Roger Waters, 
This Is not A Drill, O2 London
 

A CONFESSION first of all. I liked Roger Waters before it was cool. In the hard years, when he went solo. 

In those days, his increasingly political music and shows were overshadowed by the revival of his old band and their stadium-packing extravaganzas. The rest of the pop music world, meanwhile, seemed to just get on with its own thing around him.  
 
In recent years though, Waters has re-emerged into the public view as his political commitment, partisanship and ability to communicate powerfully and effectively have simultaneously resonated with more people and galvanised powerful opposition in polarising and increasingly desperate times.  
 
This opposition reached a frenzy over the last week with fake news and outright lies peddled on social media, a US government official accusing him of trivialising the Holocaust and craven Labour MPs straining to demonstrate their fealty to Starmer’s leadership by calling for his shows to be banned. 

Waters, and some of the more scrupulous journalists in the trade, have dealt with these lies and distortions effectively themselves, so I won’t here. The fact is that the O2 shows went ahead, were packed to capacity. Both last night’s show and, I am reliably informed the previous night’s, culminated in a lengthy standing ovation.  
  
Maybe Waters wouldn’t put it quite like this, but his show had a definite ideological content. In fact, it seemed to this viewer to embody the kind of popular front politics his parents would have been familiar with: anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, anti-war, pitting the interests of the people against the increasingly authoritarian machinery of states that work for corporations, their apparatus wielded by ever more fascistic governments.  
 
The show defies easy genre. 

Songs combined with film, beautiful animation, spoken word, written word to create something coherent, powerful and contemporary out of well-known material. In fact, this dialectic with the past was one of the most powerful aspects of the show.  
 
This Is Not A Drill was the polar opposite of heritage-industry Pink Floyd in which the music is painstakingly reproduced as exercises in commodified nostalgia and melancholic evocations of a halcyon past. Instead, Waters raids his well-known songs from both Pink Floyd and his solo works with an absolute and urgent focus on the precise historical moment, taking themes that are there in the familiar music and lyrics and giving them a contemporary accent in the multi-media show, so that they speak directly to the present. 

Comfortably Numb is chillingly reimagined, not as a show-closing rock masterpiece but as a grim, grey opening to the show, for example.  

But he also retains his sense of history and active engagement with the past. Have a Cigar transcends its roots in a satire on the music industry to become a wry, nuanced reflection on Pink Floyd in its heyday.  
 
In a particularly striking film moment, wistful shots of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd in 1967-8 are suddenly spliced with by images of poverty, hunger and distress at the time, a reminder of the reality for millions who weren’t caught up in London’s Summer of Love. Memory and reflection, but no nostalgia here.  
 
The show culminates with the bleak Two-Suns in the Sunset, Waters’s evocation of people caught up in the final nuclear conflagration. This is what awaits us unless we, like the vengeful animals in Sheep, resist. 

Which, of course, is what he urges us to do and is presumably why so much effort is being put into trying to silence him.  

On tour, details: RogerWaters.com