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Roger Waters - The WALL Tour '10

Kanada Kev

By Kanada Kev
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Kanada Kev Newbie

Kanada Kev

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Well, Roger Waters week is over in Toronto now. Wish I could have gone a second time to try to take in more and catch stuff that I missed first time around. Oh well, maybe if they do a second leg of the tour ... or do an evening in Barfalo ;)

http://bit.ly/d09KVS

Roger Waters – To Kill The Child / Leaving Beirut

folder28.jpg

Roger Waters / lead vocals, guitar, bass & keyboards

PP Arnold / vocals

Graham Broad / drums

Andy Fairweather-Low / guitar

Carol Kenyon / vocals

Katie Kissoon / vocals

Sony CD-Single Limited Edition (Was available for a limited time as a download from WATERS’ official website)

To Kill the Child: lyrics

The first song of the single runs at 3 minutes and 31 seconds. The lyrics open with the image of a child sleeping “in the glow of [a] Donald Duck lightâ€, possibly a reference to Waters’ prior song “The Tide Is Turningâ€. Waters goes on to ask why a culture whose primary concerns are luxury, consumption and petty values would “kill the child,†no doubt in reference to his view on how war is orchestrated in order to satisfy mass production and paranoia, regardless of who is killed. The song ends with a plea to protect children from the crusade-waging “bigots and bully boys / Slugging it out in the yard.â€

Leaving Beirut: lyrics

The second track of the single runs at 12 minutes and 29 seconds. Most of the song’s lyrics are derived from a short story about Waters’ hitchhiking excursion in Lebanon when he was a teenager. These passages, intoned in monologue over a descending synthesizer ostinato, are interspersed with more recently-penned refrains outlining Waters’ reaction to United States and United Kingdom involvement in the Iraq War. Waters has performed the song at every show on his The Dark Side of the Moon Live tour, replacing the spoken-word recitation with a visual backdrop of the story as a graphic novel. - Wikipedia

mp3@320CBR

Tracklist

1. To Kill The Child

2. Leaving Beirut

http://bit.ly/d09KVS

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Kanada Kev Newbie

Kanada Kev

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How The Wall gets built in the first place

By Christopher Borrelli, Tribune reporter

September 22, 2010

TORONTO — To answer one of the great unasked questions in rock 'n roll: All in all, there are precisely 424 bricks in The Wall.

There are 242 bricks in the 100-foot-long center section, with the rest stacked along the edges of the stage, climbing off into the arena; these edges are called "ramparts" by the creators of The Wall, the small corps of British architects, musicians and American filmmakers responsible for it.

This might be more than you care to know about The Wall. But say you discovered Pink Floyd's "The Wall" as an impressionable teenager. Say you sat on the corner of your bed wearing headphones and stared into space as Roger Waters' double-album opus (which sold 30 million copies worldwide) washed over you. Say you related profoundly to its metaphor — The Wall as alienation — in a way only the right music coming along at the right time can make you do. Say you never forgot, grew older and bought a ticket to Waters' 30th anniversary "The Wall" tour at the United Center. Say you spent part of the show in awe of its central effect, the same one used when Pink Floyd first played "The Wall" in 1980: the construction of a wall across the arena, during the show.

You have questions.

Well, here you go: The Wall is 230 feet long and 35 feet high — every bit as imposing as that sounds. Each brick is 5 feet wide, 21/2 feet tall. The bricks were made in Pennsylvania and are cardboard; same as in 1980, but now the cardboard is corrugated. Plastic was tested, but plastic cracks. The Wall must look solid. This is ironic because the bricks fold. Backstage last week at the Air Canada Centre, just before opening night of a 52-date North American tour, carpenters stood beside racks of flattened bricks, assembling each until the hallway behind the stage appeared littered with box kites. They wore dyspeptic faces.

The Wall smells.

Each brick has been painted white. Also, the bricks feel kind of weird, having that pocked texture of a recently dried acrylic painting. Despite being cardboard, the bricks are heavier than expected, which is alarming because The Wall crumbles during the finale, toppling in a violent wave.

As Jeremy Lloyd, the technical designer who built it with architect Mark Fisher, said: "We are very conscious of the bricks. We don't want them in the audience. Which brings me to litigation. The fact is, we're building a wall across an arena. From a health and safety view? Not the easiest. That's the biggest difference between now and then. In 1980, nobody paid as much attention to this stuff. Now there are (safety) procedures. Because The Wall could hurt if it hit you."

And, therefore, The Wall complies with federal health and safety standards.

In fact, the people who tend to and coddle The Wall speak of it as though it is a living thing, predictable and controllable but volatile — not unlike The Situation from "Jersey Shore," and possibly just as dense, though somewhat paler. This anthropomorphizing, however, is understandable, for this is not just any stage effect at just any rock concert. As The New York Times wrote in 1980, this is "the touchstone against which all future rock spectacles must be measured." Then and now.

"It's rare you work on (a tour) where you have to stop and remind yourself what you're doing is a part of music history," said Sean Evans, who created the films projected on The Wall. "You can only honor The Wall by treating it right."

•••

The Wall was Waters' idea. His deep British purr rumbles through the dark arena the afternoon before the first show of the tour. Someone has missed a cue, again: "Look, this is so fundamental," he says. "I'm not going to get angry, but I'm … furious here." He's sitting behind a bank of computers, shadows on his face shifting with the glow of monitors. He wears a hoodie; written on its back is "Trust us." He has a reputation with the technical crew for being uncommonly detail-oriented for a rock star, requesting that a single stage light be dimmed "by 10 percent," wanting to see the blueprints and specifications, not just concept art.

The Wall looms.

On it, the filmmakers project scrims — blood reds and chilly oceanic grays, a test pattern that makes The Wall resemble a pixilated video game from 1980. We tried to talk with Waters. We were told not to approach him. But he said in a statement: "The reason I designed this show in the first place all those years ago was because I had become somewhat disaffected by doing gigs in football stadiums. … I thought of doing a show based on the alienation I felt from the audience."

In short, The Wall was built on a foundation of angst, just as Pink Floyd was breaking apart. Waters approached artist Gerald Scarfe to sketch the animation for a "wall" performance years before recording the songs. Then he turned to Fisher, who designed the stage of Floyd's previous tour (and later, stages for the Rolling Stones and the Beijing Olympics). They flirted with building their own traveling arena, Fisher said, a specially designed circus tent large enough to fit the entire wall.

They settled on building a wall inside each arena, "brash but architecturally nothing an engineer from the 19th century would regard as anything but straightforward," Fisher said. "What was unusual was applying architectural principles to a rock show, one that eventually separates its audience from its act." Said Marc Brickman, who designed the lighting (then and now): "In terms of art, it was theater. In terms of rock, it asked the audience to reach."

The tour lasted 31 performances and played just four cities worldwide, including New York and Los Angeles, and it cost roughly $2 million. "And that, more than anything going on with the band at the time, had a lot to do with why (the tour was brief)," Fisher said. "You couldn't charge much more than $12 a ticket in 1980. That's not enough revenue to cover a big, expensive production. Now people seem happy to pay 10 times that much or more."

It was too big too soon.

••

Beneath The Wall resembles the metal warren of a science-fiction movie set — a cafeteria on the Death Star, say. There are pistons, hydraulic pumps, elevators, wires and scaffolding so complex that each piece arrives with an illustration that pinpoints where it fits within the completed vision. There are even evacuation tunnels (invisible to the audience); in the unlikely event of a disaster, Lloyd said, the last thing an audience wants to see is half of the building walled off.

Last year, sitting in an empty Soldier Field watching U2's stage come together, Lloyd and Fisher began discussing how The Wall might work in 2010. They studied sketches from 1979, "prepared to believe we would have to do everything differently now," Fisher said. "We came to the conclusion it couldn't be improved on."

In fact, so similar is this wall to the 1980 wall that filmmaker Evans and editor Andy Jennison studied bootlegs of the old tour for clues on where to project their films. Whereas the 1980 tour used several 35 mm projectors, Evans and Jennison can now digitally project on a single brick.

Which brings us to the jottings on the floor of the Air Canada Centre — numbers, measurements, dozens of them, seemingly random, as if Russell Crowe's character from "A Beautiful Mind" worked there. These are the directions for where to put The Wall. If they're off by an inch, that fancy projection is moot. Not to mention, Lloyd said, The Wall won't rise. So every brick is numbered, which means "every brick goes to the same spot, in the same sequence, every night."

And how does it rise?

Ingeniously.

Lloyd explained: There are 14 carpenters. They wear black dickeys and long-sleeved black shirts. The first bricks are brought to the center of the stage and fitted into slots. From there, the crew builds mostly from the outside in, stacking. There are five elevators with platforms 20 feet long; as The Wall rises, these elevators rise behind The Wall and bricks are stacked higher. "It's a ballet. The men ride up, place bricks, ride down, get more, then ride back up."

As this happens, 10 telescoping stabilizers rise from beneath the stage, traveling upward through the bricks, holding each brick in place.

And how does it fall?

At the top of each stabilizer is a hammer. As the stabilizers lower, the hammers knock at the insides of each brick. Technicians can knock forward or back; the key is hitting one brick at a time. "One falls only so far," Lloyd said. "The more that fall together, the more likely a brick reaches the audience."

On opening night in Toronto, once The Wall was completed, the carpenters rode the elevators down to the stage, walked to the front and formed a human shield. As The Wall collapsed, they stepped forward, braced and met the tumbling bricks. It's more of a fail-safe than a necessity: There's a 6-foot gap between the lip of the stage and the first rows, and a brick would have to travel a good distance to clear it.

In fact, The Wall has never killed or maimed anyone, though The Wall would have good reason to: Its bricks get trashed. There were 18 demolitions of it during August dress rehearsals and few bricks tumbled away unscathed. The bricks from the 1980 tour? Burned. But that was way before eBay and the Hard Rock Cafe would have found them a home.

This time, Lloyd said, The Wall is sustainable.

It's recycled.

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phishtaper Rookie

phishtaper

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very cool article, Kev. thanks. we were literally right beside The Wall by the schoolmaster for TO-3 and could see a lot of what is described in the article. i was particularly impressed with the fact that the projectors, perhaps 120 feet away or more suspended from the ceiling, were able to precisely hit the exact seams between the bricks. this was the most technically impressive show i've ever seen.

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Kanada Kev Newbie

Kanada Kev

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http://blogstoned.blogspot.com/2010/09/roger-waters-wall-canada-2010.html

http://lix.in/-927a00

Roger Waters - The Wall Canada 2010

Air Canada Centre

Toronto - Ontario

Canada

09/15/2010

Mp3 VBR~320kbps - Very Good Audience

CD1

In the Flesh

The Thin Ice

Another Brick in the Wall Part 1

The Happiest Days of our Lives

Another Brick in the Wall Part 2

Mother

Goodbye Blue Sky

Empty Spaces

Young Lust

One of My Turns

Don't Leave Me Now

Another Brick in the Wall Part 3

Goodbye Cruel World

CD2:

Hey You

Is There Anybody Out There?

Nobody Home

Vera, Bring the Boys Back Home

Comfortably Numb

The Show Must Go On

In The Flesh

Run Like Hell

Waiting for the Worms

Stop

The Trial

Outside the Wall

http://lix.in/-927a00

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