Roger Waters
Us + Them TRAFALGAR FILMS
The Floyd’s dissident undertones turned up to 11 in a live concert film.
Having staged the most spectacular expression of personal alienation in rock history with his $450 million-grossing tour of The Wall at the start of the decade, Roger Waters turned up the politics, amplifying the touches of Palestinian rights activism and anti-war rhetoric to a hard-hitting apex on the Us + Them tour. On stage, it was a confrontational barrage of sloganeering (“The pigs rule the world” and “fuck the pigs” held aloft by Waters, “Resist” emblazoned across the T-shirts of child dance troupes, “Stay human” on the side of the flying pig) and shock visuals, from drone warfare footage to Palestinian children facing down tanks armed with rocks and the wartime bombast of Us And Them bolstered with real-life bombs and brutality.
The cinema release of the tour’s stunning live film nail-guns Waters’ agitrock shock and awe directly into your eyeballs. Here you can see his snarls as the feral bassline of One Of These Days pounds out over images of torture blades, and the sneers on the faces of the children dressed as Guantanamo Bay inmates lined up across the stage for a repurposed Another Brick In The Wall Part II. We share in the hog-like quaffing of champagne as, in the shadow of a virtual Battersea Power Station stretching the length of the arena, the band don porcine masks and satirise the trough-snuff ling elite. When virtual banners fall from its walls reading “Help, we’re trapped in a dystopian nightmare” or the word “Charade” is plastered across images of Donald Trump during the cranky blues rock of Pigs (Three Different Ones), it’s rebellion writ IMAX large.
With the viewer embedded deep in the action, cinemas would be advised to have medics on hand to treat the debilitating goosebumps induced by a gorgeous Great Gig In The Sky, delivered as a duet by AI-like duo Lucius, and the final Brain Damage/ Eclipse, accompanied by a laser prism filled with a rainbow of lights. But while the two halves of Dark Side… bookend the show and the more politically adaptable 70s Floyd material dominates, it’s the tracks from 2017’s Is This The Life We Really Want? that strike home. Déjà Vu, a near cousin of the stunning Wish You Were Here that comes later, takes a chilling drones-eye-view of everyday Middle Eastern life and Picture That is a series of savage lyrical vignettes that emphasise our post-Millennial crisis: ‘Picture a leader with no fucking brains’. A film as bold and brave as it is breathtaking, it casts Waters as rock’s greatest, grandest agitator. ■■■■■■■■■■