Tell Me : Talk

Talk about your favorite band.

For information about how to use this forum please check out forum help and policies.

Goto: Forum List•Message List•New Topic•Search•Log In•***Print View

O/T The Wall Live, M.E.N. Arena, Manchester, Tuesday 28th June 2011

Posted by: SimonN ()

Date: June 29, 2011 11:12

Hello,

I was in two minds whether to bother coming down to Manchester and try to buy a cheap ticket for this last U.K. show in Rog's 'The Wall Live' tour.

I've never owned a copy of the mega-selling album and have always much preferred 'Dark Side...': it was in the same arena that I saw Waters and his ace band perform that album in 2007, and it remains a fantastic memory.
In fact the only small amount of knowledge of 'The Wall' that I have came from seeing The Australian Pink Floyd perform it a couple of years ago and I went away thinking that there were a couple of great songs witha load of old pony mixed in. Plus those guys played insanely loud!

So I decide to take a punt and end up with a half-price ticket (it shows how many shows that you have been at when one of the touts recognise you and say hello, hah-hah!) for the very-nearly sold out arena. Waters must have recouped his very obviously large investment and then some, as the tickets were £73 and £83: this is around the 115th date on this jaunt. He did shout out that he had "...@#$%& loved it!".

In some ways the back story to how The Wall came about is actually more fascinating than the album- I'm not typing all that out here as it'd take ages, but Google can fill in the blanks.

Waters has resisted merely rehashing the same shows that Pink Floyd played back in 1980 when they were promoting the album originally and now incorporates many modern references such as the tragic killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, or the footage of an Apache helicopter crew asking for permission to engage some Afghan civilians that they mistook for insurgents ("...light them up" ), to scenes of the Marines' children crying with joy at being reunited with their daddies.

This is uncomfortable stuff to put it mildly- manipulative and voyeuristic and deliberately so. I can only believe that he is sincere. To be fair he also uses his own dad's photo and details of his early death in service along with dozens of others as they are projected onto bricks in the wall early in the show. We're talking peace activists, 9/11 victims, Allied and German soldiers from both wars and many, many more. During the intermission we are told that the images and details of these people are used with the express permission of their relatives: "...they will not be forgotten."

The sound was as amazing as you'd expect with surround effects used but the clincher was the absolute quality of the images projected onto the arena-wide wall. Just jaw-dropping at times. Add in pyrotechnics, inflatables and a Stuka (!) and you've got sensory overload.

I suppose that I'd have to say that this show is more like theatre than a rock show given the necessary staged nature and absence of any spontaneity. Waters is a front man alright and he lives the characters he plays onstage: maybe it's too difficult to separate the love and affection that the audience have for the album from it's main composer? Anyway the reaction was unanimously positive.
Thanks Rog: next stop for you is Paris. And my brain is still scrambled...