Roger being interviewed and announces new dates in the US.

PINK FLOYD THE WALL

“‘The Wall’ symbolized … the alienation and subsequent isolation that can be common in so many relationships and situations. It’s a very human story (of) loneliness, fear, loss, anger, rebellion. People can connect to it emotionally.”

Pink Floyds The Wall was mainly written and conceived by Roger Waters. The concept is that we build a wall round our selves by our experiences of life and if we let it, it consumes us. In Roger Waters life it was an incident on the In the Flesh tour in Canada when he became so fed up with fans coming to concerts and not appreciating the music Pink Floyd were playing that he spat at a particular fan. This so discussed him that he realized that his life was becoming so distanced and he was becoming isolated from the world. Add in other traumas in his life the Wall was developed.
The Wall was only played 30 odd times in the US, London and Europe.
The stage had a 35 foot high and 230 foot wide wall built on it while the group played. So that at the end of part one the Wall was complete and the group were behind it.
During the part 2 the song Comfortably Numb is played, Written by David Gilmour and Roger Waters, it is the guitar solo which is amazing from David Gilmour that helps to make this a classic song.
At the end after the trial the roadies push the Wall down with bricks landing very near to the audience. Its an credible site which is even more so on the Roger Waters tour.
It was performed again in 1990 at the Berlin Wall with Roger Waters and guest Stars,
Joni Mitchell,Cyndi Lauper, Bryan Adams, The Band, Sinead O’Connor, James Galway and the incomparable Van Morrison.

In 2010 Roger Waters took The Wall on tour which according to the New York Post was the most amazing concert ever to be performed by any artist or group.
It was an updated version of the 1980 Wall concerts but with more emphasis on antiwar. Over 100 performances in the US and Europe.

Most of it is available here to watch.

The Wall was also made into a film with Bob Geldolf as Pink but although there were extra tracks the film was not a particular success.
The album has sold well over 20million making it one of the biggest selling album of all time.[ad#google-banwide]

By Gary Graff
For the Daily Tribune

Roger Waters

He’s taken himself back to “The Dark Side of the Moon.”

Now Roger Waters is just as happy to return to “The Wall.”

Pink Floyd’s founding bassist and principle lyricist during the ’70s and ’80s has resurrected the group’s 1979 concept album — which spent 15 weeks atop the Billboard 200 chart and has been certified 23-times platinum — for a lavish tour that features the construction and subsequent destruction of a 240-foot-wide, 35-foot-tall wall. And he says that playing Pink Floyd’s 1972 classic “Dark Side” in its entirety during 2007-08 provided the inspiration for tackling the even more ambitious “The Wall.”

“I much enjoyed ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ tour in ’07, and I think … that it put in the minds of a lot of people around me, ‘Well, why don’t you do ‘The Wall?’ ” says Waters, 67, who left Pink Floyd in 1985 and settled out of court with the other band members over use of the name and imagery associated with the group. “I started to think about it, and when I’d recovered from that last tour, I got that feeling that I probably had at least one more (tour) left in me and started to think, ‘Y’know, maybe there is something there …’ ”

“The Wall” had been staged as a live piece before — but just 31 times. Pink Floyd played it at limited engagements in four cities during 1980-81. And Waters staged an all-star version of the album, which was adapted into a film, in 1982, in July 1990 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It was the latter that gave Waters a sense of what “The Wall” — whose “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2),” “Run Like Hell” and “Comfortably Numb” are enduring rock radio staples — could be in 2010. It was written, he notes, about a more insular issue, “about this kind of youngish guy who is so fearful that he inures himself. His defenses are so powerful because of his feelings of inadequacy and so on and so forth that … he builds a wall around himself and keeps the world out.”

This time out, however, Waters’ mission was “to develop the piece to describe a broader, more universal condition than we did in 1980 and I did in 1990 in Berlin.” And, he says, it wasn’t difficult.

“It’s strange how the macro and the micro often mirror each other, so the story of one man and his failed relationships and his shame and his problems can somehow mirror a more macro kind of global-political-religious situation. There’s a wall between the north and south. There’s a wall between the rich and the poor. There is, with all due respect, a wall that we call the media that lies between we citizens and reality of our lives.

“So the wall is tremendously symbolic, maybe more so now, even, than it was when I wrote it.”

While leaving the actual music primarily the same, Waters has tweaked the extensive visual presentation of “The Wall” to express those more contemporary issues — and has gotten in hot water because of it. Most recently he was criticized by the American Anti-Defamation League, which protested that a sequence during the song “Goodbye Blue Sky,” where Jewish Stars of David were followed by money signs, was anti-Semitic.

Waters quickly responded in a statement saying that “there are no hidden meanings in the order or juxtaposition of these symbols,” but he’s since tweaked the video to separate the icons.

On the road, of course, “The Wall” loses some of its socio-political luster for Waters, whose focus has moved to executing the technically tricky show — which also feature projections and puppets — each night.

“Because it’s so visual, it means playing to (click tracks) a lot,” explains Waters, who’s also taking the show to Europe in 2011. “I personally don’t mind that. I’m happy to sacrifice the freedom of guitar players flailing about, doing anything 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.”

And, he adds, the tour has allowed Waters to bask again in an album he considers one of his greatest artistic achievements.

“I thought it was a great piece of work,” Waters says of “The Wall,” which won a Grammy Award for Best Engineered Recording — Non-Classical. “It was difficult to make. There was all kinds of politics going on in the band that didn’t help things.

“I was a bit surprised it was so successful, but I was really proud of it. I was proud of everything we did on it. It was ridiculously successful … and still stands up musically, I think.”

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The US-based Jewish ADL (Anti-Defamation League) has accused rock star Roger Waters (Pink Floyd) of anti-semitism, citing his use of the Star of David hexagram and the dollar symbol in his latest 2010/2011 production of ‘The Wall.

‘Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), has said that using dollar signs and the Star of David in an animation that accompanies the song Good Bye Blue Sky echoes the old stereotype that Jews are avaricious. In the Israeli paper Haaretz, a s well as on the ADL’s website, one van read that Mr Foxman expressed the opinion that Roger Waters should have

“chosen some other way to convey his political views without playing into and dredging up the worst age-old anti-Semitic stereotype about Jews and their supposed obsession with making money”.

What both ADL and Haaretz do not mention, is that the animation in question shows much more than the Star of David and the Dollar symbol alone. While the above video does not clearly show all of the signs and symbols that are being dropped — like bombs — from the airplanes crossing the allegedly blue sky, an article in the Independent, devoted to Roger Waters’ defense, lists them for the discriminating reader. There’s the hexagram shape regarded by some as the Star of David as well as the three-pronged star that’s the Mercedes logo. There is the shell used by oil-company Shell as well as the communist Hammer and Sickle. Last not least, the bombers also drop the crucifix (Christianity) and the Crescent and Star (Islam). This list of symbols is corroborated by the New York Post. This combination of symbols — business, money, religions and ideologies — says Roger Waters, is a

“… point I am trying to make in the song … that the bombardment we are all subject to by conflicting religious, political, and economic ideologies only encourages us to turn against one another, and I mourn the concomitant loss of life.”

The ADL of course, that much should be known to every alert reader of the news, has a problem with Waters ever since he used a tour of Israel in 2009 to criticise Israel’s controversial barrier (or wall) surrounding the West Bank, calling it an “awful thing” that amounts to a land grab. Waters has also spoken out on other occasions against Israeli policies, and he’s previously accused the ADL of painting every critic of Israeli politics, of settlements and occupation as anti-Semitic. Oh for heavens sake, this is getting a bit ridiculous now. Anyone is labelled an antisemite these days if you don’t agree with Israel’s Apartheid policies. What’s ammusing is the growing number of Jewish folk speaking out against the right wing Israeli government. What are they going to label them? Good to see how ADL and Haarez, just as other media often do, shape reality by reporting just a few parts of it. So true Christina. I once tried to submit a comment to an article on Haaretz’s web site and they wouldn’t publish it because it was not in keeping with Israeli government sentiment. The propaganda mill is alive and strong in Israel. So true Christina. I once tried to submit a comment to an article on Haaretz’s web site and they wouldn’t publish it because it was not in keeping with Israeli government sentiment. The propaganda mill is alive and strong in Israel.

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