In 2017, Roger Waters launched a lengthy tour, his first in four years, that came to a total of 156 shows — and, more important, incorporated more of his Pink Floyd work than ever before. Waters will commemorate those historic shows with a new concert film, Roger Waters: Us + Them, to be released digitally June 16th.
Co-directed by Waters and his longtime collaborator Sean Evans, the 135-minute film was shot in Amsterdam and the U.K., and, like the shows themselves, is dominated by songs from the classic Floyd albums The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall.
For fans, the biggest surprise of the tour was the inclusion of a large chunk of songs from 1977’s rarely performed Animals. (Some of those songs, like “Pigs [Three Different Ones],” took on a new context in the world of the Trump White House.) Like the shows themselves, Us + Them documents the tour’s most mesmerising production trick: a recreation of the Battersea Power Station and inflatable pig from the cover of Animals.
The digital version of the movie will include two additional tracks, the Floyd classic “Comfortably Numb” and Waters’ own recent solo track “Smell the Roses.” Release dates for DVD and Blu-ray versions will be announced shortly.
Given how many Floyd songs Waters resurrected on that tour, the timing of the announcement makes a striking bookend to comments Waters made about his old band earlier this week. In a video post on May 18th, Waters claimed his former colleague David Gilmour would not permit any promotion of Waters’ work on the Pink Floyd site. “I think he thinks because I left the band in 1985 that he owns Pink Floyd, that he is Pink Floyd, and that I’m irrelevant, and that I should keep my mouth shut,” Waters said in the video. “All right. We’re all welcome to our opinions.”
Waters’ 2020 tour, This Is Not a Drill, was scheduled to start in July but has been postponed until next year due to the coronavirus outbreak. Rescheduled dates have not yet been announced.
