Who was a hammer from a young age – Newspaper Kommersant No. 49 (7494) dated 03/23/2023

The European leg of ex-Pink Floyd member Roger Waters’ “This Is Not A Drill” tour began with big concerts in indoor arenas. Igor Gavrilov remembered favorite Pink Floyd songs at his concert in Barcelona’s Palau Sant Jordi.

The name of the Roger Waters tour can be translated as “This is not a rehearsal” or “There will be no second life.” Right on the poster, one of the founders of the Pink Floyd group announces: the conversation will be about serious things. While the audience is seated in the hall, the voice of the musician in the speakers says: “I have two requests for you. One, turn off your fucking cell phones. [смешок в конце фразы означает, что сам он в это, конечно, не верит]. Second. If you came to listen to Pink Floyd hits, and you don’t care about the political views of Roger Waters, you can immediately go to the bar. “The Bar” is one of Roger Waters’ new songs, written by him during the lockdown. The image of the bar is convenient for him because it has both “freedom”, and “community”, and “communication”. The musician sings it, sitting at the piano, twice during the show, at the beginning and at the end, and thus reduces the poster, and sometimes the hysterical fuse of the performance.

But the show begins with a new arrangement of the canonical “Comfortably Numb” from Pink Floyd’s album “The Wall”. The musicians of the Waters group perform it, standing with their backs to the audience, on a stage located in the center of the hall and surrounded by a dance partner. Each of them seems to be buried in a corner formed by the cross-shaped intersection of two huge screen panels, onto which an image of the highest definition is projected. At the beginning of the show, it is a post-apocalyptic world with people frozen among dilapidated buildings. Soon the cross rises above the stage, and the musicians get complete freedom to move and address the audience on all four sides.

Almost at the very beginning, the song “Another Brick In The Wall” sounds. Roger Waters seems to develop the idea: if you came for Pink Floyd hits, then here’s the main one for you. If that’s all you need, look no further.

Next on the program is “The Power That Be” from his solo album “Radio KAOS”, here the musician finally saddles his favorite political horse. The screens show footage of protesters being killed by police officers and captions that show that some of these people were killed for being black, some for being Iranian, some for being Palestinian. and some for being a woman.

The array of information that is communicated to viewers from the screen is excessive. Documentary chronicle alternates with animation, close-ups of the musicians are shots from the dossier of Julian Assange, whom Waters defends consistently and with the same fervor as the Palestinians. Here are the musicians on the stage, here is a video specially filmed for the show, here is the lyrics of the song, as in karaoke, here are the statistics of victims in the conflicts unleashed by the United States, and after some time a sheep flies through the hall, as in the good old Pink Floyd times (“Sheep “”) or a pig (“Run Like Hell”). A Pink Floyd fan gets what he pays for in full.

When Waters sings “Wish You Were Here”, the credits on the screen load into the show space the story of Roger Waters and Syd Barrett dating. The hero of the evening believes that right now, when the audience just wants to sing from the heart, he needs to hint once again that it was he and Sid who were at the origins of Pink Floyd, and David Gilmour, who today performs under this brand, was not around then. stood. Syd Barrett has been dead for a long time, and no one would be surprised if Waters gave the phrase from his recent interview to the screen: “Let’s get rid of this “we””, meaning that he, in fact, is Pink Floyd.

During the performance of “Run Like Hell”, Waters appears on stage in the image of the dictator Pink, familiar from the album and the film “The Wall” – a leather coat, an armband with crossed hammers on the sleeve, dark glasses. Around – red banners with hammers. On the screen are walking hammers interspersed with lines from Orwell: “Now everything is fine, the fight is over. He won over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

On stage is a man whose songs have been a vaccine against dictatorship for several generations. It seems that in the second half of the 20th century, nothing stronger than the “Wall” was created on this topic. At the same time, on stage is a man who has developed a reputation in the rock and roll environment as a freaking leftist. Shortly before embarking on a tour of Europe, he spoke at the request of Russia at a meeting of the UN Security Council. It was later announced in Germany that two shows of his tour had been cancelled, and he promptly announced that he would take legal action. In Germany, he is accused of anti-Semitism, but this is clearly not the only thing.

“If Joe Biden walked into our bar, we would ask him: “Why is this terrible war going on in Ukraine?” He would, I think, answer us something like “Putin is the new Hitler, and he attacked Ukraine.” And I’d say, “Joe, we’re at a bar, you can be honest. It’s not the whole truth. Would you like your fucking son to go and die in the cornfields of Ukraine?” I think he would say no. With all my heart, I wish young Ukrainians would stop dying in the cornfields of Ukraine, and I wish young Russians would stop dying too.”

Obviously, with such rhetoric, it is difficult for Roger Waters to count on total adoration in Europe. Obviously something else. Among all millionaire rockers, he is the most corrosive and daring critic of the world political system and the most notorious anti-Americanist. By the way, in the North American part of the tour, Waters sold tickets for $ 66 million, and no one forbade his concerts there. The bar worked flawlessly.