aaamusic | On 07, Jun 2010

Due to unprecedented demand for tickets for Roger Waters’ The Wall tour, two more dates have been added for the London 02 Arena.
 
Tickets for the new dates – Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 May – go on sale 9am Saturday 5 June from www.livenation.co.uk

Roger Waters, the creative genius behind musical pioneers Pink Floyd, is set to bring his groundbreaking masterpiece, The Wall, to Europe in 2011. This is the first time The Wall has been performed in over 20 years.

Roger Waters’ The Wall will trek through over 25 European cities to mark the 30th anniversary of the album’s release and with Roger hinting that this could mark his final big tour, it is already promising to be one of the hottest tickets of the decade.

FOR TICKET ONSALE DATES AND FULL TOUR SEE ATTACHED
 
Beginning in March 2011, Roger Waters’ The Wall Tour will visit the following destinations.

Lisbon (Portugal), Madrid (Spain), Barcelona (Spain), Milan (Italy), Arnhem (The Netherlands), Budapest (Hungary), Prague (Czech Republic), Lodz (Poland), Moscow (Russia), St Petersburg (Russia), Helsinki (Finland), Oslo (Norway), Stockholm (Sweden), Copenhagen (Denmark), London (UK), Manchester (UK), Dublin (Ireland), Antwerp (Belgium), Paris (France), Mannheim (Germany), Zurich (Switzerland), Hamburg (Germany), Berlin (Germany) and Dusseldorf (Germany).


Previously the show was simply too large to contemplate a tour, but new arenas and advances in touring technology have solved that dilemma. Now, after months of meticulous planning, Waters has updated the look and feel of the show to ensure it matches the astonishing theatrical extravaganza that The Wall’s live incarnation became so legendary for – thus allowing yet another generation to be inspired by the grandeur of the breathtaking visual and aural spectacle.
 
The show starts with the wall broken down and throughout the first half bricks are built.  The second half is played with the wall completely built. Roger Waters is developing dynamic new video graphics and visual images to illustrate the story and the songs, using an 8,000 sq ft wall as a huge screen. The show features all the Roger Waters scale grandeur and special effects such as original Gerald Scarfe imagery, crashing aeroplane, quadraphonic sound, pyrotechnics, spot pods, gigantic inflatable puppets, projection, video mapping and many elaborate effects.  Rogers band on this world tour is: Dave Kilminster (Guitar), Snowy White (Guitar), G. E. Smith (Guitar), Jon Carin (Keyboards), Harry Waters (Keyboards), Graham Broad (Drums), Robbie Wyckoff, Jon Joyce (Backing Vocals), Michael Lennon (Backing Vocals), Mark Lennon (Backing Vocals), Kipp Lennon (Backing Vocals).

“Thirty years ago when I wrote The Wall, I was a frightened young man,” he recalls. “In the intervening years it has occurred to me that maybe the story of my fear and loss with its concomitant inevitable residue of ridicule, shame and punishment, provides an allegory for broader concerns: Nationalism, racism, sexism, religion, whatever! All these issues and ‘isms are driven by the same fears that drove my young life.”

Boasting Pink Floyd classics including Comfortably Numb, Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2, Mother, Run Like Hell and Young Lust, The Wall resonated with millions of fans around the world to become one of the biggest albums ever recorded. Hugely successful upon its release, The Wall was the best-selling album of 1980 in the United States, where it remains in the top five best-selling albums of all time.

The forthcoming tour will offer European fans of Roger Waters and Pink Floyd a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to witness a full band performing The Wall in its entirety, with a specially designed, state-of-the-art stage show to enhance Waters’ epochal masterpiece of alienation and transformation. Album illustrator Gerald Scarfe, who worked on the initial Pink Floyd first tour and the subsequent 1982 film, has this year been once again collaborating with Waters to provide new art, puppetry and inflatable objects for the tour.

To date The Wall has been performed by its creator just 31 times live, including Pink Floyd’s 1980-81 tour in support of the album. Roger Waters resurrected the phenomena in July 1990 with one of the largest concerts ever held to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall. That awe-inspiring event attracted nearly half a million fans to the Potsdamer Platz and while countless millions more around the world watched the extravaganza on television, critics hailed Waters’ creation as the best concert ever, setting the standard for every act since to try to achieve. And Waters reveals that to make sure The Wall is as relevant in 2011 as it was 30 years ago, he has revisited every song and embraced the latest technology and special effects to energise his masterpiece.

“Projection systems now are completely different from what they were then, which means that I would be able to project over the entire 240-foot expanse of the wall … which we couldn’t do in those days,” says Roger.

More important to Waters than the theatrics is The Wall’s political and social commentary and he is planning to use the construction of the wall to honour soldiers who have lost their lives in battle. The rogerwaters.com website is running an appeal to relatives of those lost in war to submit photographs which Waters will project on The Wall during the show so that each victim becomes, in effect, another brick.

“When we first did it, we were after the end of the Vietnam War, and we’re right now in the middle of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, so there’s a very powerful anti-war message in The Wall. There was then and there still is now,” he notes.

“This new production of The Wall is an attempt to draw some comparisons, to illuminate our current predicament, and is dedicated to all the innocent lost in the intervening years,” he adds.

Having only been performed live in the United States, Germany and the UK previously, the tour will allow fans around Europe their first (and possibly the last) chance to see The Wall for themselves in their own country’s. Prior to the European dates, Roger Waters’ The Wall Tour will hit the road in North America for a 50-date North American tour starting in September 2010.  The latest details on Roger Waters’ The Wall Tour, and more, can be found via the artist’s newly re-launched website, www.rogerwaters.com.  Waters is personally involved with the site and is using it to communicate with his fans across the globe.

And he has used the forum to confirm that these concerts will likely mark the end of his performing days. “However, I still have the fire in my belly, and I have something to say. ‘’