The one tour that Roger Waters couldn’t stand playing
There’s a certain rhythm that Roger Waters needed to get into when making any Pink Floyd record.
By the time that Syd Barrett started to work out his demons on his own, he wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life playing the same kind of psychedelic tunes that the band came roaring out of the gate with. He wanted to hit on something a lot more cerebral than what everyone else was thinking of, but that also meant that there were a few times when people didn’t exactly grasp what he was trying to say every single time he performed.
But when you think about the peak of Pink Floyd, it really was the live show for the longest time. Even though they are known today as the ones that made the most pristine records of the 1970s, it’s hard to think of any of their early material holding that much water if they didn’t play them live. ‘Echoes’ is an achievement all on its own, but when listening to the version that they recorded live at Pompeii, it’s a completely different animal once they get down to the more avant-garde sections of the tune.
It required a lot more dexterity for them to stretch their songs out like that, but by the end of Dark Side of the Moon, things had taken a much different turn. Most people were now coming to their shows because they heard ‘Money’ on the radio and couldn’t get it out of their head, but Waters had no interest in serving that crowd. He wanted an audience that would actually pay attention to what he was saying, and if he couldn’t get his way half the time, he was going to spend time on his records mocking the whole process.
Wish You Were Here might be known today for being one of the most heartfelt tributes the band ever made to Barrett, but the most pointed moments on the record come when they are taking the piss out of the music industry. ‘Welcome to the Machine’ is still one of the most aggressive songs they had ever made, and when working on an album like Animals, Waters wanted to give people even more social commentary about what they were really buying all the time.
But not everyone was willing to get the joke. Most people going into a massive stadium only wanted to hear their favourite bands play the hits every time they took to the stage, and while Waters was not willing to budge on that, it was a lot more frustrating for him trying to get everything accomplished when fans weren’t going to sit and listen to everything they were playing.
And by the end of 1977, Waters felt completely jaded about the entire process of performing, saying, “The magic was eaten by the numbers. Until, by ’77, when we were doing the Animals tour – playing only big stadiums and selling out everywhere – all everyone was talking about was grosses and numbers and how many people there were in the house. And you could hardly hear yourself think. You could hardly hear anything [onstage] because there were so many drunk people in the stadium, all shouting and screaming.”
So, really, The Wall was the best that Pink Floyd fans could have hoped for when Waters started crafting his rock opera. The entire process would have been their way of putting on musical theatre for the audience, and since there was a big-ass wall dividing the band and the crowd for half of the show, Waters was free to tell his story while also making everything incredibly rigid when the rest of the band started building their musical foundations around him.
The Wall wasn’t the kind of show that could be sustained for very long, but Waters didn’t care whether he played those tracks for the rest of his life. If he was happy expressing himself onstage, that was all that mattered, even if it meant going through a lot more window dressing for him to enjoy himself in front of thousands of people again.
