![ROGER WATERS]( "ROGER WATERS")
ROGER WATERS
in the flesh
Anyone who is familiar with my work and with the comments I've made during the course of my career will that I have an antipathy towards football stadium rock shows.
These arenas are perfect for sports, political rallies, and Bill Graham-style revival meetings.....I mean, they suit God and football, but I don't think their scale is appropriate for rock'n'roll which allow for a much greater degree of intimacy, and contact, between the performers and their audiences.
There's something about playing before 90,000 people brings out worst in everyone. In the performers, it can't help but encourage and exaggerate the puerile, attention-seeking part of our personality which is more concerned with power and status.
Audiences for their part get sidetracked by the scale of the event, and the last thing to be properly celebrated is the music.
The connection is lost. I particularly felt this loss after the success of Dark Side Of The Moon.
On subsequent tours it felt as if justabout everything human and important - the quality of performances, as well as the fact that relationships between the members of the band had broken down - was ignored or neglected simply because there was suddenly so much money involved, and because our lust for the concomiant acclaim was so great that genuine creative endeavour, and the authentic pleasures that accrue from it, and thus devolve to everyone else, were put on hold. The Wall, which I wrote during that time, is probably still most thorough and articulate statement of these concerns.
My recent American tour, from which the live performances on these CDs have been chosen, was naturally faithful to my present requirements.
I have increasingly found myself directly addressing audiences, reaching out to them, if you like, in ways I hadn't attempted before, or at least certainly hadn't in the bad old days whaen I'd have hidden behind any prop from the responsibilities, and ultimately from the rewards of that relationship. This was not something I'd deliberately planned. It simply began to develop on the '99 In The Flesh tour and went on from there. The size of the venues, and my physical proximity to the audiences which they allowed, obviously encouraged this adjustment, but I also think it indicates some fundamental change in my attitude towards what I do, as well as a change in my attitude towards what I want to get out of it.
Much of this has to do with understanding, or I should rather say, feeling, the truly reciprocal nature of the arrangements between me and my audiences.
There's a bond established between us, one which is very precious, and one from I now derive tremendous pleausure. At best, a kind of communication occures in which all present are equally involved.
On the recent tours we - the band and I - came together every night just before we went on stage to perform a short ritual. It was a bracer really, but also a kind of mantra. We'd from a circle, join hands, and shout "Genuine Love!" I know that may sound a little cony, but all of us meant it.
I fas subsequently occured wasn't about love - mutual affection, respect and trust - then it really wasn't about anything, so it was a pledge that we renewed every night.
That the pledge worked I'm quite certain was reflected in our performances, as well as audiences' warmth and enthusiasm which was often overwhelming.
I hope and believe that the live material on the CDs ably expresses the quality and success of the shows, as well as giving a fresh lick to some old songs.
These fresh licks are provided by a great band whose personnel, except for the addition of a third singer, was the same for both tours.
Familiarity in this case bred a spirit of close co-operation, and a set of relationships secure enough to generate the confidence everyone requires if they to offer input, and to exchange ideas.
Certainly, there's a discpline rooted in the songs themselves, but from within this context everybody was able to bring something of him/herself to them.
The running order for the CDs closely follows the tour's performance programme: my favourite songs, placed alongside one another, on the basis of good they sound together. There are some ommissions of course, most conspicuously from the Dark Side Of The Moon and The Wall. Dark Side Of The Moon has been performed almost ad infitum by another band and a double CD of live performances from The Wall shows was released recently.
It seemed pointless to replicate the bulk of this material. Instead, I chose representative songs from these two works using the above criteria and placed them alongside rather more obscure pices from my back catalogue.
In doing so, it was exciting, though perhaps not entirely surprising since they are all part of my oeuvre, and of my continuing narrative, to discover that the songs sounded homogeneous together no matter what order I placed them in.
It has also been exciting to put out two CDs on which songs from my solo career, especially those from Amused To Death, sit so comfortably alongside better known stuff from my earlier catalogue.
It has always been my view that anyone who owns Dark Side Of The Moon and The Wall needs Amused To Death to complete both the set and the narrative.
"Each Small Candle" the only new song on the CDs, also forms part of the narrative. When I first wrote it, I had an idea that it would be the central piece of a new work, for which I've already written some other songs. Now I'm not quite sure. I seem to be considering even more personal and individual issues although, they all have to do with love in one form or another. It's a work in progress, and as such, subject to change.
Creativity is largely a process of discovery, and whatever I'm trying to get at generally becomes clearer and more defined as I go on.
I'm certain, however, that what evetually emerges will be the next stage in the continuum of which In The Flesh, both the tours, the CDs, and the DVD, are merely most recent.
Roger Waters talking
to Nick Sedgwick
взято из буклета In The Flesh Live
