Roger Waters’ damning indictment of U2: Overpriced tickets and “a real shitty show”
It’s almost impossible for any artist to keep their head normal-sized when they graduate to stadiums. You can claim that it’s all about the music, but when there are thousands of fans screaming every word of a song back to you, there are those occasional times when one can feel like God’s gift to the art form. While Roger Waters has never been known for having his head screwed on when it comes to his power as a frontman, he believed that he was miles better at the live experience than anything that U2 has ever done.
If anything, the reason U2 works so well is partly due to what Waters created during his prime. Looking through Pink Floyd’s live history, the idea of creating a spectacle onstage was Waters’ idea from the get-go, almost like he was trying to keep the audience engaged even if there was no music taking place onstage.
The flying pigs may have been just one aspect of the production during the Animals tour, but The Wall traded in the occasional stage prop for a grand opera no one had ever seen before. The Who had created episodic pieces of music before, but no one had thought of taking their music and putting it on the same level as a massive theatre piece like this, complete with a wall being erected halfway through the show and torn down at the end.
While Waters was on his way to making live history, U2 was still finding themselves on the live stage. Despite not participating in Live Aid, Waters did show up the day of the monumental gig, which included U2 coming into their own as rock gods during their performance of ‘Bad’, when Bono picked up a member of the audience and brought the greatest stage presence this side of Freddie Mercury.
When looking at how live shows are conducted, though, Waters thought that U2 only put on their massive stage sets for money, saying, “It’s funny how people try to work their way around the greed of it all. Like U2 whose rationale is (feigned Irish accent) ‘Ooh, we have to play in stadiums ‘cos all our fans want to come and see us’. Well, fine; give your fans a really shitty show in a stadium – but for fuck’s sake, don’t charge them 25 quid for it!”
If Waters had bothered to listen to what U2 were saying for five seconds, he would probably have realised that what they were doing at the time was completely satirical. They had already played the rock star card on The Joshua Tree, so Achtung Baby was a case of them leaning into the cartoon version of themselves to the point where it came out the other end as a post-ironic take on rockstars.
Beyond just their message, the stage show might have actually been closer to what Waters had been aiming for on The Wall. If the plotline of the rock opera was about a fictional rockstar putting on a show and strutting his stuff as the biggest celebrity in the world, this was a case of a real band living that fantasy in real time.
Most people are more than justified in complaining about U2 getting a little too pompous nowadays, but Waters may have gone a little overboard. Whereas other artists are likely to go for gold whenever they can, this was U2 deliberately trying to look like the heightened version of what a rockstar is supposed to be.
