IT'S FROM THE WALL

Berlin police investigate Roger Waters over Nazi-style uniform at concert

Pink Floyd singer wore costume during performance in which he imagines himself as fictional fascist dictator




Philip Oltermann in Berlin
THE GUARDIAN

Fri 26 May 2023 

Police in Germany have launched a criminal investigation into the Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters over a Nazi-style uniform he wore at a recent concert in Berlin.

“An investigation has been opened over the costume displayed at the concerts on 17 and 18 May,” Berlin police spokesperson Martin Halweg told the Guardian.

Displaying symbols of Nazi rule, including the swastika or SS insignia, is illegal in Germany, with exemptions for educational purposes and in artistic contexts.

The legal concept of “incitement of the people”, which often applied to trials relating to Holocaust denial in Germany, makes it illegal to assault the human dignity of “national, racial, religious groups or a group defined by their ethnic origins”.

“The context of the clothing worn is deemed capable of approving, glorifying or justifying the violent and arbitrary rule of the Nazi regime in a manner that violates the dignity of the victims and thereby disrupts public peace,” Halweg said.

At the concert at Berlin’s Mercedes Benz Arena, Waters appeared on stage as the character Pink from the rock opera The Wall during a performance of the song In the Flesh, wearing a black leather trench coat with a red armband bearing two crossed hammers instead of a swastika.

In the rock opera, the song marks its protagonist’s descent into a drug-induced hallucination, in which he imagines himself as a fictional fascist dictator addressing a neo-Nazi rally.

When Waters and the German band Scorpions performed In the Flesh at a concert in the no-man’s land next to the recently toppled Berlin Wall in 1990, Waters wore a military uniform closer resembling those worn by the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

In the 1982 film version of The Wall, Bob Geldof performed the same song in a Nazi-style uniform, and Waters wore a similar costume as part of his 2010-13 The Wall Live tour, which included nine concerts in Germany.

As part of their investigation, police in Berlin would look at footage of his previous shows in Germany to assess whether the costume had been changed, Halweg said.

Israeli authorities have in recent days criticised Waters less for the costumes than a segment featuring the names of activists killed by authorities. Names on the list included Anne Frank, the Jewish teenager killed in a Nazi concentration camp, as well as that of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian-American journalist who is believed to have been shot dead by an Israeli sniper in May 2022.

Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, wrote on Twitter that Waters had compared the Holocaust victim Frank to “a journalist shot in an active combat zone”, adding: “Waters seeks to compare Israel to the Nazis.”

Berlin police will continue to gather evidence for approximately three months and then hand over their findings to the state prosecutor, who will assess whether Waters’s act can be considered as incitement to hatred.

Waters is due to play a concert in Frankfurt on Sunday that city magistrates had tried to cancel, accusing him of being “one of the most widely known antisemites in the world”. Waters, who has always denied accusations of antisemitism, took legal action against the decision. Frankfurt’s administrative court last month declared the singer’s right to go ahead with the event, while acknowledging that aspects of his show were “tasteless”. The Guardian has contacted Waters for a response.

German police probe Roger Waters over Nazi-style uniform

DW

May  26,2023

The Pink Floyd co-founder wore a Nazi-style uniform at a concert in Berlin. Several other German cities previously tried to cancel the musician's shows after he was accused of anti-Semitism.

German police have launched an investigation into Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters after he appeared on stage in Berlin last week wearing a Nazi-style uniform and firing an imitation machine gun.

Waters' outfit comprised of a long black coat with a red armband featuring a Swastika-like emblem of two crossed hammers.

"We are investigating on suspicion of incitement to public hatred because the clothing worn on stage could be used to used to glorify or justify Nazi rule, thereby disturbing the public peace," a police spokesperson told the AFP news agency on Friday.

Nazi uniforms, flags and other symbols are banned in Germany, but police said Waters is being investigated under a separate law of "incitement of the people."

Once the investigation is concluded, police will hand the findings to Berlin prosecutors who will decide whether to pursue any charges

Accusations of anti-Semitism

Waters is a well known advocate for Palestinians, but he has also been accused of anti-Semitism, which he denies.

During his German tour, including at the Berlin concert, he flashed the names of several deceased people on-screen.

Among these names were Anne Frank, the Jewish teenager who died in a concentration camp, and Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian-American journalist who was shot dead while reporting on violence in the West Bank, prompting accusations of Holocaust relativization.

"Good morning to every one but Roger Waters who spent the evening in Berlin (Yes Berlin) desecrating the memory of Anne Frank and the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust," Israel's Foreign Ministry tweeted earlier this week.

Waters' shows also often feature giant inflatable pigs emblazoned with aggressive or brooding slogans. Some of these had the Star of David painted on them.

Several German cities previously tried, unsuccessfully, to cancel Waters' concerts after Jewish groups, including the Central Council of Jews, accused the rockstar of anti-Semitism.

However, some fans came to the defense of Waters on social media, arguing that the performance in Berlin and the armband emblem were a recreation of the satirical scene from the 1982 the feature film based on the band's hit album "The Wall," which was a critique of fascism.

zc/nm (AFP, Reuters, AP)

 

Two Nights in Santiago With Roger Waters

Vijay Prashad | 29 Nov 2023

• 
  

“Stop the Genocide” in white letters against a red background appears on the screens above the band’s head, as the guitars tear through the night.

Roger Waters performing.

No one does a stadium show like Roger Waters. The music, of course, is resplendent, but so too are the soundscape, the images, the giant sheep and pig, the lasers, the films, the energy of the fans who—despite the language differences—sing along… “Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?” It is a riot of emotions. The quiet calm of Santiago is broken by familiar sounds and necessary feelings: yes, we are here; yes, we exist; yes, we must resist. Santiago is a city blistered by social inequality. For two nights, Roger Waters played at the Estadio Monumental in Macul, a commune of Santiago that is more middle-class than the rest of the city although still not immune from the sharp divides that produced the massive social unrest of 2019. Then Roger sang a version of Víctor Jara’s El derecho de vivir en paz, with new lyrics for the new moment:

I can hear the Cacerolazo I can smell you, Piñera All fucking rats smell the same.

The Cacerolazo is the banging of pots, a social protest that resounded from Buenos Aires (2001) to Santiago (2011 and then again from 2019 to 2022). There is a good reason to walk on the streets and bang pots every day given the permanent condition of austerity reproduced by people like Chile’s former president Sebastían Piñera, one more of the “fucking rats” that make life hell. There is the austerity, the demise of social welfare and decent work, and the rise of poverty and social despair. Then there are the sharpened contradictions, the anger that sometimes gives rise to hope in madmen (Argentina’s incoming president Javier Milei is one of them) and at other moments, it gives rise to disorganized and organized forms of dissent. A sheep flies over the tens of thousands of people in the stadium. It is the physical cognate of the song that flies off the stage, a paean to the atomisation of people in society by this State of Permanent Austerity and of the necessity of resistance.

Through quiet reflection, and great dedication Master the art of karate Lo, we shall rise up, And then we’ll make the bugger’s eyes water

Why not? Why not rise up? Sure, run like hell, run as fast as you can from the forces of repression that want to manage the contradictions of austerity. But then—as Roger does, as that sound of the hammer battering down your door quietens—take off the shirt that says, “run like hell” and put on one that says, “Resist.” The guitars tear through the night, the lasers flash to infinity, and the desire increases to rip off one’s fear of the State of Permanent Austerity and to rush into protest. But the images are chosen carefully. This is not a call for action without strategy. “Master the art of karate,” sings Roger. Like the karateka, dedicated study is needed, and the battlefield must certainly be approached with care to “make the bugger’s eyes water” and to do that with careful strategy. The hammer’s sound is both that of the march of the police—in Chile the hated Carabineros—and the banging of the tools of the people, including the pots and pans. The stadium is engulfed by the madness of the electric guitar (particularly when Dave Kilminster has his eyes closed and his fingers aflame), heartbeats symphonised drawing people into Roger’s bar, a bottle of mezcal on the piano, Roger with his arms in the air, the night sky clear and hopeful because not far away is the dawn. Universal Human Rights About 5 kilometers from the Estadio Monumental is the Estadio Nacional, where Víctor Jara was assassinated by the coup regime of Augusto Pinochet 50 years ago. A few days before Roger’s show in Santiago, Victor’s wife, Joan Jara died, but their daughter Amanda was there to listen to Roger recognise the assassination of Víctor Jara and to Inti-Illimani open the show with a tribute to Víctor, including singing a full-throated version of El derecho, itself a tribute to Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese fighters.

Donde revientan la flor Con genocidio y napalm (Where they burst the flower With genocide and napalm)

Jorge Coulón from Inti-Illimani belted out those lines with a kufiyah around his neck. Roger, with his acoustic guitar and kufiyah and with the haunting voice of Shanay Johnson alongside him, sings, lay down Jerusalem, lay your burden down.

If I had been god I would not have chosen anyone I would have laid an even hand On all my children everyone Would have been content To forgo Ramadan and Lent Time better spent In the company of friends Breaking bread and mending nets.

“Stop the Genocide” in white letters against a red background appears on the screens above the band’s head. Roger was born in England in 1943 to a communist mother, Mary Duncan Whyte (1913-2009). His father—Second Lieutenant Eric Fletcher Waters, also a communist—was killed in Italy in 1944 (immortalized in my favorite song, The Gunner’s Dream from Final Cut, 1983). Five years later, the United Nations crafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That text is the foundation of Roger’s beliefs (“I don’t know when I first read it,” Roger tells me after the show, but he refers to it often, including in his shows). The fierce defense of human rights governs Roger, his anti-war sentiment shaped by the loss of his father. It is this universal faith that drives Roger’s politics. “Are there paranoids in the stadium?” Roger asks. We are paranoid not because we are clinically ill, but because there is an enormous gulf between what we know to be true and what the powers that be tell us are supposed to be true. Roger Waters stands for human rights, including the rights of the Palestinians. We know that to be true because that is what he says, and he acts according to that belief. But the powers that be say that what Roger says is not true and that in fact, he is antisemitic. A consequence of the powers that be is that they tried to cancel his show in Frankfurt and—weirdly—all the hotel owners in Argentina refused to allow him—but not his band—a room in their establishments (he had to stay at a friend’s house in Uruguay). When Katie Halper and I asked him about this attack on him, Roger responded:

My platform is simple: it is [the] implementation of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights for all our brothers and sisters in the world including those between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. My support of universal human rights is universal. It is not antisemitism, which is odious and racist and which, like all forms of racism, I condemn unreservedly.

Roger says this over and over again, and yet, over and over again the powers that be malign Roger. “I will not be cancelled,” Roger said in Birmingham at a concert. And why should he be? The attempt to cancel critics of Israel had some impact in recent years, but no longer carries weight: the atrocities of Israel against the Palestinians in Gaza have produced new generations of people who see the hideousness of the Occupation and refuse to bow down before the powers that be. “We need more than a pause” in the bombing of Gaza, Roger said from the stage in Santiago, “but a ceasefire that lasts forever,” the soundtrack to that sentiment produced by the saxophone of Seamus Blake and the lap steel of Jon Carin. The show opens with Pink—the lead figure from The Wall (1982)—in a wheelchair, comfortably numb. In the second half, Roger is in the wheelchair in a straitjacket, thrown in there by orderlies of the powers that be. Is this the life we really want? It better not be. I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon. Roger Waters’s This is Not a Drill tour moves on to Lima, Peru (November 29), San José, Costa Rica (December 2), Bogotá, Colombia (December 5), and ends in Quito, Ecuador (December 9).

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. The views are personal.

Source: This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Roger Waters says Nazi outfit at Berlin concert was anti-fascist
 

FILE PHOTO: GERMANY-MUSIC/ROGER WATERS reuters_tickers

This content was published on May 27, 2023

BERLIN/LONDON (Reuters) - Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters said he was opposing fascism and bigotry when he wore a Nazi-style uniform on stage at a concert in Berlin that led German police to launch an investigation into the British musician.

The 79-year-old said aspects of his performance at Berlin's Mercedes-Benz Arena that have been questioned were "quite clearly" a statement against fascism, injustice and bigotry.

"Attempts to portray those elements as something else are disingenuous and politically motivated," he tweeted.

Images from a May 17 concert showed the famed singer and bass player in a long black trench coat with bright red arm bands, aiming an imitation machine gun into the audience.

The outfit included a swastika-like emblem made of two crossed hammers - iconography that also appeared on costumes in a film based on Pink Floyd's hit 1979 album "The Wall", a critique of fascism.

Waters said the depiction of "an unhinged fascist demagogue" had been a feature of his shows since "The Wall".

Social media users defended Waters, saying the performance was a recreation of satirical scenes from the film starring rock star turned campaigner Bob Geldof and that Waters had worn the same costume in past concerts.

Nazi symbols, flags and uniforms are prohibited in Germany. Waters is being investigated under a separate law on suspicion of "incitement of the people", police said.

The costume worn by Waters "is deemed capable of violating the dignity of the victims, as well as approving, glorifying or justifying the violent and arbitrary rule of the Nazi regime in a way that disrupts public peace," a police spokesperson said.

Other German cities including Munich, Frankfurt and Cologne tried to cancel Waters' concerts after Jewish groups including the Central Council of Jews accused him of anti-Semitism.

Waters is a member of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement that targets Israel over its occupation of territories where Palestinians seek statehood.

He denied the accusations and the efforts to stop the concerts were unsuccessful. The final German tour date at Frankfurt's Festhalle venue on Sunday is still listed on Waters' website.

(Reporting by Friederike Heine in Berlin and Sachin Ravikumar in London, Editing by Andrew Heavens and Andrew Cawthorne)

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2023/05/berlin-police-investigate-roger-waters.html

US weighs in on Roger Waters antisemitism debate, says artist has long history of denigrating Jews

SLANDER; HE IS ANTI-ZIONIST, 

PRO-PALESTINE

By Matthew Lee | AP

June 6, 2023 

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is weighing in on the controversy over Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters, saying his recent performances in Germany were antisemitic, an assessment shared by many in Israel and the pro-Israel community.

The State Department said Tuesday that Waters has “a long track record of using antisemitic tropes” and a concert he gave late last month in Germany “contained imagery that is deeply offensive to Jewish people and minimized the Holocaust.”

The comments came in a written response to a question posed at Monday’s State Department press briefing about whether the administration agreed with criticism of Rogers from the U.S. special envoy to combat antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt.

“Special Envoy Lipstadt’s quote-tweet speaks for itself,” the department said.

“The concert in question, which took place in Berlin, contained imagery that is deeply offensive to Jewish people and minimized the Holocaust,” the department said. “The artist in question has a long track record of using antisemitic tropes to denigrate Jewish people.”

In a May 24 tweet after the concert in Berlin, during which Waters appeared on stage in a costume reminiscent of Nazi-era Germany, Lipstadt denounced the musician by echoing comments from EU antisemitism envoy Katharina von Schnurbein, who is German.

“I wholeheartedly concur with @EUAntisemitism ’s condemnation of Roger Waters and his despicable Holocaust distortion,” Lipstadt wrote in reply to a tweet from von Schnurbein.

Von Schnurbein had taken issue with Waters’ performance in Berlin as well as his previous comments related to Israel and the Holocaust.

“I am sick & disgusted by Roger Waters’ obsession to belittle and trivialize the Shoah & the sarcastic way in which he delights in trampling on the victims, systematically murdered by the Nazis,” von Schnurbein wrote. “In Germany. Enough is enough.”

Shortly after the concert, police in Berlin said they had opened an investigation of Waters on suspicion of incitement over the costume he wore.

Images on social media showed Waters firing an imitation machine gun while dressed in a long black coat with a red armband. Police confirmed that the costume could constitute a glorification, justification or approval of Nazi rule and therefore a disturbance of the public peace.

Waters rejected those accusations in a statement on Facebook and Instagram, saying “the elements of my performance that have been questioned are quite clearly a statement in opposition to fascism, injustice, and bigotry in all its forms.”

He claimed that ”attempts to portray those elements as something else are disingenuous and politically motivated.” Waters has also drawn the ire of the pro-Israel community for his outspoken support of the BDS movement, which calls for boycotts and sanctions against Israel.

No Room at the Inn for Roger Waters

November 19, 2023

The rocker’s Buenos Aires and Montevideo hotel rooms were canceled because he opposes genocide in Gaza, so he must fly in from Brazil each night for his concerts, he told Pagina/12.


Billboard in Buenos Aires for Roger Waters concert sold-out in mid-May this year.

 (Joe Lauria)

Republished with permission from the Argentine daily Pagina/12.



By Eduardo Fabregat

“I’m furious,” says Roger Waters. And he shows it. The musician should be in Buenos Aires – where he will perform on Tuesday the 21st and Wednesday the 22nd, in River Plate, but no. He could be in Montevideo, but not there either.

Last Friday, Página/12 made the situation known, when the same musician reported that they had canceled his reservation at the Faena Hotel, and that a subsequent reservation at the Alvear (both in Buenos Aires) had fallen through a few hours after being accepted.

But the situation escalated, as he explains in this exclusive interview. “The city of Montevideo has been closed to me, I have nowhere to stop. I have to fly there directly on the day of the show, Friday the 17th. And I had a dinner date on the 16th with José Mujica, the former president of Uruguay. … He’s a friend of mine. And I can’t go, I can’t have my dinner with Mujica because the Israel lobby and whatever they call themselves have canceled me .”

The bassist and singer refers to the email that the Sofitel Hotel in Montevideo received (see below), in which Roby Schindler, president of the Central Israelite Committee of Uruguay, wrote: “Maybe you don’t know, and I don’t blame you for that, that Roger Waters is a misogynist, xenophobe and anti-Semite, who takes advantage of his fame as an artist to lie and vomit his hatred towards Israel and all Jews,” and affirms that, “By receiving him, you will be, even if you don’t want it, a propagator of the hatred that this man exudes and will be contributing to increasing Judeophobia.”

And then, where are you now?

I am in São Paulo, (Brazil) happily in a beautiful hotel, the Rosemary. We were supposed to leave the day before yesterday, but we took another five days; We were supposed to be in Buenos Aires today, but we can’t go there either so we’ll stay here.

So in Brazil the same thing did not happen as in Uruguay and Argentina…

The people here are loving, we did two sold out shows in São Paulo that had fantastic reviews, everyone loved the show, we loved it, they were among the best shows we did, the audience had a great time. And somehow these idiots from the Israeli lobby managed to co-opt all the hotels in Buenos Aires and Montevideo and organized this extraordinary boycott based on malicious lies they have been telling about me.

I know this well, I see that this Roby Schindler calls me a “misogynist” as the least of the crimes I am supposed to have committed. And do you know where that comes from? From Polly Samson, the wife of David Gilmour (Pink Floyd guitarist with whom Waters has a historic dispute): she is the only person who has ever accused me of being a misogynist. And they took that and put it in my general description, as a Nazi, and a Jew hater, and all the rest of the absolute nonsense they say about me, dirty lies.


This is Not a Drill Roger Waters concert in Washington DC, Aug. 2022. (Joe Lauria)

Your This is Not A Drill tour had already been questioned, but for an absurd misinterpretation of the character Pink from The Wall. Has this changed since the Hamas attacks on October 7 in Israel and everything that came after?

They do it because I believe in human rights, and I speak openly about the genocide of the Palestinian people. And I’m going to continue doing it. Because genocide is being committed right now, every day in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and all the occupied territories. And it has to stop.

The time has come for all of us around the world, all the brothers and sisters to say enough is enough. No more. Israel cannot be allowed to continue with this disgusting genocidal rampage. And these people, the Roby Schindlers of this world, try to silence me because I believe in human rights and they don’t.

They are a colonial society that stops nothing, not even mass murder, from proclaiming its supremacy over other peoples and other religions. The people of the world have to stop them. As human beings it is an absolute moral duty to confront them. And you can write this: it makes me laugh, it would be really very funny if it weren’t so vile, so disgusting and stupid.

Did they give you any other explanation at the hotels?

No, they just “don’t have a room.” And I understand that in Montevideo they have been in all the newspapers for weeks telling people not to buy tickets for the show. And you know how it is: when you keep telling lies all the time and you do it at high volume, I got people to say “um, maybe it’s true, maybe I’m not going to the show.” The last time I was in Montevideo, five years ago, they gave me the keys to the city!

But now they changed the lock!

I was standing there with a medal around my neck, listening to them say that I was a wonderful person, what a great defender of human rights, and what a wonderful musician, thank you for these 60 years of great music and blah, blah, blah … and now I’m not! They won’t let me stay in a hotel in the city! It’s crazy, obviously.

Requests for a ceasefire have multiplied. What is missing in the international community?

We have to stay united. Why deny the genocide, the bombing of Gaza, the death of 4,000 children and babies? … Children are dying in Gaza because they do not have oxygen in their incubators. It breaks my heart every second that this continues. Everyone must stand up and say “Israel, no more. Stop right now. You are behaving like animals, you are the monsters in this story, you are the terrorists.”

We look to the future and hope that there will be a democracy, a state in which everyone is equal before the law for everyone, without distinction of religion or nationality. There can be no more masters and slaves on the sacred land. That is the reason why the Israeli lobby has been trying to destroy me, for 17 years now. And so far they have failed, and they will continue to fail.

Because I will continue to stand on the platform of universal human rights, for all brothers and sisters, throughout the world, not just on the sacred land. But that is not their platform, they are a colonial society that believes that they are better than their neighbors and that they can do whatever they want with them.

Well, we, the people of the world, are not going to allow it. This did not start on October 7, this started even long before 1948, but the critical day was when the nakba began , and it has been happening ever since and that is enough!

Now they have reached this extremism of their colonial behavior, and now they commit genocide despite what leaders of the United States and the European community are saying, and the power of will of the people of the United States and the people of Europe, and of course the global south, which supports the Palestinian cause.

Roger Waters performing in Raleigh, NC, August 2022. (Joe Lauria)

A couple of weeks ago you could see a massive march of Jews in New York.

In the West we have governments that point out that what is happening is against the will of their people, it was demonstrated by the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of citizens in the streets, almost every day. Jews demonstrating, saying,“Not in our name”! Because Judaism is a good religion, that cares about its brothers and sisters, that loves people.

This is an aberration, which is supported by propaganda every minute of every day that the Israeli people have received since 1948. We cannot blame them, they were inoculated with this poison, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for 75 years. It’s no surprise then that they behave so horribly. But we have to help them. And keep doing it despite this moron Roby Schindler and the dirty lies of him.

But you know that your opposition to the State of Israel unleashed accusations of anti-Semitism.

I said it in an interview a couple of weeks ago: only one person in the world knows if Roger Waters is an anti-Semite or not. And that person is Roger Waters. I know very well what I feel in my heart, and I have not had a single anti-Semitic thought in my entire life.

What I condemn is what the Israeli government does, and I will continue to condemn it because it is wrong,and it was wrong from the beginning. Well, time’s up: Stop the genocide now! The easiest thing is to point me out as an anti-Semite, and it’s because they don’t have a moral compass, they can’t have a solid argument from the Israeli side of the issue.

They are committing murder, they are committing genocide, they are oppressing another people. It is an ethnic cleansing that they have been carrying out for 75 years, since day one of the nakba. They have killed hundreds and hundreds of people, they have committed atrocities, massacres that have been happening since then. No more.

But lock me up, send me to sleep in the stable? It’s so stupid! It’s crazy that people in Argentina accept this nonsense about the Faena and the Four Seasons, and what the other hotels are called. It’s stupid. They should think a little more and behave like adults!

In this context, can we talk something about music? Is this really the last tour?

Probably not! The “last tour” thing is more of an inside joke in the industry, who knows. I continue writing, composing, I am working on my next album, in the hotel rooms I am writing things, putting together songs and presenting some fragments in the show. I haven’t stopped working, and I probably won’t stop.

If I will continue doing these kinds of shows, I have no idea, only time will tell. Because I am very excited about the shows in Buenos Aires, my last shows there are a legend, nine concerts in River Plate.

I’m not bragging, I’m just saying that it’s important, and that these concerts are surrounded by the Israeli lobby makes me furious. It’s bringing the attention away from This is not a Drill, and the music I’ve been making for 60 years.Using it in a way that seeks to sustain the Israeli regime and the atrocious treatment of the native peoples, the Palestinians, takes the focus off of these shows, which will be great, because the BA audience is fantastic, I’ve experienced it before , and you will love this show.

But don’t you think that the content of the show also multiplied the criticism?

-This is a very political show, very frontal. They have tried to cancel it through Germany and England and have failed. But when you go to see it you’re going to say, “But why are they trying to cancel it?” Oh , because I mention Anne Frank and Shireen Abu Akleh in the same song. Well, they were both murdered by ruthless regimes, that’s why they’re in the same song. In both cases it is a State committing a crime, be it Anne Frank or Shireen Abu Akleh.

They cannot cancel the show of a person who points out these crimes because he does it in the same song. In the show I also mention Sophie Scholl (activist of the White Rose movement, guillotined by the Nazis in 1943), who during our stop in Munich on the tour my wife and I went to leave white roses at the grave her. If you don’t know her story, look it up, educate yourselves.

Is there anything you want to add?

I’m running out of breath, I’ve said everything I could say… I hope in the future our lives will intersect to talk in more depth about music. But right now I’m in the middle of a war. And it is not the war against me that matters to me, but the carnage of brothers and sisters in Gaza. That’s what’s important to talk about today. Not the feelings of the Israel lobby: they deserve our contempt. And yes, I am deeply angry, this is crazy and an absurd joke, but we have to do something about it.

Sofitel Montevideo Casino. (accorhotels.com)

Roby Schindler’s Message to Hotels:
In an email titled “Lodging to Roger Waters” and sent to the general manager of Sofitel Montevideo, Roby Schindler, President of the Central Israelite Committee of Uruguay, sent the following message, which had the desired effect:

“It has emerged that due to the refusal to receive Roger Waters in other hotels, Sofitel Montevideo will accommodate him. Perhaps you do not know, and I do not blame you for that, that Roger Waters is a misogynist, xenophobe and anti-Semite, who takes advantageof his fame as an artist to lie and spew his hatred towards Israel and all Jews.

Hate speech often has worse consequences for humanity than weapons. By receiving him, you will be, even if you don’t want it, a propagator of the hatred that this man exudes and you will be contributing to increasing Judeophobia (that is, hatred towards Jews) in our country. You wouldn’t want to be in his shoes and have to carry the stigma of hosting one of the biggest hate speech spewers on the planet.

Sincerely,

Roby Schindler

President of the Israelite Central Committee of Uruguay.”

Together For Change Doesn’t Want Waters Either

The “Waters case” also deserved attention in [the Argentine] Congress. In a draft declaration presented by the legislator of Together for Change, Sabrina Ajmechet, and accompanied by Alejandro Finocchiaro, Karina Banfi, Ana Clara Romero, José Luis Espert, Rubén Manzi, Marilú Quiróz and María Sotolano, the chamber is called to express “its deep repudiation of the singer’s presence in our country.”

The legislators’ presentation alludes to statements made a couple of weeks ago by the artist, when in an interview with journalist Glenn Greenwald he noted: “How the hell did the Israelis not know that this was going to happen?

I mean, didn’t the Israeli Army in those 11, 10 or 11 fields hear the explosions when they happened? Whatever they had to fly to cross the border? There is something very suspicious about that.” In the same interview, the musician noted that “The thing was blown out of proportion by the Israelis inventing stories about beheading babies.”

“Opinions such as those expressed by Waters seek to question the actions of the State of Israel in the exercise of the right to self-defense, being deeply anti-Semitic using anti-Zionism as a mask,” states the deputies’ project.

Roger Waters releases new versions of antiwar tracks on The Lockdown Sessions EP

Kevin Reed
WSWS.ORG

Rogers Waters has released an extended play (EP) record entitled The Lockdown Sessions that contains remakes of six popular tracks from his five decades of songwriting, studio recording and live performances.

Waters was a founding member and the primary creative force behind the internationally acclaimed rock music group Pink Floyd and, since leaving the band in 1985, has established a global following as a solo artist.

The Lockdown Sessions, Roger Waters

Released through multiple music streaming services on December 9, five of the recordings were made in Waters’ home studio during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. The black-and-white music videos shared on YouTube—dated between May 2020 and April 2021—show members of the band performing separately from one another and presumably also in their home studios.

Since the original 2020 start of his “This is Not a Drill” world tour was postponed by the COVID-19 crisis, Waters decided to record some of the tracks with the band that had previously been performed as encore numbers at the end of previous live shows.

In a brief statement about the EP, Waters explained that he had considered making a studio record of these encore songs. He said, “I started thinking, ‘It could make an interesting album, all those encores … The Encores.’ Yeah, has a nice ring to it!” Waters said the pandemic brought everything to an abrupt halt on March 13, 2020, including for the moment the concept that would eventually become The Lockdown Sessions.

The tracks selected for the EP bring together some of Waters’ most powerful antiwar creations. There is no doubt that the reinterpretations are recorded with an eye to contemporary events. At that time, there were ongoing illegal imperialist military operations—including drone assassination strikes and other secret killing campaigns by the US government—in the Middle East and Africa, as well as a growing threat of nuclear world war between the US and either Russia or China.

The US-NATO instigated war against Russia in Ukraine that began in February 2022 certainly also played a role in the decision by Waters to release the EP, investing the themes with an even higher level of urgency.

Some of the songs are very close recreations of the originals, while others dramatically depart from the sounds, rhythms and keys of the music from three or four decades ago. The collaborating musicians on the record are the members of his touring band: Dave Kilminster and Jonathan Wilson on guitars, Joey Waronker on drums, Lucius-Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig on backing vocals, Gus Seyffert on bass, Jon Carin on piano and keys, Bo Koster on Hammond and Ian Ritchie on sax.

The EP starts with “Mother” from the 1979 Pink Floyd album The Wall, which has the iconic opening line, “Mother, do you think they’ll drop the bomb?” The song transitions from a light vocal melody with acoustic guitar accompaniment—performed by Waters—into a heavier rock and roll anthem by the band, including a grinding electric guitar solo, and then back again.

The second and fourth tracks, “Two Suns in the Sunset” and “The Gunner’s Dream” are from the 1983 Pink Floyd album The Final Cut, one of the most powerful antiwar rock music albums ever produced. The first of these contemplates the end of the world with a sunset in the west while another fire ball is illuminating the sky in the east, as Waters sings, “Two suns in the sunset / Could be the human race is run.”

The second of these two numbers has Waters playing piano and telling the story of the thoughts of a World War II airman gunner as he is falling to his death after having been shot down. Like Martin Luther King Jr., the gunner repeats “I had a dream, I had a dream,” and then he offers a vision of the possible future of society:

A place to stay, enough to eat
Somewhere, old heroes shuffle safely down the street
Where you can speak out loud about your doubts and fears
And what’s more, no one ever disappears
You never hear their standard issue kicking in your door
You can relax on both sides of the tracks
And maniacs don’t blow holes in bandsmen by remote control
And everyone has recourse to the law
And no one kills the children anymore
No one kills the children anymore

Writing about the original recording on the 30th anniversary of The Final Cut’s release in 2013, Rachel Mann of The Quietus commented that “The Gunner’s Dream” was the “centrepiece of the album.” Mann observed that the track “tenderly imagines the lost hopes and expectations of a bomber gunner shot down and falling to his death over Berlin” and that “Waters’ voice is beautifully matched to words whose understatement adds to the power.” This “beautiful match” is even more pronounced on the new version.

The third track is “Vera” from The Wall, which is a reference to Vera Lynn, an English singer who was very popular during World War II, especially among the British soldiers, and who sang the legendary “We’ll Meet Again.” Waters asks, “Vera, Vera, what has become of you?” and then goes into the chorus—with Wolfe and Laessig singing along—to repeat, “Bring the boys back home,” and adding to the new version, “Don’t leave the children on their own, no, no.”

Waters wraps up the five tracks with “The Bravery of Being Out of Range” from his 1992 solo album Amused to Death. It addresses the use of laser guided missiles to launch strikes on the enemies of US imperialism “from 3,000 miles away.”

Roger Waters performing in 2018 [AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo]

The music video begins with a portion of the farewell presidential speech by Ronald Reagan in January 1989. Waters says in the liner notes that the first verse of the song is about Reagan who “is still revered by many, even though he is a mass war criminal who, among his many other crimes, knowingly supported the genocide of the Mayan people of Guatemala when he was president of the United States.”

Waters slows down the tempo and adds a new verse to the three-decade-old song:

Thirty years later it’s the same old tune
No closer to peace than the man in the moon
The president’s still just as crazy as a loon
Still picking fights in some foreign saloon
Bombs still falling out of the sky
The band’s still playing Miss American Pie
The Gunner still sleeps in some foreign field
And the boys are still coming home on a shield
But nothing is real

The last track is a remake of the hugely popular “Comfortably Numb” from The Wall. It was not recorded during the lockdowns, but in studios across North America during the world tour in 2022 and is intended as a warning about the catastrophic consequences of a world war with nuclear weapons.

As Waters explains in the notes included with the music video, “Before lockdown I had been working on a demo of a new version of ‘Comfortably Numb’ as an opener to our new show ‘This Is Not A Drill.’ I pitched it a whole step down, in A Minor, to make it darker and arranged it with no solos, except over the outro, where there is a heartrendingly beautiful vocal solo from one of our new sisters Shanay Johnson. It’s intended as a wakeup call, and a bridge towards a kinder future with more talking to strangers, either in ‘The Bar’ or just ‘Passing in the Street’ and less slaughter ‘In Some Foreign Field.’”

Longtime listeners and fans of Pink Floyd and Waters will welcome these new interpretations, and those who are just now becoming familiar with the important artist will have an opportunity to learn about his principled stance against imperialism and war. The second leg of Waters’ “This is Not a Drill” concert tour resumes in March with dates across Europe and the UK.