Roger Waters wrapped up his three-year Wall tour in
September, and since then he's turned his attention toward his first rock album
since 1992's Amused to Death.
"I finished a demo of it last night,"
he tells Rolling Stone. "It's 55 minutes long. It's songs and theater as
well. I don't want to give too much away, but it's couched as a radio play. It
has characters who speak to each other, and it's a quest. It's about an old man
and a young child trying to figure out why they are killing the children."
Waters is not sure if he'll support the disc with a tour.
"I'm suffering a little bit of withdrawal after ending the Wall
tour," he says. "It's sort of a relief to not have to go out and do
that every night, but they're such a great team. There were 180 of us together
everyday. That piece was very moving every night."
The massive show was staged 219 times at stadiums and arenas
all over the globe, grossing upwards of $458,000,000.
"I can't top that tour,"
Waters says. "First of all, you have to accept the fact that I'm not going
to live forever. I'm 70 years old. You just have to accept that when you do
something as enormous as that tour. The hardest thing in the world is thinking
of something to do, so going and doing it is a reward in itself."
The memory of the tour still brings a big smile to his face.
"I found that the loudest fans in the world are in Istanbul," he
says.
"I remember standing there with the band during 'Hey You.' We were
behind the wall, so nobody could see us playing. We started looking at each
other going, 'What is that sound?' When they sang 'Don't give in without a
fight,' you could feel it. It was like the roof was coming off, even though
there was no roof. It was amazing."
With that in mind, he refuses to rule out the possibility of
reviving The Wall tour at some point in the future.
"I'm not thinking
about that right now," he says. "But that's not to say I won't. I
think there's an audience there. We did do 219 shows, which is a lot."
HEY YOU (live in Istanbul, 2013)
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Wow. So many thoughts about this bit. So hard to believe he is 70. But, then my rational self says, "Of course, he is. You're not getting any younger there missy."
ReplyDeleteIstanbul, once the heart of the Ottoman Empire, is a place that remains a bit of a mystery for me. I understand that it is a bit of a melting pot there in terms of culture. However, I believe it is still something very "foreign" to those of us here in the ole USA. Yet, the music still resonates strongly. Which leads me to believe, as I have always thought, that as people we have more in common than we ever have different. Given that, why do we have so much trouble finding common ground?
I wonder if the barrier to common ground is the tendency for people to want control in a relationship (or, as they said on Seinfeld, "hand").
DeleteYou see it in marriages, business deals, politics and international dealings.
And you're so right-what people have in common is so much more than the piddly sh#t that we let divide us.
It just shouldn't be this hard, should it?
When I hear of rock bands going to places like Istanbul, or India, it always throws me for a loop until I remember that both times I went to Ireland, the only places playing "Danny Boy" were tourist traps!
Larry