Roger Waters in fightback mode at London’s O2 Arena — review

Today’s immersive arena stagings are designed for Instagrammable moments and TikTok-friendly filming. But Roger Waters appears to have made his This Is Not a Drill tour with a different social media platform in mind. His furious polemics and the no less furious responses to them resemble the endless trench war of a Twitter dispute, one of those vitriolic stalemates in which both sides call each other fascists and label themselves victims.

The O2 Arena in London was the latest staging post. For the first of two nights at the venue, a group of protesters outside its entrance waved Israeli flags and brandished signs reading “Roger! Leave us Jews alone”. Meanwhile, inside the arena, their opponent claimed that he was the target of a smear campaign orchestrated by the UK embassy in Tel Aviv. “But I’m fighting back!” the ex-Pink Floyd man roared, to cheers and applause from his followers.

This was the 81st date in the tour. To recap: Waters has given inflammatory newspaper interviews praising Vladimir Putin’s leadership and condemning Joe Biden as a war criminal. Talking to the Berliner Zeitung in February, he asserted that “the Israelis are committing genocide” against Palestinians. The city of Frankfurt banned his show on grounds of alleged antisemitism, which Waters rejects as a slur. He went to court and overturned the ban.

In Berlin last month, he performed a section of the show in a Nazi-style leather trenchcoat with a fake machine gun, prompting a fresh volley of outrage. The city’s police force has launched a criminal investigation. (Amid the sound and fury, a curious quirk of history can be savoured here: at the age of 79, Waters is managing to cause upset way beyond the scope of the punks who once decried Pink Floyd as boring dinosaurs.)

This show’s start was preceded by a screened statement about the Berlin controversy. “Regardless of the consequences of the attacks against me, I will continue to condemn injustice and all those who perpetrate it,” it concluded. The trenchcoat and gun had been dropped from the first UK date in Birmingham a week earlier. But this evening, with Waters in fightback mode, the Nazi-style garb made a return. 

He adopted it for “In the Flesh?” and “Run Like Hell” from Pink Floyd’s The Wall, sung in the role of the concept album’s protagonist, a rock star who goes mad and imagines that he’s a Hitlerian demagogue. Banners with swastika-style crossed hammers hung from the stage. Thunderous rock in its grandest 1970s guise rang out, all thickly underlined chords and bold-formatted drumming. Waters grinned as he strafed the air with the machine gun.

There were majestic moments, with immense swells of sound redolent of Pink Floyd at their most expansively oceanic

This particular provocation is straightforward to deal with. Those condemning Waters for abusing history with his mocked-up version of an authoritarian rally are themselves ignoring the history of The Wall, which has incorporated precisely such imagery since its release in 1979. “It’s called theatre, darling, it’s called satire,” Waters rasped sarcastically from the stage, gargling the luvvies’ endearment like broken glass. 

His comment came during an earlier interruption in the set when he addressed demands from a Labour MP, Christian Wakeford, for the show to be banned. On that score — the defence of artistic expression — Waters is surely right. But his diatribe against the obscure MP, referred to as a “cripple” and maligned as a stooge of government propaganda, also showed the troubling crudeness of his invective.

This crudity was all the more striking for the show’s technical sophistication. A cross-shaped stage was placed in the centre of the auditorium. A similarly shaped set of high-definition screens was suspended above it, broadcasting Waters’ visions of dystopia. There were news clips of demos and wars alongside animations of marching hammers and oligarchic pigs in suits. An inflatable sheep floated around the auditorium as he played Pink Floyd’s “Sheep”. An inflatable pig with shining red eyes did the same during “In the Flesh?”.

Archive Floyd footage was shown for prickly passages of nostalgia. Syd Barrett was the only former member of the band to be mentioned, commemorated by an epic combination of “Wish You Were Here” and parts of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”. Floyd songs dominated the setlist over tracks from Waters’ solo career, although he played a new song twice. “The Bar” was a sturdy piano-led march whose first rendition was preceded by a speech about free speech and the shared civic space of the pub.

He shared the stage with a highly accomplished backing band including Joey Waronker on drums and Jonathan Wilson on guitar and vocals. Dave Kilminster took lead guitar, ably tackling solos from the Floyd classics. Backing singers Amanda Belair and Shanay Johnson gave flight to the wordless gospel runs on Dark Side of the Moon’s great finale, “Eclipse”.

Waters’ own voice is a rumbling, grumbling thing these days. At the risk of adding to his legal team’s busy workload, I’d venture to say that his vocals occasionally seemed filled out by pre-recorded parts. Wilson took lead vocals for “Money” and “Us and Them”.

The show blew hot and cold. There were majestic moments, with immense swells of sound redolent of Pink Floyd at their most expansively oceanic. But there was also a persistent feeling of estrangement from Waters’ hectoring messages. What were we meant to feel about the disastrous scenes of state violence and corporate greed unfolding on the screens? 

Oppression was presented as a universal condition. Names of murdered individuals were screened during “The Powers That Be”, from Anne Frank to George Floyd. Victims of Turkish and Iranian brutality appeared here too. Putin’s face was shown briefly at another point, juxtaposed with Donald Trump. But the focus repeatedly zeroed in on US repressiveness, at home and abroad, with Israel as a secondary focus of attention. 

With a mindset forged during the Vietnam war, when Floyd formed, Waters is essentially an old-school anti-American leftist for whom Israel acts as a proxy US power in the Middle East. It would be possible, indeed legitimate, to create a show that promulgated that viewpoint. Such a staging would be disputed and attacked, but it would also carry an internal logic. But by universalising the abuse of power while simultaneously leaving out the misdoings of numerous other powerful entities, Waters has created a bad-faith argument.

Its badness was particularly apparent on the day when Russia had allegedly committed a war crime by blowing up the Kakhovka dam, which went unmentioned. To adapt an author whom he cited during the show, George Orwell, Waters treats all state violence as equal, but some violent states as more equal than others. His staging fails for what it chooses to be silent about, not for what it loudly forces to the forefront of our attention.

★★☆☆☆

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