Don’t mention The Wall
Waters’ war-themed lockdown set gets first physical release. By James McNair.
Roger Waters
★★★
The Lockdown Sessions
SONY MUSIC. CD/LP
ROGER WATERS will be 80 in September, but while other veterans gather dust, Pink Floyd’s irascible agitator is still fired by a key hurt, namely the death of his father Eric, who fell at WW2’s Battle Of Anzio when his son was still an infant. As Waters continues to mass the full Floydian live spectacle to indict and confront, fighting what many deem the good fight across various delicate fronts of global politics, his recent statement that Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine was “illegal but not unprovoked” seemed contrarian and prompted the query: which side are you on? By contrast, another infinitely less serious conflict – the ongoing spat between Waters and his old bandmate David Gilmour – has felt like theatre; handbags at dawn.
Comprising six re-worked songs – three from Pink Floyd’s The Wall, two from the band’s Falklands War-informed LP The Final Cut, plus one from 1992 Waters solo
album Amused To Death – The Lockdown Sessions is as conceptually rich as any prog fan could wish. From Mother, still a brilliant folk song deriving great power from its simplicity, to The Gunner’s Dream, wherein a dying airman imagines a world without conflict, these are largely songs counting the cost of war – and often at a deeply personal level.
The one exception is Comfortably Numb 2022, where what ails the song’s rock star narrator Pink is ennui and alienation. Dig deeper, though, and this version is perhaps not without its power grabs. Waters has said he transposed the song down to A minor “to make it darker”, adding that he purposefully “arranged it with no solos.” But given the worth of David Gilmour’s iconic solo to the landmark song’s original version, it’s hard not to read Waters’ excisions as a bit of sabre rattling.
Not that there’s anything wrong with these arrangements. Waters’ close-miked, cornered-animal voice can still pack a transfixing howl, and, supported by a whole slew of able, tasteful musicians, including ex-R.E.M./Beck drummer Joey Waronker and Californian producer/solo artist Jonathan Wilson, our host has too much talent and satirical articulacy at his disposal to fail.
Waters’ stark lampoonist flare is well to the fore on The Bravery Of Being Out Of Range. It was originally penned as a take-down of Thatcher and Reagan’s most hawkish military campaigns, but Russia’s aforementioned president seems a perfect fit for its “Hey, old man/Who you gonna kill next?” Elsewhere, when back-up singers Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig bring their heavenly choir to Vera, Waters’ study of UK forces sweetheart Dame Vera Lynn and the tarnished promise of her most famous song, it’s special, a fresh dawn for the great gig in the sky.