“Ladies and gentlemen, turn off your cell phones, and if you don’t like the opinions of Roger Waters, you would do well to screw yourself and go to the bar”, with this warning the Roger Waters concert began last night at Sant Jordi, a sound and visual spectacle fully fledged, perhaps the last in Barcelona if we pay attention to the way this This is not a Drill tour was announced, and the atmosphere that floated among the public.
It doesn’t matter that he is about to turn 80, or that the publication of The Dark Side of the Moon is already half a century behind him, Waters never gives up. His way of understanding music remains the same, pregnant with reflective and vindictive messages, and controversy, as demonstrated by the recent cancellations of his concerts in Poland and Germany, in response to the public statements by the British artist on the war in Ukraine. or the conflict in Israel.
It will be because Waters has never known how to put himself in profile that last night he chose the center of the Palau to set up his stage, a huge cross where he performed together with the band, made up of nine members. Above their heads, a screen in the same shape as a cross was in charge of the spectacular visual artifice that concerts by the former leader of Pink Floyd are used to, and that unlike other musical shows was not limited to following the development of the band on stage. . Around him, 17,000 people who filled Sant Jordi, and who followed the concert mesmerized, in silence, reserving their throats for choirs and cheers.
The concert started with a long video clip, motionless people in a dead city while the stanzas of Comfortably Numb played softly. “Is there anybody in there?” “I can ease your pain” was heard, messianic verses after which the screen rose, magically, to the roof of Sant Jordi to reveal the musicians and of course Waters, who with the parsimony of whoever He has everything already won, he holed up the verses of The Happiest days of our lives to launch himself at Another brick in the wall.
The musical and visual spectacle continued during the two long hours of the concert where he recounted a good part of the songs from TheWall, Wish you Were Here and The Dark side of the Moon. There was no shortage of political content expressed in songs like The Powers that be, which he performed while people from all over the world, victims of police and military violence, appeared on the screen: Names like Mahsa Amini, Rashan Charles, Philando Castile or D’andre Campbell, reflected in huge characters like cathedral columns that at times stole the limelight from the music. It was followed by The bravery of being out of range, with images of a Ronald Reagan whistled by the public, thus revealing his age range.
What nobody expected is that before playing The Band, composed during the pandemic, Waters explained that he had a Catalan friend “and when you are Catalan, you are Catalan”, named Étienne Roda-Gil, exiled in France and son of a Republican general .
The Cigar opened the phase dedicated to Wish you were here, turned into a revival of the band, with images of the original Pink Floyd quartet accompanied by scenes of sixties parties and hippies lounging on the grass. From here he went on to the solo of the song that gives the album its title and on the screen was remembered the promise that Taylor and Syd Barrett, the ill-fated, made to form a band when they went to university.
The chords of the vibrant Sheep sounded while an inflatable sheep floated through Sant Jordi to the admiration of the public, closing the first part of the concert with a few minutes of operatic rest. After the surprise, Waters reappeared in a setting with fascist overtones firing a submachine gun into the audience while In the flesh sounded and the already legendary -and controversial- flying pig made its appearance, this time without the star of David or the hammer and sickle . In its place, the Meta logo, Facebook’s parent company, along with the inscriptions “fuck the poor” on the back.
Deja-Vu, one of the post Pink Floyd songs. served to render accounts with a few adversaries, demanding the freedom of Julian Assange to then dedicate a few “fuck” to drones, patriarchy, anti-Semitism and the war on terror. And while Seamus Blake’s sax solo played, the rights of Palestinians, Yemenis and indigenous people, transsexuals as well as reproductive rights were demanded, a varied offer that any leftist university assembly would sign without hesitation.
Waters left the review of Dark Side Of The Moon for the end of the concert, interpreting the second part of the album with guitarist Jonathan Wilson putting the voice on Money and Us and them. The finale of the evening was put by Two suns in the sunset, a song about the nuclear war that he used to affirm in a long and multifaceted speech that “my heart is with the Ukrainians, they have to stop this war”, earning the applause of a part from the public while another part whistled demanding that he stop talking and do the favor to sing. And to top it all off, he attacked The Bar for the second time, a song with which, surrounded by the band and toasting with mezcal, Waters said goodbye to an audience that left hoping that this was not the last time.
