whatdavidbowiewoulddo-ThinkProgress: Stade De France

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Monday, September 23, 2013

Anger management: Roger Waters - The Wall at Stade de France

To see the English at their most English, after you've read this post, of course, slide on over to YouTube for a priceless excerpt of Anglo-Saxon awkwardness, featuring Roger Waters and his onetime Pink Floyd cohort David Gilmour.

In a 110-second clip from 2006, you will see these once bitterest of bandmates meeting in the car park of Bray Film Studios where, by pure coincidence, Gilmour was rehearsing for his On An Island tour in Studio 1, and Waters was rehearsing for his tour in Studio 2.

Given the years of post-Floyd animosity between the Floyd's own Mick and Keith, the meeting is understandably edgy.

Rarely raising their eyes up from the car park's ashphalt, they appear to small talk about this and that. Waters kisses Gilmour's wife, the writer Polly Samson, Gilmour and Waters awkwardly hug, and they return to their respective sound-stages.

The lack of eye contact adds depth to a history of repressed rage, buried recrimination and still-simmering resentment. "Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way," you could say. Thankfully, the detergent powers of therapy have helped thaw the relationship between the two.

The Wall, the Pink Floyd album Waters largely devised and wrote amid crumbling relationships with the rest of the band (Gilmour in particular, as the two vied for creative control), was an outlet for his rage. Rage against the fame that had increasingly encroached on him in the wake of Dark Side Of The Moon's global success; rage against the injustice of having lost his father, Eric Fletcher Waters, to the brutality of World War Two when Roger was still a baby; and rage against totalitarianism, capitalism, communism, fundamentalism, fanaticism, consumerism - any 'ism you like.

Waters turned 70 earlier this month. And he's still angry. Like an ageing activist at Speaker's Corner, he continues to rail against a long list of the world's 'isms and, for the last three years has used a truly epic restaging of The Wall live show as a platform to make his point(s).

Of course, with the Floyd going their separate ways, reuniting only for a terse performance at Live 8 in 2005, the patrons who filled the Stade de France in Paris on Saturday night may have been there expecting a Pink Floyd show more than a 'solo' performance by one disproportionate quadrant of the band. Whatever they were there for, they got their money's worth. And then some.

Some will say The Wall was overblown, overwrought, self-indulgent rock bombast. And from some angles, it was. But others will say - quite rightly - that it was a double album on a totally different scale of narrative ambition to anything then - and certainly anything since.

Released on the cusp of the 1980s, The Wall's epic, theatrical expanse appeared, thematically, to mark the end of the rock era, an era that had seen similar concept projects, be it Sgt. Pepper or the The Who's Tommy, which explored a similar thesis.

In 1980 the Floyd took The Wall on the road as an elaborate arena stage show for 29 dates. Part rock concert, part rock opera, part theatrical outlet for the neuroses Waters had written about, it opened with a 'fake' Pink Floyd wearing face masks of the real band, featured a giant wall across stage with the real Floyd initially performing behind it, and made liberal use of Gerald Scarfe's clearly Nazi-inspired animations of marching hammers.

Updated with the latest staging technology, including an enormous wall spanning the entire stadium width and high definition projection, the updated Wall show is a breathtaking spectacle.

Given the number of acts now touring classic albums as tidy pension contributions, it would be easy to accuse Waters of also plundering the pot. But that would be a great disservice to this who. And, as he explained in 2010 when announcing the three-year tour, there was another motive for restaging The Wall show now: "30 years ago when I wrote The Wall I was a frightened young man," Waters explained on his website.

"In the intervening years," he added, "it has occurred to me that maybe the story of my fear and loss with it’s 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".

"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," Waters explained.

Thus, in this reimagining of The Wall stage show, he tackles the war on terror and war in general. From the very beginning, with its pyrotechnics punctuating In The Flesh? and a miniature Stuka flying the length of the stadium before crashing in flames, Waters remains without compromise.

Another Brick In The Wall, Part 2 - being the album's fifth track - provides an early highlight to the evening, and its first singalong moment. On the album it was a breezy, faux-disco 4/4 novelty. Released as a single in November 1979, it became the final No.1 of the 1970s in 17 countries - a Christmas No.1 taking a swipe at Thatcher's Britain and school brutality, with a chorus of London schoolchildren declaring "we don't need no educashun"!

Here, it is updated with a newly-written coda: an animated London Underground train arrives on the wall, muzzle flashes are seen, pistol shots are heard, and Waters launches into The Ballad of Jean Charles de Menezes, about the Brazilian mistakenly killed by police at Stockwell tube station in the aftermath of the July 2005 terror attacks. It ends with Waters enunciating the caustic final lines: "Just one man dead and nothing is gained, nothing at all. And Jean Charles de Menezes remains just another brick in the wall". On the day of the Nairobi atrocity, it adds a moment of poignant reflection.

Picture courtesy of Guino Patrice
http://rockerparis.blogspot.fr/

Waters' attempts to raise the mood a little by introducing Mother, playing acoustic guitar and ambitiously syncing his vocal to footage of him performing the song at Earls Court in 1980 (the "fucked up Roger", he declares, self-depreciatingly).

Coming halfway through the show's first half, Mother starts to unlock The Wall's undercurrent menace, a gentle foothill to the onslaught to come as it tells the story of the fatherless Pink character as mollycoddled recipient of an overbearing mother trying to keep "baby cosy and warm", building a protective wall around him and sealing in his alienation.

Bluesy, even gospel-infused, Mother is another early peak in the show, coming before The Wall crawls further to the dark side with Goodbye, Blue Sky. Controversially, Waters uses the impressive HD projection system to full the stage wall with an animated collage of B-52s drop bombs of corporate logos, swastikas, hammer and sickles, the Star of David and other icons of those 'isms' he gets worked up about.

At the interval - The Wall was a four-sided vinyl album after all - images of people who've lost their lives to war are projected on the wall, another reminder of what inspired the record to begin with. Waters' father was a schoolteacher, Labour Party activist, devout Christian who, at the outbreak of World War 2, was a conscientious objector. As the war dragged on, he changed position and joined up, becoming an officer in the Fusiliers. In the battle for Anzio in 1944, Eric Waters was killed. His son Roger was only a few months old. His death would resonate for the rest of Roger Waters' life and career, drawing on his father's beliefs, fuelled by his father's slaughter.

Picture courtesy of Guino Patrice
http://rockerparis.blogspot.fr/

Opening with another Floyd classic, Hey You - an anthem of bricked-in repression - the band are hidden completely behind the wall. Only the continuing stage lighting gives away the fact someone's back there, and that Waters and his sizeable ensemble are still in the dressing room quaffing eau gazeuse and cheesy nibbles.

The Wall's profound theatrically is exploited to the full during the second half, as it makes sinister progress through the story with Nobody Home, the nostalgic Vera and the choral Bring The Boys Back Home, before piling in to the opening power chord of Comfortably Numb. a song that has taken on the mantle of Pink Floyd's opus, a highlight of both Waters and Gilmour solo shows, and even part of the Scissor Sisters' camp schtick.

On the album Comfortably Numb was a cut-and-shunt of a song by Waters and another by Gilmour (the former providing the manic vocals of the verses, Gilmour adding his gentler voice and 12-string guitar to the countering chorus). Compromising entente it may have been, but it produced one of rock's greatest epics - and greatest guitar solos.

Performed with longtime Waters sideman Snowy White recreating Gilmour's original fretwork with such vigorous attack you'd hardly believe he'd been playing it night after night for three years, it provides a solid reminder of just how well written The Wall was. For a concept album, producing even one hit single was an anomaly. Producing so many outstanding contributions to the Floyd legacy was an even bigger achievement.

Picture courtesy of Guino Patrice
http://rockerparis.blogspot.fr/

Of course, the second half of The Wall is also well known for the emergence of the Pink character as a fascist nutjob. Waters, sporting de rigeur dictator Aviators, leather greatcoat and the marching hammers armband drawing obvious visual reference to the Nuremberg rally of 1938, struts about declaring The Show Must Go On.

As his fascist ranting in In The Flesh (never to be confused with the opening track, In The Flesh?....) gets underway, a giant inflatable pig is released into the crowd. It's a moment that causes thousands of smartphones, which had previously been trained on the stage to such effect that the Stade de France floor looked like a twinkling carpet of LCD screens, point upwards, catching sight of a gimmick that has been causing quite a stir. Especially in Israel.

For alongside a crucifix, the dollar sign, a hammer and sickle and other graphics, is the Star Of David. Waters has, as a result, been accused of being anti-Semitic, a stance not helped by his previous criticism of Israel over its treatment of Palestinians, nor by his clear commentary on the war on terror in the Muslim world. Waters has defended the pig as "satire", but has added that it would be wrong "to pretend these problems in the Middle East don't exist".

For, I suspect, much of the audience, it's a moment of light relief. The political symbolism is lost in a Saturday night stadium party. And, as the inflatable pig is gradually lowered into the crowd, where it appears to undergo some form of inflatable porcinecide, Waters continues to strut about, the jangly familiarity of Run Like Hell building the backdrop of autocratic mayhem as he screams "If they catch you in the back seat trying to pick her locks/They're gonna send you back to Mother in a cardboard box - you'd better run!".

The Trial, with its orchestral backing, was, on the album, something between a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta and Lionel Bart show tune. Live, Waters retains this camp theatricality and embellishes it with more of cartoonist Gerald Scarfe's vivid imagery, as used by Alan Parker in his so-so film adaptation of The Wall.

Waters is now in his element, seemingly effortlessly pushing his 70-year-old voice to deliver the show's most demanding number, one that takes you even further away from your notion of being at a rock concert, as it builds to a crescendo and the collapse of the wall.

Few rock shows, few rock albums for that matter, have or ever will end this way. Traditional rock concerts end with a finale, an encore of hits (plus the annoying unknown new one). But this is no rock concert. It ends with Outside The Wall, Waters playing a lament on his trumpet, the accompanying band assembling around him with rustic instrumentation - mandolins, acoustic guitars, accordion and vocal harmonies to - as they bring this epic to an end.

For all the rage, for all the anger, Waters declares that this is probably the last time he will ever stage The Wall. He's got another solo album to finish and then...and then we'll see. He's the last member of rock's great circus I'd ever give over to sentimentalism, but there are tears on his cheek and a crack in his throat as he brings the invisible curtain down on his three-year adventure.

"And when they've given you their all," that final song had chimed, "Some stagger and fall, after all it's not easy - banging your heart against some mad bugger's wall." Indeed.

Monday, July 1, 2013

All for show: Bruce Springsteen at the Stade de France, Paris

The French have gone from being one of Europe's most contented nationalities to one of its gloomiest. A recent survey of the nation française revealed the national spirit is at an all-time low, gloom has set it amongst the Galls. Though not all of them.

The 75,000 who piled into the Stade de France on Saturday night screaming "Brooooooooooooce!!!" were clearly in the mood to have a good time. And a royally good time they had.

This was a night of consumate showmanship on both sides of the English Channel, a contrasting tale of two cities - one made of light, the other built of tents.

In Paris, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band were giving the sort of industrious performance for which they've become reknown, an exhaustive 42-year compendium of the American heartland, of cars, Saturday night sweethearts, screen doors and auto shop grease, all to an infectious stomp that barely stopped from start to finish.

442 kilometres away (or 275 miles, if you care about such things), in an unexpectedly dry Somerset field, The Greatest Rock And Roll Band In The World™ were working their way through a half-century repertoire of interpreted Chicago Blues, music steeped just as equally in American toil, but which had worked its way up the Mississippi River from the sweat-riven cotton fields of the South.

The Stones are, still, a force to be reckoned with. In Mick Jagger - who turns 70 in four weeks' time - they have a leader who prepared for Glastonbury with, according to The Times, a "gruelling" fitness regime of running, kickboxing, cycling, gym work and ballet. And in Keith Richards, the beating heart of what it is to be a Rolling Stone, they have a guitarist whose Glasto preparations were "making sure all my lighters have been filled".

At just 63, Bruce Springsteen is still the young pretender, but if the Rolling Stones have, over 50 years, set the bar high, Springsteen is clearly capable of leaping even higher over it. "Le Boss" gave a masterclass in entertainment on the largest of scales. Three hours and 20 minutes of it, to be precise. Springsteen and his stage-filling, 17-strong 'family' providing an utterly compelling demonstration of how to do this stadium thing properly - straight-forward, old-fashioned rock performance at its very best.

A band of seasoned performers, who have been touring the globe since 1972 like a giant circus troupe, each member with their own distinctive act. You had Stevie van Zandt, who'd just flown back from James Gandolfini's funeral, a semi-comedic Richards to Springsteen's Jagger, with his manic Keith Moon eyebrows and protruding bottom lip amusingly out of sync with the video screen to the extent that he actually looked like the The Sopranos' dream sequence fish.

And in Nils Lofgren we had an equally gifted guitarist, whose extended sideburns, diminutive stature and stunted stovepipe hat gave him the appearance of a rock'n'roll leprechaun. At the back behind the drumkit for almost the show's entirety was Max Weinburg, looking more like a New York lawyer rocking out as a weekend hobby, but barely raising a sweat as he held everything together, much like his English countpart Charlie Watts over at Glastonbury.

The E Street Band are a tight crew. The deaths, in 2008 of keyboard player Danny Federici and, in 2011, of legendary saxophonist Clarence Clemons, have perhaps made them tighter, as they would any family, and especially a travelling family such as this. Thus, the sight of Clemons' nephew, Jake on saxophone raised as big a cheer as any of the other leading members of the band.

This was my first ever experience of Springsteen live. I knew of his reputation, of stamina-testing shows and of superlative stagecraft, but nothing could have prepared me for the non-stop enjoyment. Anyone mad enough to have been watching me rather than the show would have seen the same stupid grin from start to finish. It was so good I just couldn't stop smiling. Or stamping my right foot.

Opening with Badlands from Darkness On The Edge Of Town, the crowd may have been at risk of peaking their excitement early. The River's Out In The Street followed, prompting the first outbreak of mass participation (there would be many more), before the ensemble on stage snapped into an energetic cover of Little Richard's Lucille - the first number of the night to be selected by Springsteen from hand-written requests held aloft on bits of cardboard by hardcore fans down the front.

On Wrecking Ball Springsteen convulsed through his latest album's title track and its commentary on the times: "I was raised out of steel here in the swamps of Jersey, some misty years ago. Through the mud and the beer, and the blood and the cheers, I've seen champions come and go", before adding the album's vitriolic Death to My Hometown to the evening, his face contorted like Schwarzenegger's in the Martian scenes of Total Recall as he rasped out the song's sharp commentary on American heartland decay.

After restoring the party spirit somewhat with a rousing Cadillac Ranch, Springsteen then announced - in, apparently, perfect French - that the band would work its way through the Born In The USA album in its entirety.

Plenty of bands on the heritage trail have done this, sort of thing of course, but for the Paris crowd it was an unheralded surprise. It was, Bruce told them, 28 years to the day that he'd brought the original Born In The USA tour to Paris and that the band wanted to commemorate that special night in 1985.

Even after this many years of being hijacked by idiotically misinformed politicans, the vituperative anger of "BARN in the yoo-ess-ay" still cracks like a pounding wound as Springsteen unleashed the first verse and those lines: "The first kick I took was when I hit the ground/You end up like a dog that's been beat too much/Till you spend half your life just covering up". The mood shifted with a positively beautiful I’m On Fire, a darkly passionate love song that just shouldnt have rendered a concrete bagel like the Stade de France to silence, but it did.

More they followed - No Surrender, Bobby Jean, the singalongaspringsteen Glory Days, and then Dancing in the Dark. Last week I heard it given the bluegrass treatment by Ruth Moody, Mark Knopfler's support act, so it was odd so soon to hear the original performed by its originator. We all know it to be a song with a questionable history - that video, with a young Courteney Cox being plucked from the audience by a jiving Springsteen - being generally regarded as one of the horrors of the MTV era. Here it turns the stadium expanse into a giant high school prom, Bruce inevitably picking incredulous fans from the front row to frug with him onstage.

After that, we all needed a rest. My Hometown, the moodily bittersweet recollection of a segregated '60s America cut poignancy through the perfect summer's evening in Paris, a dark azure falling over the floodlit stadium as Springsteen intoned to an imagined son: "take a good look around - this is your hometown".

The emergence of Mumford & Sons and The Lumineers, and their cod Celtic jiggery has raised the duster of critics who find it all a bit faux 'Oirish. There's no denying that such music, when cranked up, can be dangerously infectious, however, but the Mumfords and their lind are, alas, late to this particular céilidh. Listen to Springsteen'swonderful Live In Dublin album from 2007 and you'll hear it all done properly, by a New Jersey native of Dutch, Irish and Italian heritage.

And thus, on the last day of June, Paris turned into the 17th day of March, as Pay Me My Money Down and Shackled and Drawn prompted arms to be linked and strangers to dance merrily about. It was as entertaining a spectacle to watch as, I suspect, it was to participate on the pitch below.

By this stage we were still only two-thirds of the way through the show - 21 songs in, to be precise. It was at this point that Springsteen refocused attention on an event that changed the world forever, an event that impacted the very people of his own New Jersey community, his neighbours and his schoolfriends: 9/11.

Springsteen was in the midst of writing the album that would eventually become The Rising when New York was attacked, just across the Hudson from his Jersey Shore home. He recalls seeing the pall of smoke coming from the site of the Twin Towers.

As such, Waiting On A Sunny Day wasn't actually written about the attacks, but like the rest of the album, it took on a different meaning in their wake, it's bouncy hook speaking of the simpler world we all enjoyed before the dreadfiul events in 2001. To underline the pre-9/11 innocence a young girl is pulled out of the crowd and handed a microphone to sing the chorus which she does, totally unfazed by the Enormodome audience before her. Call it a hammy moment if you want, brand it ever-so-slightly corny, but the collective "Ahhhhh.......!" from the audience tellingly informed that in a beleaguered world that might otherwise find such a moment cynical, there is still enough humanity left regard it genuinely cute.

From the potentially sachrine to the actually moving: The Rising. With planes taking off behind Stade De France from Charles De Gaulle Airport - a powerful metaphor for that horrendous Tuesday morning more than a decade ago - a song about a fireman fatefully heading back up one of the towers.

The Rising has become an emotionally charged, but resiliently uplifting anthem, no less for Springsteen himself who pumped his Telecaster like an angry blacksmith hammering away at molten iron.

Three hours in it is time for that love it/hate it moment of pantomime where the band goes off for "light refreshment" to retun to a foot-stomping, wolf-whistling, frantically clapping audience for one last hurrah. In the case of the E Street Band, their departure is both understandable - given the hour - but brief: after what must have the most momentary of towel-downs, back out they came to the appropriatelty-titled We Are Alive, Wrecking Ball's homage to those who gave their lives in the construction of America.

Then, with barely a second for anyone - especially the audience - to catch its breath, the massed guitars of the E Street Band are thunking out the opening riff of Born To Run, the song from the album that transformed Springsteen from scruffy struggler to producer Jon Landau's claim that he'd seen "rock'n'roll's future - and it's name is Bruce Springsteen."

There isore poignancy as Jake Clemons blasts out his uncle's sax solo with relish before Springsteen recovers the baton to scream: "The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive". Never before has stadium rock sounded so big or so appropriately staged. And somewhere in the middle of it all, New York-born, Paris-dwelling rocker Elliott Murphy makes an appearance, much to the locals' delight.

Ramrod, next, gives Springsteen's comic theatricality a joyous outlet, as he and Van Zandt goof around, mugging for the cameras like a Three Stooges tribute act missing a critical third. However, if there was any doubt about it, it's clear that all 18 people on stage are having as much fun as the audience.

The party storms on with Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out, the story of how the E Street Band formed in the first place, the LED video screens fittingly filling with the huge image of the band's deceased sax player, just as Springsteen delivers the line "...the Big Man joined the band", to rapturous (and even tearful) applause.

It almost seems too much. It isn't, of course. Like a party you leave not realising how late it is because you were having that good a time, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band finish up, fittingly on the Saturday before July 4, with American Land. It's the unashamed Stars-and-Stripes-waving Wrecking Ball track which reminds us that, for all its ills, America has not only drawn all and sundry to its shores, but has welcomed them.

"They come across the water," Springsteen sings, "a thousand miles from home, with nothing in their bellies but the fire down below". It is one last opportunity of the night for the crowd to jig about, link arms with strangers and soak up the spirit of "There's treasure for the taking, for any hard-working man...".

At its close, one hard-working American man applauds his band off stage, one-by-one slapping them on the back as they disappear down a tunnel after a truly awe-inspiring spectacle, one I'd imagined, even expected, but had little real understanding of without experiencing it first hand.

With the E Street Band gone, it is left to Springsteen, alone, to strap on an acoustic guitar and affix a harmonica brace around his neck. There have been goose-pimple moments, but not quite like this one. He strums, he breathes into the harmonica, and then.... "And the screen door slams, Mary's dress sways. Like a vision she dances, across the porch." Yes, Thunder Road.

This is the America of romantic ideal, which may or not have existed for real, and may or may not exist still today. This is Springsteen's America, of sweethearts in the moonlight and the skeletons of burned-out Chevrolets. And it is a moment to savour.

The end is palpable. As if we have both - artist and audience - arrived at the same conclusion. Exhausted but elated, as if we've all been on an epic journey of our own, from Badlands to Thunder Road, highway heroes all, on a last-chance power drive.

Incredible.