Roger Waters : Rolling Stone Article On Tour Rehearsals
(Above NEW SONG “Picture That debuted live at tour rehersals)
Roger Waters staged a stunning Trump takedown during his performance of Pink Floyd’s “Pigs (Three Different Ones)” at a rehearsal last night for his upcoming Us + Them tour. During the 11-minute Animals song, screens that bisected the small crowd that the singer later described as “friends and family” displayed doctored images of the president in bright, Warhol-like colors depicting him with lipstick, with breasts, with a Klan hood, without pants (showing a tiny penis), with his head on a pig and with the word “charade” (referencing a lyric in the song) written over his face.
Midway through, a giant, flying, drone-controlled pig flew around the screen. The words “Welcome to the Machine” were written on it juxtaposed by an image of Trump with dollar signs over his eyes and a word bubble saying, “I won!” The other side of the pig simply read: “piggy bank of war.” Later, the screens displayed some of Trump’s most heinous quotes about his proposed border wall, 9/11, taxes, women, his daughter Ivanka and more before running the words “Fuck Trump” the length of East Rutherford, New Jersey’s Meadowlands Arena in a stunning affront to the president. He also continued with Trump-related imagery in “Money,” and used “Us and Them” to showcase a world at odds with each other.
Earlier this year, Waters told Rolling Stone that the Us + Them tour would be “an exercise in resistance, not just to Trump, but to all the despots, dictators, thieves and ne’er-do-wells all over the world.” He’d previously used “Pigs” in his Mexico City and Desert Trip concerts late last year to showcase his distaste for the president. He felt it was a message worth repeating.
“We have to organize our love in such a way that it becomes a potent and powerful enough tour to resist their narcissism and their greed and their callous disregard for the feelings of others and their absolute lack of the ability to empathize with anybody,” he said. “It’s a lack of empathy that creates a true sociopath like Donald Trump.”
Waters also test-drove a number of new songs from his upcoming LP, Is This the Life We Really Want?, including “Déjà Vu,” “The Last Refugee” “Picture That” and “Smell the Roses.” The majority of the set consisted of Pink Floyd numbers, including “Time,” “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2),” “Brain Damage” and “Comfortably Numb.”