Us and Them

Waffle mode on...

This gig has been a long time coming, Roger Waters at the SSE Hydro. Back in the very early 80s I really got into  Pink Floyd's albums from Dark Side of the Moon through to The Wall and then The Final Cut came out and Roger left. I'd always appreciated his input to the band more than the others (with David Gilmour a fairly close second), so followed RW's solo output more the band's. Setlist.fm tells me the last gig in Scotland with him was in 1974 and he's never toured solo here before.!! So given all that and the fact he's approaching 75, I had to go!!

Ms H joined me, she'd been introduced to Pink Floyd via another band who'd been influenced by them so became familiar with DSOFTM, but that's as far as she took it.

He'd taken the Us and Them tour round the US a couple of years ago and he'd been touring it now in Europe since April. I knew it had a stunning visual show and it featured the DSOFTM through to The Wall albums, plus his latest... but that's all. He played pretty much every song I wanted to hear/see to perfection. The visuals were... stunning, the blip shows top left, The Great Gig In The Sky (vocal fab and a different take on them but could never be as good as the original), Another Brick in the Wall (with Glaswegian youngsters dressed in Guantanamo Bay's orange boiler suits), Pigs on the Wing (with a Battersea Power Station projected building reaching out into the arena and a inflatable pig flying around the hall) and finally Eclipse (and the iconic laser project pyramid).

What quickly became apparent, with these songs that were over 40 years old, where how relevant the lyrics were to today's politics... and the show was full of visual references... particularly about Trump. It felt like RW was desperate to say look what I said back then and how it's got worse, you've got to do something about it! Even the intermission featured rolling projections of various facts and statements. He is obviously sticking it to the man as much as he was 45 years ago. So I was ok with all of that...

Anyway, I loved it all... sometimes a tear in my eye when a favourite song began, as in wow, I've listened to this song so many times and now it's being sung to me in person. I wonder if he's planning on retiring... after he takes the tour around the rest of the world after summer!! What a guy....

Aye ok, waffle mode off...