An article from the ROLLING STONE archive
Once again Roger Waters brings his rock opera to the stage – for the first time in the way he had planned it himself. “The Wall” is the summary of his work and at the same time his last major project.
Fall 2010, New York City. At this moment Roger Waters would be happy if he had a miniature version of his “Wall” at hand. As soon as he’s stowed his six-foot-tall in the back seat of the limo that’s supposed to take us to a Manhattan restaurant, he realizes the chauffeur is a little too clingy. Waters collapses. “Been a fan for as long as I can remember,” snaps the baseball-capped driver named Fred, with a thick New York accent. “Cradled ‘Wish You Were Here’ while hitchhiking around Europe. The best album ever made. Must be a great feeling to know that you have influenced an entire generation with it.”
Roger Waters – the perfectionist
“We don’t usually find out about this until we get in your car,” says Waters in bone-dry Oxford English. It’s hard to guess what’s really going on behind his steel-blue eyes. But it seems like he wants to put on a good face to the bad game this time. It certainly doesn’t hurt his mood that he has just treated himself to a few glasses of an excellent Montrachet as a reward for a hard day: In the morning he drove from his house in the Hamptons to Manhattan and initially worked on his biceps, triceps and worked the abdominal muscles (“It’s killing me, but I just have to get stronger”), had then practiced scales with a singing teacher in order to be able to reach the higher registers of his youth again, had stage outfits with a stylist – exclusively in black – selected (and discarded a pair of leather boots as “very Bruce”, others as “too Pete Townshend”) and ended up driving to a production studio to work on details of the stage lighting and animation.
Since January 2010 he has been working steadily on the first definitive touring version of what he sees as the centerpiece of his career: The Wall, the story of an estranged rock star named Pink, whose biography bears an unmistakable parallel to his own. The show is now also performed in Germany. Pink Floyd’s original stage version – with its oversized puppets and giant wall – provided the basis for all the stage extravaganzas that would follow, from Steel Wheels to Zoo TV. But the show was only shown in four cities, always interrupted by breaks of several months. And since there are no official recordings of these shows (apart from Gerald Scarfe’s animation, which was also used in the 1982 film version), they were gradually forgotten.
This rock opera was actually a suicide mission
The shows were in the red (at ticket prices of twelve dollars) and helped to finally drift the band apart. “They were getting closer and closer to the point where they didn’t want to see each other anymore,” says architect Mark Fisher, who built both the old and new stages (and was responsible for the “Spaceship” on U2’s “360°” tour) . “It was a welcome alibi to dismiss the whole project as an unrealistic crazy idea and to go our own way.”
Lighting director Marc Brickman, who had just joined the team in 1980, remembers his first impressions: “It was absolutely crazy to suddenly want to stage something like an opera as part of a rock’n’roll show. You couldn’t even dream of a project like this in 1980.” For Waters, on the other hand, the requirement was clear even then: “You can’t lure people into the circus and then only present them with fleas. It must be elephants and tigers.”
On the next page, read how Roger Waters spat on a fan