ABORT Magazine™

Live Review: Roger Waters: THE WALL Live, May 26th, 2012 – BC Place Stadium, Vancouver B.C.

(CLICK TO ENLARGE | Photos – Scott Alexander)

Roger Waters: The Wall Live
Saturday, May 26th 2012
BC Place Stadium

With some acts, you know exactly what you are buying a ticket for. You already know they’re going to play your favorite songs, because hell, they’re the hits that have been sustaining the band in question for decades. Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fame is a giant exception. Fans aren’t buying tickets for the singles, they are buying tickets to an experience that lifts each and every body out of their seats and into the mind of Pink to experience The Wall.

BC Place has celebrated its recent renovations with a successful show that had a few hiccups on the venue side to start, with long queues and confusingly labeled floor seating pushed the show back around twenty minutes. Despite the problems, a show doesn’t need to be technically perfect to be technically perfect.

As anyone who has listened to the album, or watched ‘The Wall’ (Movie-1982) knows, The Wall is a politically and socially charged epic, swimming in symbolism, and the live show would be no different. Drawing from modern day events and pop culture, the performance was able to flawlessly bring those in the audience under the age of about forty into Pink’s world to understand the mindset of our tortured hero.

An interesting point to note, and backed up by Roger in a recent interview on 60 Minutes (HERE) is the symbolic wall a small but noticeable contingent of audience members constructed themselves, in the form of high-def video capable point and shoot cameras, iPhones and Blackberries. In what seemingly appears to be their only window into a fantastical world right before them, these human tripods stood stoic, their eyes focused at arms length on a glowing three-inch screen. The truth is though, that it happens everywhere now, but the irony isn’t lost that it was so prevalent at this show.

If imagery of the effects of war and the influence pop culture is having on our brains is not enough, the slow build-up of a literal wall on stage, bombarded from across the massive arena by about fifty high-powered projectors speaks volumes about the human psyche in itself. If anyone in the audience didn’t understand what they were seeing, it is easy to think they still felt it.

With about twenty-some-odd shows left before the July 21st grande finale in Quebec City, those who are able to experience any stop of this tour are highly recommended to do so.

Rogerwaters.com

By: Scott Alexander

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