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SPORTS PALACE (MADRID)   MARCH 25, 2011

 

The previous atmosphere that was breathed in the surroundings of the Palacio de Deportes de la Comunidad de Madrid was that of great occasions. Undoubtedly, the occasion deserved to have acquired one of those “Premium Golden” seats that were offered. In the VIP room, drinks and canapés were served, but I digested the ambient music better: snippets from Wish You Were Here, The Wall and surprisingly from A Momentary Lapse of Reason. The venue, full to the brim. At 9:30 p.m., the crowd, anxious. The lights go out and a master of ceremonies announces the start of the show. Pink, the protagonist doll, is thrown onto the front stage and the chords of In The Flesh 1 begin to sound, this time without a clone band. Neither without the characterization of the 'homeless' made on the American tour. The war theme, present throughout the concert, begins to become evident from the first theme, where a bombardment with fireworks is staged. The sound: immense. The lighting and staging: incredible. A military plane crashes into the half-built wall. The show has only just begun.
With the first notes of The Thin Ice, images of people who lost their lives as a result of armed conflicts begin to be projected on the wall. The first, that of Eric Fletcher Waters, the artist's father, who died in an allied offensive in Anzio (Italy) during WWII.
The script continues until reaching the school stage, making an appearance the expected inflatable of the teacher, who is blamed by a children's choir during Another Brick in the Wall 2. Next, Roger comments that in the theme Mother is going to synchronize his performance with the one he did at Earls Court in London in 1980, which is projected behind him on the circular black and white screen. At one point in the performance you can read on a piece of the wall under construction "don't fuck with me" in perfect Spanish while the huge inflatable mother with wall arms witnesses the scene.
The war theme returns with Goodbye Blue Sky. An animation of different bombings is projected where the missiles are replaced by Christian crosses, Arab crescents, stars of David, dollar symbols, Shell oil and Mercedes-Benz symbols.

The oil company takes the ovation before one of the most anticipated visual spectacles begins: the coital battle of the flowers designed by Gerald Scarfe for the original shows and also used in Sir Alan Parker's film.

We are at the beginning of the Empty Spaces theme and two seed-like points of light begin to develop their roots from each end of the wall to sprout on the circular screen. The genius is served. The phone call where the protagonist discovers that his wife is cheating on him with another opens the stage of love disappointment, a situation that apparently also happened to Waters. The inflatable scorpion-mantis-woman enters the scene with Don't Leave Now and green tears are shed from the top of the wall as it is being completed.

The wall that separates the band from the audience becomes a television screen that is destroyed before the lunch of Another Brick in the Wall 3. While the instrumental The Last Few Bricks plays, another of equal dimensions is projected onto the wall where Different virtual holes appear and disappear until with Godbye Cruel World the last piece of the wall is placed. The construction of the cardboard wall has come to an end and with it the first part of the action.

30 minute break to return to the VIP room for a snack, although they also give you time to read some of the different true stories that people sent to the artist's website and which are being projected on the wall to make you reflect on the secondary effects of armed conflicts. Among these you can also find Spanish stories from the Civil War, such as that of Federico García Lorca.

Hey You opens the second part of the show. The song is performed with the band completely hidden behind the wall, as a metaphor for personal isolation and the loss of connection with the public in big concerts. Another epic moment. It is followed by Is There Anybody Out There?, where inquiring spotlights seem to ask the audience the question.

During the performance of the acoustic guitar solo of this song, the first time window on the wall opens. The second, at the beginning of the following song: Nobody Home, where a torn Waters laments from a hotel room, just as it happened in the original tour, in the 1982 film and in the massive 1990 concert that celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Syd Barrett, the charismatic and fleeting leader of the psychedelic Pink Floyd, inspired the hotel sequence where the protagonist, absorbed in the memory of his traumatic past, loses track of reality. Roger Waters once found Syd totally transposed in a Los Angeles hotel room while the cigarette he had lit had been completely consumed, leaving only the ashes of it to reach his callous fingers. Placidly insensitive.

Comfortably Numb is one of the numbers whose single performance justifies attending any concert. Here Waters plays the role of the doctor, this time without the gown and without turning his back on the audience facing the wall as he did in the original show. The role of Pink, which was played by David Gilmour (and which he promised to reprise in a surprise city on the European tour), was performed between Robbie Wyckoff (vocals) and David Kilminster (electric guitar), both standing on platforms above the wall. Kilmister performed the spectacular guitar solo (considered by Guitar World magazine as the fourth of the 100 best ever) while a huge spotlight cast his shadow on the bleachers and the wall showed magnificent computerized images.

An instrument kit appears on the stage in front of the wall. The chorus reminds us that the show must go on. It is the totalitarian moment of the show. In The Flesh 2 plays and the flying pig from Animals transmuted into a remote-controlled fascist boar emerges from the left side of the wall to take a walk around the compound. The spotlights illuminate the attendees again, this time looking for riffraff not worthy of attending him. After saying that "if it were up to me I would order you all to be shot" Roger begins to shoot the audience with his machine gun. Montreal spit taken to the extreme. The public, however, is excited.

The Animals theme continues to make an appearance. While Run Like Hell plays, the messages iLead next to a pig, iProtect next to a dog and iFollow next to the sheep are projected onto the wall, a clear allusion to the book Animal Farm by George Orwell.

In Waiting for the Worms the parade of hammers from the original montage is projected onto the wall. In another sequence, some innocent people die in a bombing, a poster is hung in their memory and in full extremist euphoria Roger shoots him down while launching his proclamations through the megaphone. Hammer!! Hammer!!

The band disappears again. Pink appears on top of the wall while below Roger sings Stop. The doll is thrown into the void onto the front stage before The Trial begins, during which the animated images Gerald Scarfe created for the original montage are projected again, albeit now onto a larger wall surface. Roger plays the roles of prosecutor, school teacher, protagonist, mother, wife and judge to end up ruling "tear down the fucking wall". Moment of great expectation. After staggering, the wall ends up collapsing in another stellar number of the night. The audience stands up waiting for the last song.

Outside the Wall is made to wait in the manner of an encore. It is performed acoustically by the band in front of the rubble of the wall. Among them we find Harry Waters (Roger's son) on accordion, Dave Kilminster on banjo, Snowy White (side guitarist on the original tour) on acoustic guitar, as well as Jon Carin (known Floyd backing musician), and Roger Waters on clarinet. The lyrics are sung by all the members of the group, who are then introduced by Roger one by one as they leave the venue in single file. The last to do so is Waters. Before disappearing, he thanks the audience for their help  to be a better man every day, trying to outshine the image of that turbulent Waters who, at the age of 36, conceived this masterpiece. We should thank you, Roger. After all it's not easy to beat your heart against some crazy guy's wall.

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RAUL CASAL (ALTERNA2)     www.alterna2.com

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PALAU SANT JORDI (BARCELONA)  MARCH 29, 2011

 

The epic opera rock  “The Wall” by Pink Floyd was played again in its entirety at the Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona by the hands of the one who has been, almost entirely, the composer: Roger Waters. The brief tour that was carried out in some few and privileged cities he visited with the same show some years ago some 1981 and 1980

A concert divided into two parts with an intermission of just under 30 minutes. In the first section, the construction of the wall (11 meters high by 34 meters wide) is carried out, block by block, while Mr. Waters and the large gang behind him remain in the back room, less and less visible until completely disappear. The great theme "Another brick in the wall" (in three parts) which opens the album and the show with Roger Waters taking center stage in the part of the stage most advanced to the wall is not long in coming. . And a finale before intermission saying goodbye with “Goodbye Cruel”.

During the intermission, with the great white wall full of projections with the files of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers killed in the Vietnam and Korean wars, but also updated with those of Iraq and Afghanistan. And it is that the message is not obsolete, society is heading down the same paths of self-destruction. If we take the same paths we will find the same signs that alert us to danger and will lead us to the same reflections. But in this concert, the content of the message was not what the public applauded and shouted excitedly, but its spectacular nature.

In the second part, a beginning more typical of a theatrical stage with an act in which Roger sits on the sofa in a room and stages part of the message that "The Wall" wants to convey to listeners: the loneliness and lack of communication that society suffers. In the last bars of the concert, its main protagonist leans on the wall creating an effect with the projection in which some symbolized interior forces illuminate the entire block and put pressure on it to be demolished (partly on the public). The entire band performs with voices and strings, upright before the attendees, a couple more songs as a farewell. In the second, Roger himself introduces and dismisses each one of them until closing the parade himself.

Beyond the message, which surely could have little impact on the respectable crowd that packed Sant Jordi on this first day with the crowded capacity, we are facing a concert of a spectacular sound and visual as few have been made about the different scenarios that exist on the face of the earth. Some projections of a quality and visual technique like I had never seen before. Images recovered from the film directed by Alan Parker and with animation scenes by Gerald Scarfe mixed with various montages. Like the very visual image of planes bombing cities with logos of different well-known trademarks (Mercedes, Shell, etc). Inflatable dolls, which appeared on both sides of the stage, from behind the wall or from above, moved and projected rays of light onto the sea of attendees. A giant pig that was floating above the track during an entire song. An airplane that makes a flight from side to side of Sant Jordi to crash on the stage with a great explosion; and it is that the fireworks were not lacking from the beginning. The circular screen, similar to the one the Rolling Stones also used on one of their last tours, lost prominence in the face of so many visual distractions.

And the best and most important of all: an impressive sound, of a quality rarely found in a pavilion of these characteristics that does not have the technical requirements for good live acoustics. The sound of some impressive musicians supported by some sound effects that attributed a very high degree of realism to the voices, screams, bursts of machine guns or explosions and broken glass. Concert worth seeing and listening to.

 

 

SERAFIN GONZALEZ (LA ESTADEA)     www.laestadea.com

 

PALAU SANT JORDI (BARCELONA)     29 MARZO 2011

 

Flag bearers with swastikas, Roger Waters in a leather trench coat like a Gestapo agent, fireworks and part of a gigantic wall. This is how the concert begins while 'In the flesh?' is playing.

The atmosphere was calm among all the attendees, a mixture of old fans of Pink Floid and Roger Warters and new fans of the psychedelic sound of the album 'The Wall'. There is no stress in the front rows, no pushing, no protests for taking out the cameras and covering part of the show. So throughout the recital.

And while the set-list plays, several workers are gradually building the wall, without disturbing, going practically unnoticed. One brick, another, and the technicians giving the order to light the newly laid brick, which gives an effect of not realizing that the wall grows until they have 40 bricks laid. 'Boy, the wall has grown, how did they do it?' Meanwhile, the images flood the large round screen at the back of the stage. The figures of the teacher and the great mother appear on the scene and the wall begins to fill with photographs and labels. And it continues to grow until there is only one window through which Waters says goodbye while they brick it up. And the first part of the show ends.

A very clear sound, with different effects depending on the position of the speakers, and without excessive volume, made the experience very pleasant.

Always faithful to his English phlegm, [Waters] behaved like a gentleman of rock with comments of thanks throughout the recital. 

After the break, with the wall already complete, and the band in front, the images continue on the wall, with the dawn in the temple of columns, the entrance into the land of imagination, the march of the hammers, the pig inflatable flying over the spectators and the final fall of the wall. A very clear sound, with different effects depending on the position of the speakers, and without excessive volume, made the experience very pleasant, being able to comment on what was happening with the person next to you without any problem.

Waters, always faithful to his English phlegm, behaved like a rock gentleman with comments of gratitude throughout the recital, his encores with the audience, whom he corrected when they got confused in any part of the songs, the prominence that he gave him He gave the rest of the band, not taking full attention, but giving them their moments, they turned the concert into something quite personal, very intimate despite being about 40,000 spectators at the Palau Sant Jordi.

A truly unique show, and one that has left a very good taste in my mouth. I think I am right in saying that it has been the best show I have seen so far, without comparison to the other concerts I have attended, since said event has far exceeded my attention span. Too much to see in just two hours. I would definitely repeat.

 

 

LOZOOT (THE MUSICALL)     themusicall.blogspot.com.es

 

PALACIO DE LOS DEPORTES (MADRID)     26 MARZO 2011

 

As great lovers of classic rock and admirers of Pink Floyd, we couldn't pass up the opportunity to see Roger Waters perform The Wall. We were obliged to see it live because due to our age we have never been able to see Pink Floyd live and we were also very aware that this would never happen again.
I was going with the intention of seeing a great concert with a great show, but nothing that surprised me because I have seen the film and the dvd of the direct from Berlin numerous times, in fact I have both originals. While we wait for the line, we hear several people (one of them El_Culebra) say phrases like "I have a friend who went yesterday Friday and she says it was amazing."
We have been queuing since 3 in the afternoon excited as children the day before Three Kings waiting for the gifts, and we managed to get into the first rows of the queue, but not to get into the first row of the stage. We went early to get the best place, a place close enough to the stage to see and hear it well, but far enough away to have a panoramic view of the entire stage that allowed us to see the entire wall without having to turn our necks. so as not to miss anything.
At 7:30 we entered and saw the stage with a piece of the wall already built on the sides, the typical Pink Floyd circular screen and a mannequin in the middle of the stage that had the coat of the dictator character with the bracelet with the symbol of the hammers. The excitement increased a lot, despite the fact that there were 2 hours left for everything to start. We were like little children who have discovered in which closet the Kings' gifts are hidden, but even so they have to wait for the 6th.
The show began with British punctuality and from the first song what I said before "nothing would surprise me because I have seen the film and the DVD of the Berlin live show numerous times" was completely erased. "In The Flesh" was performed accompanied by projections, fireworks, soldiers carrying flags with the symbol of the hammers, explosions simulating shots from airplanes that could be heard in Dolby surround coming from all sides synchronized with projections of airplanes and at the end a plane that it came from behind us to crash against the wall, break it and burn.

As we all expected, the wall was being built as the show progressed and it was also gaining more prominence thanks to the projections. In addition to the careful content of the projections, it is also necessary to highlight the highly accomplished technique and precision with which it was made. The ceiling was full of projectors, you can count up to 12 and each one projected a specific part of the wall without noticing the overlap between the projections of the projectors. In addition, the images were not projected on the musicians, only on the wall and as a new brick was placed, the projection was turned on in that brick. In “Thin Ice” deceased people* (starting with Roger's father) were introduced to us on the circular screen and their photo was added to a brick until the whole wall was completed (at that time of the concert only partly raised).

If this album has a characteristic song, that is “Another Brick In The Wall, Part 2”, for that reason its staging was superb. A doll of "The Professor" bigger than the wall itself, children doing the choirs.

One of the moments that I remember best is the interpretation of “Mother”. Roger came out accompanied only by an acoustic guitar, gave us a presentation of the song (too long) and began to play the song while on the wall and the circular screen a perfectly synchronized video of him playing that same song in a concert filmed in the 80

A personal disappointment was not seeing Roger sing “One Of My Turns” from a small room above the wall and seeing him throw a telly like in the original show emulating the movie, but the room would later appear in “Nobody Home”.

As the wall was being built, the projections were gaining more weight. Most of them have been created specifically for this tour and only a couple of songs like "The Trial" used videos taken specifically from the film. Once the wall was completed and we had reached the middle of the show, we had a 15-minute break. The second part of the concert was a visual spectacle with the entire wall where anti-war messages were projected, videos of the atrocities of the war as civilians shot and a critique of today's society. This reached its climax when they played “Comfortably Numb”, what can I say about this song? See for yourselves.

After this we come to the final firecracker of the concert where the madness of Pink (the protagonist of the work) becomes untenable and makes him believe he is a dictator, putting on the military suit with which he opened the concert to interpret the last songs: In The Flesh, Run Like Hell, Waiting for the Worms and Trial. All this with projections of the hammers, a somewhat different version of the inflatable pig from "Animals" floating around the venue, more fireworks, Roger with a submachine gun... Incredible!
Without a doubt the best concert I've ever seen. Spectacular on all levels. A unique experience. It has made me spend two hours with my eyes and my mouth open.

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ALFREDO MANTECA CANO (VIDEODROMO)     www.videodromo.es

 

PALACIO DE LOS DEPORTES (MADRID)     25 MARZO 2011

 

This weekend took place in Spain one of the musical events that will mark an entire generation because we were able to see “THE WALL-LIVE TOUR” on Friday and Saturday in Madrid and Sunday in Barcelona, as part of its world tour. We were clear that it was a show that will never be repeated, especially if we consider the age of its creator, Roger Waters. The tour began on September 15, 2010 in Toronto (Canada) and tickets went on sale in Spain to end the 30-year wait and be able to see this mythical work live.

The youngest should know that it has been long because only between 1980 and 1981 in a few cities like New York, Los Angeles, London or Dortmund they were able to enjoy it. In these shows the animation sequences were projected in 35mm (something very rustic you may think) that were later used for adaptation to the big screen. Both the animations and reproductions of the characters as gigantic puppets were made by the great cartoonist Gerald Scarfe.

In 1985, a legal dispute was filed with David Gilmour and Nick Mason over the rights to the “Pink Floyd” trademark and all their material produced to date. The result was that Gilmour and Mason retained the rights to the “Pink Floyd” trademark, but the ruling granted Waters rights to the work “The Wall”, who was obviously the true creator. That led to the fact that after the fall of the iron curtain in 1989 he offered a solo concert called "The Wall Live in Berlin" on July 21, 1990, with several famous musicians, including Van Morrison, Sinéad O'Connor, Cyndi Lauper , Scorpions, Jerry Hall and Bryan Adams, among others, to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall and to enable the creation of a "World War Memorial Fund for Disaster Relief" against wars and their consequences.

With the punctuality that characterizes the British, the singer came on stage and the packed Palacio de los Deportes was delivered from the first second. The expectation that we all had in mind when we entered was that we were going to see a live representation of the homonymous film made in 1982 by the British director Alan Parker, based on the same script created by Roger Waters. We couldn't be more wrong.

The album's core plot centers on a singer, Pink, whose childhood is marked by his father, an RAF pilot, who is killed during a battle in World War II, and the oppression of British education. To this we must add that he is left alone with a controlling and protective mother. As an adult he achieves success concert after concert but to be able to go on stage he turns to drugs, thus little by little he loses his wife and a wall is created between Pinky and society, in general terms, falling into a deep depression. One night in a suicide attempt with alcohol and drugs, he has a dream in which he becomes a fascist dictator, the complete opposite of what he feels and is as a person. That will mark a turning point because a dream trial will be held that will end with the verdict of tearing down the wall that he has created and exposing himself again to that society that he abandoned.

So the roots of the argument must be found in the madness of the founder of the group, Syd Barrett, in certain autobiographical overtones of Waters himself, such as his relationship with his mother, wife and with the general public, with whom during the decade of The eighties did not have good relations, something similar to what happened to Jim Morrison, leader of the "Doors". With forgiveness to all music lovers who can read me, but I think I'm right if we say that Waters has given a twist to this enormous contemporary opera and becomes one of the greatest social critics covered by an endless of technological and musical displays. The representation begins with a sound extract from the film made in 1960 by Stanley Kubrick entitled "Spartacus" in which all the slaves can be heard saying that they are named after their leader, while in the room the spotlights focus on the anonymous audience. . With that, he lays the foundations that we as spectators do not stop being slaves to the society in which we live.

To give way to symphonic and progressive rock chords that will take us through a plot that has not lost its vital nucleus, but in which time has turned the possessive and controlling mother into a version of the State, oppressor and controller, where the surveillance cameras see everything, tinting the plot with Orwellian airs, making clear tributes to his work “1984” with the projections.

But he goes further, because his guitar becomes a huge scalpel that cuts open that huge pig that is the society we live in to bring to light the great culprits of all evils: the huge corporations and banks, which every Today they are more greedy and want to devour us, and they are the ones truly responsible for the various wars in which we find ourselves involved, be it Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan. Thus, in the projections, the bombs that we could see in the original creations of Gerald Scarfe are replaced by the symbol of the dollar, of the Mercedes Benz, of the Shell oil company, etc. And that we will see again in another element of the overwhelming scenery that is that enormous pig that flies over the stalls.

The allegation against the war populates the entire concert since she sings the songs “Thin Ice” or “Another brick in the wall part I”. For me, for personal reasons, one of the most disturbing songs every time I listen to it, and in this case it takes on a new dimension.

But without a doubt the moment that shrinks your heart, that moved me to the core, that makes my hair stand on end every time I see it again on youtube,  my tears foolishly come to my eyes, and moved me like a little boy, is without a doubt the cornerstone of this new revision of this immense contemporary classic, the song "Vera Lynn" and "Bring The Boys Back Home".  During his execution the viewer can see a projection on the wall with a fragment of a speech made by US President Dwight Eisenhower that says:

“Every gun that's made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, from those who are cold and are not clothed”
"Every weapon that is created, every warship launched, every missile fired, means, in the final sense, a robbery, those who are hungry, and who are not fed, those who are cold, and are not sheltered"

With that, I think Roger Waters has said it all in a devastating show, which has impacted my retina and my mind, like no other opera has done so far, and that I have been able to see a few at the Teatro Real. It is vital, rebellious and politically incorrect. Apart from being a technological display because as you have seen in the linked videos, images are projected on each brick, it is above all a demonstration of courage and criticism in which it gives us enough clues. Thus, at the moment in which his fascist alter ego takes over Pink, he gives us the recommendation of "You better run", (you better run). Translated within the framework of the brilliant show, "the best thing to overthrow him." And as we see on the news daily things are moving in the Middle East.

But one has hope in the human being and believes in the possibility that all walls fall. I hope that the Jews apply the story since it is shameful what they do.

So far my chronicle on what without fear of being wrong has been the concert of my life, it is a true masterpiece, and I hope to be eighty years old and see it performed at the Teatro Real again. Because only Waters has been able to create a world that represents how hard an illness like depression is, where you feel surrounded by a wall and there is no one outside to listen to you, and your personal paranoia does nothing but reverberate against the walls. Bono from “U2” would like to get to the sole of his shoe, because every day they are more sold to commerciality (Blackberry, to be exact) despite their chest beating. They make us long for that Amnesty International concert at the Bernabeu, but that was other times, and now they only make money.

Waters, for his part, distances himself completely to the point that in statements to the media he has acknowledged that he will not play in Israel and a cultural boycott must be carried out until they tear down that wall of shame that is in the West Bank.

 

 

THE MARQUES (THE METAL PORTAL)     www.elportaldelmetal.com

 

PALACIO DE LOS DEPORTES (MADRID)     26 MARZO 2011

 

For two nights in a row, Roger Waters has filled the Palacio de los Deportes in Madrid to bursting. The reason? Staging something that will never become an anachronism: The construction of the wall that stifles individualism, the conception of the human being as just another brick, as an anonymous cog in the gear, without a soul, without essence and without decision-making capacity.

I don't know the reason for this tour in 2011, but Waters hit the target in every way when he wrote “The Wall”, and the different generations gathered yesterday in the Goya street pavilion are proof of this.

The classic Floyds are one of those formations that I always sensed that I was not going to witness on stage. As much as they tell us about a meeting between Waters and David Gilmour, we know that it is too powerful a machine to start rolling at this point, unless it is for a sporadic meeting, a charitable cause or similar. Since Wright's death, moreover, a meeting between the two geniuses and drummer Nick Mason makes little sense, so the chance to witness the main creative mind of the mythical English band live was something he couldn't pass up.

“The Wall”, the original, is the album that helped me discover, more than twenty years ago, that there was life beyond Heavy Metal. It's the work that encouraged me to dive fearlessly beyond the music of Maiden, Priest, the Barons, the Young brothers, Mr. Iommi and a million others.

It is the work that taught me that a record can contain much more than the songs. And the truth is that, when I discovered the strength of Pink Floyd's creative universe, going back to the Jevis bands already felt like little to me in certain aspects, nothing was the same anymore.

And yesterday I witnessed that lanky sixty-year-old with hair as white as the bricks of his wall, raising once again the empire that he created from an instant that for any other mortal would have been unpleasant, but inconsequential. Mr Waters envisioned the idea of the wall that isolates and dumbs us all down at a concert back in 1976 or 1977, when a spectator spat at him from the front row. That guy will have already smacked, or is queuing at the Social Security offices of some gray English town, the kind that end in Hampton or Borough, but his inelegant gesture inspired one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century to build a concept that yesterday impressed the thousands of attendees at the Palacio de los Deportes.

Ever since Waters lost his father at the front lines in World War II, the senselessness of violence has slumbered in his subconscious, and yesterday he made sure we all felt what it was like to be under bombardment when that plastic blimp flew across the roof. from the venue, at the end of “In the Flesh,” and literally went up in flames as it crashed into the sound towers on stage.

From there, the entire staging of "The Wall", no less, with all those moments that the Floyd fan knows by heart, thanks both to the Alan Parker film and to the DVD of the concert that the divo held in the Great Square of Berlin in 1990, merging his fictitious wall with the bricks of the recently demolished real wall.

Yesterday we witnessed that row of flags, of spotlights that illuminate the public in the middle of the night and turn the venue into a concentration camp, of helicopter noises that made us look at the ceiling, believing that an AH 64 or a Bell Huey with the M60 machine gun mounted on the door, one of the most pharaonic moments and the most introspective.

It will always be impressive to see Roger Waters in the overalls and the hammers armband playing the Nazi tyrant and yelling “Are there any fags in the audience tonight? Put him against the wall!” It will always be cathartic to hear him changing his voice and slipping into the many roles of the final “The Trial”, when the teacher, the mother, the wife, the Judge and the Prosecutor in the life of Pink, the protagonist of the conceptual lyric of “ The Wall”, is judged by all of them and receives the final verdict before his peers “bring down the wall”.

It was curious to witness the theatricality of the show, and between number and number the extras were placing bricks – I am not speaking figuratively, Waters builds a real wall twenty meters high. When you want to realize it, the Wall is built before you. The genie sings the depressing “Goodbye Cruel World”, and the Wall closes with the laying of the last stone.

We've heard the hardest moments before: The loneliness and abandonment of "Don't Leave Me Now," with that creature, Pink's half-mantis/half-wife, who descends from the stage and struts around as the lead sinks into her head. misery. The insane lust of “Young Lust”, with the projections of fatal women leading to the ruin of that wretch. Waters' delivery when singing "Mother" in the center of the tables with the acoustics. It is noticeable that this is one of the pieces that reaches him the deepest, as he made sure to present it and explain his concept to the public, who fully identified with the artist when he said "Mother, should I trust the Government?" The word No! was projected on the wall in red, accompanied by “No Fucking Way”, and “Don't fuck with me” in perfect Spanish. And it is that in few places like Spain we know what it is to have a political class shit.

The second part of "Another Brick in the Wall" is memorable, with about twelve children singing the choruses, the immortal "We don't need no education/We don't need no thought control..." It must be a hell of a lot to tell your father : “Dad, sign this receipt for the teacher, I will not go to school for the next few months, I am going on tour with the Pink Floyd singer.

Of the projections, apart from the legendary drawings by illustrator Gerald Scarfe, the prize went to the images in “Goodbye Blue Sky”: A flock of white doves gives way to a battalion of bombers that cover the sky. Its lethal load is the symbol of the dollar, the Jewish star of David, the Arab Crescent, the star of Mercedes, the shell of the multinational oil company Shell... Nobody is spared here, all the economic and political leaders have loaded the blue of our universe, and that is why the final rain was bloody crosses.

Side C of the original double album contains the most introspective moments of "The Wall", and yes, Waters opened a window on his wall to the world, and represented, sitting on a sofa in front of the television, the sad "Nobody Home", with all that heartbreaking lyricism (When I pick up the phone to call you/I know there's nobody home…I have an urgent need to fly/but I have no place to go…).

A small reproach at this point: Theatricality takes precedence over music. And while “Is there Anybody Out There?”, “Vera”, “Bring the Boys Back Home” sound, you only see the gigantic wall already built, and in the best of cases, the frontman staging. Behind it is supposed that the band is playing, but you are not sure if they have limited themselves to putting the original CD in playback. For that very reason, it's a joy when, towards the end, you have Mr. Waters' entire 2011 tour crew playing before you the rockiest tracks: “Run Like Hell” and “Waiting for the Worms”.

About the band I can talk about the only guys I know: Snowy White, who played on Thin Lizzy's “Renegade”, and GE Smith, an effective guitarist who orchestrated the Bob Dylan tribute concert in 1992 on the 30th anniversary of his career. , in a show in which Johnny Winter, Tom Petty, Johnny Cash, Neil Young, John Mellencamp, Ron Wood, Kris Kristofersson, Willie Nelson, Eddie Veder, Eric Clapton took part... nothing, a quiet day.

Between the two Waters guitarists, and the third, who if you look closely must be Lemmy's son, scored a colossal “Comfortably Numb” on top of the wall. And it is that one can only show off with such material, the best interpretation of David Gilmour, the best scores in the history of rock.

Various anecdotes: Throughout the recital, images and names of victims of the nonsense that are wars and terrorism were projected. Names of those who fell on the beaches of Normandy sixty years ago, of women stoned to death in Iran, of marines killed in Iraq, or of victims of torture in the Abu Ghraib prison. We already know, man is a wolf to man, we will never learn. Detail that touched me deeply because in its day it touched me closely professionally (I dedicate myself to teaching work related to the field of foreign security): In 2005, when four crazy people killed 52 people on the London subway, the police gave the arrest of a Brazilian electrician who was mistaken for a terrorist. The man was illegal, he tried to flee and was shot, on the dirty floor of the platform. Waters agreed and included a reference to this man and the unfortunate episode yesterday on his wall.

Another anecdote: I was amused when I ran into two veteran Skinheads in the stands, already with the focused aspect of maturity, but that aura of dodgy guys in their eyes that skinheads have. And I say that I was amused, because the Skins played a major role in some scenes of Parker's film. Not surprisingly, the Hammerskin collective took its name from the hammers drawn by Scarfe for the "Waiting for the Worms" clip. So it caught my attention to see those two characters yesterday, in their own way they contributed to placing us in a certain period: Those years after the fall of the Wall, the end of the Cold War, the aesthetics of old Europe.

I end by pointing out that the surly Waters has softened his character over time, that yesterday he was nice, grateful and communicative with the public. Tomorrow I return to Madrid and I will walk through the park in Berlin. In case you don't know, I will tell you about a little battle that took place in the capital twenty years ago. When the Wall fell, the German Chancellor gave our country three authentic stone blocks, which are still on display today in the aforementioned park, a symbol of freedom, the union between peoples and such and such. The blocks preserved the graffiti of the oppressed East German people, a reflection of a dark historical period. Lo and behold, the first night, some competent and dedicated cleaners believed that some vandals had covered the stones of the wall with graffiti, and they proceeded to clean them in part, destroying forty years of history. This is true. Now, I can't blame some municipal officials for making an effort to do what they believed was their job.

 

 

JAVIER ROMAN (WE LIKE MUSIC)     www.nosgustalamusica.com

 

PALACIO DE LOS DEPORTES (MADRID)     26 MARZO 2011

 

Sublime and without buts the performance that Roger Waters culminated on March 26 in a fully packed Palacio de los Deportes in Madrid. More than 30 years have had to pass to be able to listen, feel and touch all the magic of one of Pink Floyd's most important albums, in a unique and special live performance. I would be lying if I said that I knew what I was going for, in fact, I still have doubts when it comes to defining what I saw.

Punctual, Roger Waters appeared on stage with the blocks of his wall on the sides, everything began to come to life. With “In the Flesh”, the first theme of this symphonic rock opera, the show began. And with it the magic that enveloped the pavilion, thanks to the careful surround sound, the visual effects, the projections, and even a plane that ended up crashing into the wall with an explosion included. There was no turning back, Waters' anesthesia had taken over us.

High point when 'Another Brick in the Wall', with an added brilliant children's chorus, began to play, creating one of the most exciting moments of the concert. But The Wall is more than just music, it is a montage around a wall that did not stop receiving animations loaded with social and political criticism. Images, lots of images of children and soldiers victims of absurd wars. There was also no shortage of giant puppets of the characters from The Wall movie, the professor, the mother and the mantis.

And just as this conceptual work is divided into two parts, so is the show. Thus halfway through and with a wall fully raised, since it was being completed block by block throughout the show, we reached the intermission.

"Hey You" gave the beginning of the second act. A new composition that collected intense moments such as when “Bring the boys back home” sounded, or the impressive sound and force that was felt when Waters with a megaphone in hand made a kind of musical rally to the sound of a brutal and impressive parade of hammers. And of course, the classic pinkflonian pig turned into a flying boar loaded with capitalist messages.

And so we reached the end, a unique, tremendous moment. The Wall had fallen, and with it our faces of astonishment after having seen a musical, an opera, a rock symphony, and a sensory journey to the origin of a classic that today makes more sense than ever. Mr. Waters, you are  great, very great...

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