Waters has a new song to correspond with the tour- “The Bar” imagines the arena as a neighborhood pub, one where any and all can go to debate topics, agree to disagree, have a pint, and feel some community – something wishful awash in a sea of so much shown despair. The video accompaniment to 1987’s “The Powers That Be” and 1992’s “The Bravery of Being Out of Range” called out authorities for unwarranted killing of minorities (including a Kansas City man) and labeled the last half-dozen US presidents as war criminals for atrocities committed on their watch, as a first serious test of audience member’s fortitude to Waters’ unabashed and extreme political views. Screen explosions transitioned the set into selections from The Wall, the ten-piece band featured a mix of Waters’ usual collaborators (i.e., Jon Carin- keys, Dave Kilminster- guitar) and more recent cohorts (Jonathan Wilson – guitar, Joey Waronker- drums), all of whom combined for a musically precise show. Thunder clapped as lights when down and a dark, dystopian urban landscape (not unlike in Matrix Revolutions) flashed on-screen, cuing up a downtempo “Comfortably Numb” with near-spoken word vocals and monk choir-esque choruses. His first of two sets, this one sixty-five-minutes in length, was prefaced by a pre-show warning if offended by his politics, to head for the bar now. This tour finds Waters playing in-the-round for the first time, on a cross-shaped stage with accompanying massive screen and enhanced audio (& 140 crew members), making every seat in a cavernous arena, able to clearly see and hear what Waters is calling his “first farewell tour” (scheduled for only the US, Canada, & Mexico, UK/EU and other intl. More recently, tours focused on Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall, and his previous Us+Them (which opened in KC), has found him selling out arenas regularly once more.
Since Pink Floyd’s unceremonious breakup in the mid ‘80s, it had been the other faction, made of up of remaining members David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright, that had been staging more successful and larger scale tours, until the Waters version began to increase in momentum over the last couple decades. No simple task indeed, his This Is Not a Drill Tour is a high-production, expertly executed immersive audio-visual arena-sized experience, that is the clearest vision of Waters’ own personal vision to date.
Most musical artists are content to have their live audiences just lean back, cheer them on, and enjoy the show, but for legendary singer-songwriter Roger Waters, the Pink Floyd co-founder compels you much further into his world- one, of not only his own personal and former band’s often tortured history, but the geo- and socio-political history of the modern world itself, as seen through his now 78-year-old eyes. “ So ya, thought ya, might like to go to the show, to feel the warm thrill of confusion…”
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