Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
The air and atmosphere inside the Echo Arena was still, a feeling arguably of the uncertainty of time in which the overbearingly hot, sweat-filled and almost distaste of a lack of summer breeze coming off the Mersey, ran riot with the emotions of the thousands who were there, milling around, some hand in hand, others clutching the only means of cooling down they could find, a full circle reached, in a way that only Roger Waters perhaps could achieve.
That still air was the phony war for what was to come, the brief interlude of respite that would soon become a crescendo of noise, of battle, of cajoling the audience to resist, to fight back and not meekly surrender the little freedom we have left in which to demonstrate against the machine of 21st Century fascism that has crept, even strode with pride, into our lives; the theme of our song must be now Is This The Life We Really Want?
Ten years and a couple of months down the line since Roger Waters made his last appearance at the Echo Arena, ten years in which the world has taken a brutal ugly turn, a sense of disgust that we have not been able to shift, ten years a new album since, this was what the silence before may possibly have been for, reverence, the respect due to one of the true gentleman of the genre, a man of his word at all times.
It was a stillness that erupted into a volcanic fire as songs such as Breathe, One of these Days, The Great Gig in the Sky, Welcome to the Machine, The Last Refugee, Picture That, Another Brick in the Wall, Dogs, the venom and ire of Pigs (Three Different Ones) and Us and Them played out with a passionate Liverpool audience joining in on every word, being spellbound by the design of the show, and finding that even now there is hope in anger.
If you can attend a gig and see the spectacle, witness the moment through the partial darkness, punctuated by a light show pulse, in a row of seats close to you of a group of people managing the twin act of wistful remembrance. With a faraway look in the eyes, tears undoubtedly running down their faces and catching finally in the random exposure to the lyric being sang, and still managing to belt out the song with such gusto that the experience was to send a chill down the spine akin to that when you first hear that famous old Liverpool song being belted out with passion at Anfield; then you know what you have just seen cannot be anything other than raw, beautiful humanity at its very best.
Wish You Were Here, the stirring song of memory rarely disappoints those to whom it has touched, it is arguably one of the great songs of the Pink Floyd catalogue, and as the softness of its opening played out across the vast Liverpool arena, perhaps for the last time by a member of the band, those tears were not just for the memories of those lost along the way, the bitter arguments, the passing of souls that went before their time, but for the future, an uncertain one for us all; Time’s iron bell telling us that we should resist being the ones to whom this song is played out, that we should not give in to the fate decreed us by the dogs, and the pigs.
A night with Roger Waters is never wasted, for the fans in Liverpool who fortunate enough to be there, perhaps for the last time to see him live on stage in the city, then this was the crowning glory, a feast in which the pigs might find themselves on the menu.
Ian D. Hall