.04.2010: Weitere Details über die Waters “The Wall” Tour gab es gestern beiBillboard zu lesen. Waters wird ab März 2011 seine Tour mit 57 weiteren Konzerten in Europa und Südamerika fortsetzen! Allzu lange Gitarrensolos wird er nicht zulassen, und filmen wird er seine neue Show auch lassen! Roger Waters: “I started to think that maybe there is something in the story of ‘The Wall,’ which is about this one guy…that could be seen as an allegory for the way nations behave towards one another, or religions behave towards one another. So I started to think about it more and more, and I suddenly had a few more ideas and I thought, ‘Maybe if we did this with this song and that with that song, we could achieve that.’ And so I started jotting a few things down on paper, and eventually I said, ‘Y’know what? I’m gonna do this…’ “
Waters’ “The Wall” will be a theatrical opus like Pink Floyd’s performances in 1980 and Waters’ all-star presentation to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall in July 1990. The centerpiece will be an actual wall — 240 feet wide and 35 feet tall — that’s constructed during the first half of the show and knocked over towards the end. The shows will also feature Gerald Scarfe-designed puppets that “Gerald Scarfe will articulate more than they did in the last show,”according to Waters, as well as extensive projections and other special effects.
“The engineering and technology has gotten better, especially the projection techniques,” Waters notes. “We can make a very bright image across the width of the arena, which we couldn’t do before.” Info: Henning Sigge Details über die neue Show: 13.04.2010: Das Original von Pink Floyd ist hinlänglich bekannt. Die Gefahr, dass es sich bei der neuen Version zumindest aus technischer Sicht nicht um eine billige B-Version handelt, die scheint nicht groß zu sein. Die folgende Beschreibung liest sich auf jeden Fall vielversprechend: The show will be a state-of-the art affair, featuring a 240-foot-wide and 35-foot-tall wall constructed and subsequently torn down during the concerts. Other props and special effects are expected to be part of the show as well. Und Roger Waters ergänzt noch: “Projection systems now are completely different from what they were then, which means that I would be able to project over the entire 250-foot expanse of the wall … which we couldn’t do in those days.” Gerald Scarfe arbeitet auch bei diesem Projekt wieder mit und hat neue Grafiken und Puppen, und fliegende Objekte entworfen! Waters möchte das diese „The Wall“ Konzerte eine stärkere politische Aussagekraft haben. Er wird während der Show gefallenen Soldaten aus vergangenen und aktuellen Kriege gedenken. Um das tun zu können bietet Waters auf seiner Webseite die Möglichkeit an, Fotos von verstorbenen Verwandten und Freunden zu senden. Waters wird diese Fotos während des Konzerts auf die “The Wall” projizieren. Waters: ”I get slight shivers talking about this. I want people to remember their loved ones as I remember mine, as part of a show that has a strongly anti-war message.” (USA Today) Waters: “When we did it then, we were after the end of the Vietnam War, and we’re right now in the middle of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, so there’s a very powerful anti-war message in ‘The Wall.’ There was then and there still is now.”
On the musical end, Waters says this version of “The Wall” will be closer to the Pink Floyd performances than to the 1990 exposition at Berlin’s Potsdamer Pltaz, which had to be arranged to accommodate his special guests. “Because it’s so visual, it means playing to clicks a lot,” Waters explains. “I personally don’t mind that. I’m happy to sacrifice the freedom of guitar players flailing about, doing anythign they want, on the altar of creating a show that moves people and that’s political and so on. It’s a piece of theater, so it has to be controlled…The lighting and the visual content has to be in sync with the music that we’re making. That doesn’t worry me at all.”
Despite the more “universal” focus of the piece, Waters does not anticipate changing “The Wall’s” songs very much; he’s considered with the idea of swapping out a reference to Britannia in “Waiting For the Worms” for a more inclusive “us” but is leaning against it. Otherwise he’s confident the work will hold up as well now as it did when it was releaed in November of 1979.
“I thought it was a great piece of work,” Waters says of “The Wall,” which spent 15 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart and has been certified 23-times platinum. It also won a Grammy Award for Best Engineered Recording — Non-Classical. “I was a bit surprised it was so successful, but I was really proud of it. I was proud of everythign we did on it. It was ridiculously successful.”
Waters adds that he hasn’t thought about filming or recording during the tour but says that “it’s very unlikely we won’t film it at some point.” Pink Floyd’s production was documented aurally on “Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live 1980-81,” which was released in 2000.
