The 1980 tour that reduced Roger Waters to tears: “I find it hard to say this”
Touring wasn’t exactly everything that Roger Waters had in mind when first working with Pink Floyd.
The greatest bands in the world would have kept trying to tour their greatest hits until they were a bag of bones, but when Waters started to get separated from the crowd, it’s hard to really engage with an audience that sounds like nothing but waves of people screaming like banshees. It’s the same problem that The Beatles dealt with, but that didn’t mean that Waters couldn’t still make a profound impact when he wanted to.
He still wanted the chance to make people feel something in a crowd of that size, and The Wall was the only way that he could find to make a comment on what he was doing. The stadium-rock circuit had been a relatively new thing at this point, and while the biggest bands in the world were making music that was supposed to sound great in arenas, Waters was making the kind of record that could double as a social commentary as he was tearing through the album live.
The character ‘Pink’ is a deeply flawed individual, and the idea of him shutting himself off from the rest of the world and becoming a fascist dictator wasn’t exactly comfortable subject matter. It’s bad enough trying to simulate fascist practices nowadays on the touring circuit, so having the same thing happening in 1981 was either going to be looked at as genius or unbelievably stupid depending on who you asked.
But the reason why it worked so well was you could feel the heart behind everything that Waters was singing. He didn’t want to give the audience a bunch of theatrics without any levity, and while a lot of the album itself is hard to stomach, the core piece of the story is this lonesome kid that never got to see his father after losing him in World War II. A lot of that was based off of Waters’s own experiences, but he didn’t realise how much he had hit a nerve.
Most people would have only seen that part of the rock opera as exposition, but when Waters met a veteran backstage before the show halfway through the tour, he nearly collapsed with emotion, saying, “At one particular show, there was an old guy there. He put his hand out, so I took it, and he wouldn’t let go of my hand. He looked me in the eye—I find it hard to say this—but he said to me, ‘Your father would be proud of you.’ I welled up. I sort of [shows pained expression] as I went to the stage to do the second half.”
And that headspace isn’t usually something you want when going into the second half of this kind of show. For anyone that’s seen it, this is the moment where a lot of the unspeakable parts of the show start and Pink flip-flops from being emotionally catatonic to one of the most deplorable human beings ever, so then was probably not the time for Waters to get sentimental all of a sudden.
It does give you a bit more perspective on the band’s audience, though. Not everyone was making songs that were paying tribute to the Vietnam Veterans anymore, and while Waters wasn’t getting as specific as Billy Joel was on ‘Goodnight Saigon’ or Jerry Cantrell later on ‘Rooster’, he knew a thing or two about empathy and how everyone in the world has to go through their own sense of struggle.
That kind of empathy for war veterans may have gone too far into dramatic territory on The Final Cut, but Waters was only hoping to make the kind of record that he felt that people like that old man could appreciate. It’s not easy to make records that affect people that strongly, but Waters didn’t ever want to sidestep that sense of human compassion coming through in all of his music.
