Roger Waters The Wall Live

Roger Waters The Wall Live

Date: 14 September 2013

Location: Wembley Stadium, London

Support: n/a

Special guests: Nope. David Gilmour did not appear. I’m sure it would have been well publicised by now if he had.

In my experience, how surreal a concert experience is is directly proportional to the length of time between booking it and actually going. Probably something to do with spending such a long time waiting for it to happen that it doesn’t feel like it ever actually will. Anyway, I booked this last November, the day tickets went on sale, so the entire night was pretty surreal.

It was by far the biggest concert I’ve ever been to, with around 70,000 people filling most of the stadium, and although I could have had a better view had I been standing, I probably couldn’t have done much better with the seats – they were a good balance between not being too sideways-on and not being too far away from the action, and although there was a camera tower that obscured a small part of the right side of the wall, I could see almost everything. When I arrived, it was still light outside, and around two thirds of the wall was already built, with just the middle section still to be filled in. This happened throughout the whole first act, and was very cleverly done – I’d rarely notice a stage hand actually putting a brick in place, I’d just see that the gap was slightly smaller than before.

Most of the setlist will probably come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever heard the Wall album, but there were a couple of extra additions in the first half. Inserted between ‘Brick 2’ and ‘Mother’ was a new song, ‘The Ballad of Jean-Charles de Menezes’ which Roger only wrote a couple of years ago. It was pretty short, and I think it did stand out as being noticeably different from the other songs – someone who didn’t know the music could probably tell it was the odd one out. That said, I liked it, and it was nice to have a personal moment of just Roger on his acoustic guitar rather than the huge production that was everything else. Later on, we had ‘What Shall We Do Now’, an outtake from the original Wall sessions which I think is more than good enough to be on the album, and fits in well with the hard rock style that characterises side two. The other outtake they included was ‘The Last Few Bricks’ which was nothing more than an excuse to complete the wall-building (except for one brick) and which doesn’t add anything, since it mostly reprises other songs.

Musically, everything was played pretty identically to the album – right down to having the exact same guitar tone as David Gilmour uses. So most of what you’re getting by seeing the live show is the multimedia experience – and now the tour’s been going for four years, this has been choreographed to perfection, with everything happening in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment. Things started off with a literal bang as a brightly coloured firework display went off during ‘In the Flesh’, which, if you thought it was a good opener on the album… here it was just unbelievable. The band needed no warming up but launched straight into one of the most passionate, high energy live performances I’ve ever seen.

Some of the most important visuals were all the large scale props. At the beginning of ‘The Thin Ice’, an aeroplane whizzed down a wire over the audience towards the stage, where it promptly explodes. Much later, during ‘In the Flesh’ and ‘Run Like Hell’, the famous Floyd inflatable pig made an appearance, painted black with the crossed hammer logos and some of the relevant slogans, like ‘Trust us’. It later descended onto part of the standing audience, who attacked it, and what wouldn’t I have given for the chance to catch the pig? Gerald Scarfe’s famous puppets also got their time on stage: huge, flashing-eyed versions of the mother, schoolmaster and wife crawled menacingly around the stage during their songs, and at the end of ‘Stop’, the Pink puppet himself, sat ontop of the wall, plummeted to the ground accompanied by a scream. As well as all this, more Scarfe animations got their turn to be projected onto the wall, coming to prominence in ‘Empty Spaces’, ‘Waiting for the Worms’ and ‘The Trial’.

Not everything was focused on the story, though. The giant projection wall allowed for some of the more general themes of the album to be expanded on more, and there was a much stronger focus on the anti-war side of things, as well as references to other things Roger’s spoken out against, including religion, consumerism, the government and the idea of a Big Brother-type society. I thought the way the images relating to these themes were worked in with scenes from the plot and original footage from the 1980 Wall tour was really clever.

As for the songs themselves, highlights for me included all parts of ‘Another Brick’, ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’, still one of the most moving songs ever – although possibly lightened slightly by the fact that when we heard the child’s voice; ‘Look mummy! There’s an aeroplane up in the sky’, someone a few rows behind me called ‘There is!’ and pointed to where, high above the open air stadium, an aeroplane was coincidentally flying overhead. I loved the very end of Act 1 where Roger sang ‘Goodbye Cruel World’ and placed the last brick himself, and even better was ‘Hey You’, possibly my favourite song of the night, where everyone on stage reappeared reinvigorated and ready to give the second half everything they had.

‘Comfortably Numb’ was never going to be as good as it could have been with Gilmour – and I was still holding out a tiny bit of hope for his appearance right up to that point – but it was still excellently performed, and perfectly staged, with just the one light shining on the guitarist on top of the darkened wall until he’d finished his solo, at which point Roger punched one of the bricks and it exploded in a cascade of colours. As expected, ‘Run Like Hell’ was a great one for getting the crowd going, but its followup ‘Waiting For The Worms’ was a more unexpected highlight, since that’s never been a particular favourite of mine. And lastly, the final minutes where the whole band played ‘Outside the Wall’ amongst the ruined bricks was an immensely satisfying denoument.

There are pros and cons to both small and large concerts, but this one I really think could only work with a huge number of people, partly because of the size of the production but also partly because of the connection between everyone who was there: in moments like when everyone was chanting “Tear down the wall!” the audience completely became one, and at times, it really did feel like we were all banging our hearts against some mad bugger’s wall.