Hi All,
In this blog I really want to talk to you about a fantastic experience I had last weekend:
For Christmas last year my partner bought me tickets to see Roger Waters perform ‘The Wall’ at Wembley stadium. I had always enjoyed Pink Floyd’s music (mainly ‘Wish You Were Here’ and ‘Dark Side of the Moon’) but I would not call myself a diehard fan by any stretch of the imagination. In fact I don’t think I had even listened to the whole of ‘The Wall’ front to back before.
It was a long wait from Christmas to September and as 2013 went on I’d almost completely forgotten about it. Without realising it, the gig was only a few days away, so I decided to just go in cold and not do any last minute listening to the album to try to make the most of the experience. This was completely the right decision.
I’ve been to many great gigs large and small but this really opened my eyes to what was possible when performing live. The whole concert was a spine tingling combination of sound and vision. Sonically it had an amazing band, great songs and powerful surround sound effects. Visually there was great lighting and pyrotechnics, the best animation I have ever seen projected onto ‘The Wall’ that spanned the whole width of Wembley stadium, and if that was not enough we had the iconic Pink Floyd flying pig re-booted and slogan adorned for 2013, a crashing plane and numerous 3D grotesques moving around the stage. All of these elements worked in complete harmony to deliver a strong social and political message, which considering the wall was first realised in 1979, its message could not be more relevant than today.
My vocabulary is too limited and time too short to be able to convey in words how the show looked, sounded and made me feel, but I’ll try to describe a few words some of my favourite moments from the show:
The first thing I noticed was that as well as the usual front of house PA setup either side of the stage projecting front to back, there were also speakers hung all around the stadium in a circular pattern which seemed to be reserved only for effects, the most noticeable of which were plane and helicopter sounds which made the audience feel we were under attack from all sides. At certain points in the show I don’t think there was a single person in the audience who wasn’t nervously looking around to check there wasn’t a helicopter swooping in, artillery blazing.
The second thing that I think deserves a special mention is the emotional voyage the show took the audience on. From desolate despair at the beginning as tens then hundreds of faces of those lost to war in all its guises over the last century were projected on to the wall as ‘The Thin Ice is played’, to nearing the end of the show when feelings of awe and paranoia were evoked as the whole stadium became a rallying swarm covered in crossed hammer flags, with Roger Waters playing the great dictator. At this point the fear and tension was almost unbearable, but fear not, the revolution is coming and the angry crowd led by Waters screamed for the wall to be torn down. Finally, feelings of relief, elation and hope poured out from the audience as they got their wish and the wall is destroyed. It is down to Waters’ mastery of the stage and sincerity of the message that none of this felt gimmicky or detracted from the music in any way and only served to heighten the experience.
We now live in a world where music is increasingly consumed one track at a time and this show helped me to re-realise the power of a full album and particularly that seemingly lost art, the concept album. I really hope they survive in the world of mp3’s and streaming as some messages are too big and important to be conveyed in three and a half minutes.
If you get a chance to see the wall, do it. You won’t look back.
