BOOKS & DVDs
Roger Waters
Us + Them TRAFALGAR FILMS
The Floyd’s dissident undertones turned up to 11 in a live concert film.
Having staged the most spectacular expression of personal alienation in rock history with his $450 million-grossing tour of The Wall at the start of the decade, Roger Waters turned up the politics, amplifying the touches of Palestinian rights activism and anti-war rhetoric to a hard-hitting apex on the Us + Them tour. On stage, it was a confrontational barrage of sloganeering (“The pigs rule the world” and “fuck the pigs” held aloft by Waters, “Resist” emblazoned across the T-shirts of child dance troupes, “Stay human” on the side of the flying pig) and shock visuals, from drone warfare footage to Palestinian children facing down tanks armed with rocks and the wartime bombast of Us And Them bolstered with real-life bombs and brutality.
The cinema release of the tour’s stunning live film nail-guns Waters’ agitrock shock and awe directly into your eyeballs. pounds out over images of torture blades, and the sneers on the faces of the children dressed as Guantanamo Bay inmates lined up across the stage for a repurposed . We share in the hog-like quaffing of champagne as, in the shadow of a virtual Battersea Power Station stretching the length of the arena, the band don porcine masks and satirise the trough-snuffling elite. When virtual banners fall from its walls reading “Help, we’re trapped in a dystopian nightmare” or the word “Charade” is plastered across images of Donald Trump during the cranky blues rock of , it’s rebellion writ IMAX large.
