ROGER WATERS
Roger Waters sings for WikiLeaks, unveils a new gig film. Plus, a manager’s memoir, and a huge post-split Pink Floyd box…
He has a new film about to come out, and was busking Wish You Were Here. And there’s a new Floyd box set and a newly-discovered memoir by their former agent. Read on for what it all means.
“We can either pool our love… or remain Comfortably Numb.” ROGER WATERS
ON SEPTEMBER 2, 2019, Roger Waters gave a live performance in support of imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison in May after almost seven years in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy. Waters, backed by his ex-guitarist and former Amen Corner frontman Andy Fairweather Low, played an acoustic version of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here outside the Home Office on Westminster’s Marsham Street.
Prior to the performance, Waters declared, “This is my walk-on part in this war. It’s important to show some solidarity… Empathy is the most valuable thing any human being can possess.”
Empathy was among the themes of Roger Waters’ 2017-18 tour documented in the forthcoming concert movie, Us + Them, due for worldwide cinema release on October 4 and 6. The Us + Them tour was an audio and visual spectacle in which Waters revisited some of his best-known works in front of a global audience estimated at 2.3 million.
The movie includes performances of Floyd’s biggest songs, among them Wish You Were Here, Money and Another Brick In The Wall Part 2, from Amsterdam’s Ziggo Dome in June 2018, plus the show’s reproduction of Battersea Power Station, a 90-feet-wide LED screen flashing ‘Trump Is A Pig’, and Waters/ Floyd’s trademark inflatable porker. “Us + Them is a call to action,” Waters says. “Homo sapiens stand at a crossroads. We can either pool our love, develop our capacity to empathise with others… or we can remain Comfortably Numb.”
Yet thoughts of empathy were in short supply in 1987 when Waters, having left Pink Floyd, threatened his estranged bandmates with legal action to prevent them touring under the Floyd banner. An updated, remixed version of the group’s first post-Waters release,
A Momentary Lapse Of Reason, is included on Pink Floyd: The Later Years, a 16-disc box set released on November 29. The box also includes two subsequent studio albums, live recordings and over six hours of previously unreleased audio-visual material. Of particular interest is the new version of A Momentary Lapse Of Reason. Overseen by David Gilmour, engineer Andy Jackson and producer Bob Ezrin, it returns some of Floyd co-founder Richard Wright’s original keyboard parts and includes drums newly recorded by Nick Mason.
This flurry of Floyd-related activity – and competing claims on the legacy – is completed by rumours of a live LP/DVD and 2020 festival dates by early-Floyd touring tribute, Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets, and the September publication of Have A Cigar!, the memoir of Pink Floyd’s former agent, the late music impresario Bryan Morrison.
Even now, Floyd’s troubled ex-frontman and initial motivator Syd Barrett is not forgotten. Morrison, who died in 2008, details adventures with several famous musicians, including the time an angry Syd bit his finger “down to the bone” during a royalty dispute. Tellingly, perhaps, 2019’s Floyd-related bonanza comes full circle on Pink Floyd: The Later Years. The box features a 7-inch single of the last-ever live performance by Gilmour, Mason and Wright, playing their Barrett-composed debut 45 Arnold Layne, at the May 2007 Syd tribute concert at London’s Barbican.
Us + Them is in cinemas worldwide on October 2 and 6. For tickets go to rogerwatersusandthem.com.