“Bullshit”: The band Roger Waters was ashamed to have inspired
As rock ‘n’ roll’s motor mouthpiece, Roger Waters is less shy about sharing a personal opinion than a football pundit after a couple of pints. His ethos is that too many people stay shtum and comfy when the world really should be put to rights. As he says himself: “As far as my contemporaries, I am monumentally surprised how fucking scared my fellow musicians are to stick their heads out.” But there are also a few folks out there who he wishes would wind their necks back in.
Ambition and bite are two things he has never lacked, and this came to a head in a concept that revolutionised modern concerts. In July 1978, at Britannia Row Studios, Roger Waters pitched his bandmates two new ideas. The first option was a 90-minute demo with the working title Bricks in the Wall. As we all know by now, the pitch got the vote, and the band heeded Waters’ creative vision.
The project arrived at a curious time for Pink Floyd; they had reached a period in their career where stardom was secured, but the toil of keeping it lofty was taking its toll. They were drained, and more often than not, that is infertile soil for creative fruit, but The Wall provided a mechanism whereby they could flip the drawback on its head. Paradoxically taking the pressure off by being daring and bold in the extreme, subsuming their own issues in something mammoth.
It was a show made for a huge scale, so much so that Waters said, “I did an interview a couple of years ago for a guy called Redbeard,” Waters told the Radio Times. “He said, ‘Would you ever perform The Wall again on stage?’ And I said, ‘No’… Indoors, it made no sense financially; it’s too expensive.“ It embodied the fact that big shows were no longer just fancy lights. It also embodied the fact that expensive shows can still make huge profits.
Basically, every big act since has cottoned onto that, but none more so than U2. Their U2 360 Tour is the third highest-grossing of all time. It racked up a whopping $736 million over 110 shows from 2009 to 2011.
Over seven million people watched the shows, which took place mostly in massive stadiums like Barcelona’s Nou Camp. In fact, they had an average attendance of roughly 66,000 over the course of the global jaunt. Playing such huge stadiums meant that they could offer rather reasonable ticket prices with a sliding scale of price categories to suit all budgets. Most tickets retailed between $30-55 in the US ($41-$68 today), with additional packages at $90 ($123 today) and $250 ($342 today).
The inspiration for The Wall was readily apparent. The shows featured a huge spider-like structure and spared no expense for production. This giant cyborg of LED screens dwarfed the stadiums by design to make things feel more intimate. Naturally, it had its own problems—it took 120 trucks to cart it from venue to venue. The crew numbered 300, and the tour overheads were reportedly in the region of $750,000 per day. That meant that despite being the highest-grossing tour of all time, profits actually weren’t all that high. However, it certainly launched the band as one of the most ambitious in rock, following in Waters’ footsteps, even if he detested every step they took.
Waters’ dislike of U2 comes from a public spat with the band. Despite the evident similarities between their shows, Waters seemed to recall that U2 were dismissive of his pet project, and boy, he did not like that. “I remember when we did The Wall, being criticised by Bono,” he told Rolling Stone. “U2 are a very young band, and they’re going [in a mock Irish accent], ‘Oh, we can’t stand all that theatrical nonsense that Pink Floyd do. We just play our music and the songs unto themselves and blah, blah, blah.”
Waters wasn’t having any of it and thought that the youngsters quickly left their original ethos and clung to his coattails once a more commercial side of rock beckoned. “Oh, really?” he questioned, “All they did for the rest of their fucking career was copy what I’d been doing and continue to do. So good luck to them, but what a load of bullshit. If you lead them, people will follow.”
In fairness, U2’s recent live shows couldn’t possibly be more bombastically performative if they somehow managed to summon an actual UFO from orbit or initiate the second coming of Christ, a close personal friend of Bono. But Waters’ point is that they are all flash with very little substance—the antithesis of what he had attempted to create.
