Interestingly, even though Waters has a band that can apparently play just about anything, the iconic solos in “Numb” were not played. The concert consisted largely of cuts from Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall, and some Waters solo stuff (with one new tune called “The Bar.” (If you want earlier stuff, Nick Mason has a band called Saucerful of Secrets that does that stuff.) I am of the opinion that Waters said fuck it, I am going to get the big ones out of the way so I can do my own stuff. I will say that while I agree with most of his politics, I would hate to spend good money and find out that the artist was going to, say, applaud Trump all night.Īnyway, the show started with images on the screen (the visuals were incredible) and Waters standing in silhouette singing “Comfortably Numb” which segued into “The Happiest Days of Our Lives” and then “Another Brick in the Wall Parts 2 and 3.” I know people who won’t go see him for the latter reason. Now if you know anything about Waters’ politics at all, he’s very anti-fascist, very political, very pro-human rights, and famously, very pro-Palestine.
If you don’t like Roger’s politics, feel free to fuck off to the bar. Initially they used the screen to give a countdown to the show and then a warning of sorts was written on it (and spoken in a sonorous British voice) thusly: Was it going to rise? Was the band going to burst out of it? Well, given what we know about Floyd I should have guessed- it was a screen. So you see this big black structure with people sitting right up against it. Here’s how it looked about 1/2 hour before showtime. At that show, the setup was pretty traditional with the band at one end of the arena and us about 20 or so rows back.īut our seats here – while located on the floor – initially gave us what was a weird view. The show was at the TD Garden in Boston where we (my son and I) saw The Who a few months ago. So finally, we waited long enough that we could actually congregate again. “Their own,” Smerconish answered.I actually bought these tickets for a 2020 show and I think we all know what happened then. “Who have the Chinese invaded and slaughtered?” “The Chinese didn’t invade Iraq and kill a million people in 2013,” Waters added. You can’t have a conversation about human rights and Taiwan without actually doing the reading.” You are believing your side’s propaganda. If you don’t know that you aren’t reading enough. That has been absolutely accepted by the whole of international community since 1948. When Smerconish then noted that the Chinese are “too busy encircling Taiwan as we speak,” Waters snapped back with this proclamation: “Taiwan is part of China. “I would suggest that you… go away and read a bit more, and try to figure out what the US would do if the Chinese were putting nuclear armed missiles into Mexico and Canada,” he added. Twenty-three million Russians died, protecting you and me from the Nazi menace.” “Thank gGd the Russians had already won the bloody war by then.
You were completely isolationists ,” Waters argued. He also dismissed Smerconish’s comment that Americans are “liberators.” “You got into World War 2 because of Pearl Harbor. Smerconish told Waters he’s “got it reversed” by “blaming the party that got invaded” but Waters defended his stance: “Well, any war, when did it start? What you need to do is look at the history, and you can say, ‘Well it started on this day.’ You could say it started in 2008 – this war is basically about the action and reaction of NATO pushing right up to the Russian border, which they promised they wouldn’t do when Gorbachev negotiated the withdrawal of the USSR from the whole of Eastern Europe.” “Why won’t the United States of America encourage Zelenskyy, the president, to negotiate, obviating the need for this horrific, horrendous war that’s killing… We don’t know how many Russians.” “Well, he’s fuelling the fire in the Ukraine, for a start – that is a huge crime,” he answered when asked why he added Biden in the lineup.
The former Pink Floyd member recently sat down with CNN’s Michael Smerconish (who notably loves Waters’ music but disagrees with some of his political views) to defend some of the extreme messages during his show, such as including president Joe Biden in a slideshow of “war criminals.”
Roger Waters has never been shy about his political stances, and his This Is Not a Drill tour begins with a blunt message on the big screens: “If you’re one of those ‘I love Pink Floyd, but I can’t stand Roger’s politics’ people, you might do well to fuck off to the bar.”