Roger Waters’ The Wall

When Pink Floyd recorded The Wall in 1979, Roger Waters was well on his way to being in total control of the group. The album was about his life and his growing sense of alienation and the other band members were increasingly being shut out. After the Floyd split, The Wall became seen as his project which he toured with various stellar line-ups. Now there is a film of the 2010–13 solo tour, co-directed by Waters and Sean Evans, and it’s on at Kino-Teatr this weekend. There is also a local connection as Oleg Poupko, a cameraman from St Petersburg long based in Hastings, was first assistant camera on the tour. Simon Charterton regresses to his Progressive Rock past…

Floyd’s Roger Waters

I used to really like Pink Floyd. My dad took me to see them at the Finsbury Park Rainbow in 1972 debuting a lengthy piece called Eclipse. I saw them again a few years later at Earl’s Court when that piece had become known as Dark Side of the Moon. I gave up on them during the punk rock wars but was grudgingly impressed when they reinvented their sound with their big quasi-disco hit single Another Brick in the Wall. To me, the main man in the post Syd Barrett years was David Gilmour with his fluid, ever tasteful selection of guitar notes from the blues palette. But it was without doubt his sparring partner Roger Waters who was in charge and kept the group going after the departure of Syd, the original Crazy Diamond, in 1968.

The band always had a strong connection with film. They recorded soundtracks to Barbet Schroeder’s ‘More’ and ‘La Vallee (Obscured by Clouds)’ – two of their finest pre Dark Side Of The Moon albums. They also had a re-working of Careful with that Axe Eugene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s ‘Zabriskie Point’. Their own classic ‘Live at Pompeii’ must rank among the best rock performance movies of all time, particularly for anyone ‘experimenting’. More obscurely there is Peter Sykes’ 1968 black and white effort ‘The Committee’ and, in contrast, Alan Parker’s 1982 blockbusting original film of The Wall, with Gerald Scarfe’s animated marching hammers, Bob Geldof’s disappearing eyebrows and all that.

Then there are the more esoteric links. The unfounded rumours that they were commissioned to write a soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’, backed up by the fact that Echoes fits very snuggly as an alternative soundtrack to the psychedelic Stargate sequence towards the end of the film. And, talking of space, there is the never officially released piece called ‘Moonhead’ written for the BBC’s coverage of Man’s landing on the moon in 1969, recorded to fill in time when nothing much was happening. A bit like the late December lull before New Year.

Perhaps the best film to fully sync with Pink Floyd music is David Elfick’s 1973 surf film ‘Crystal Voyager’ where the entirety of Echoes is used to soundtrack stunning slow motion footage from the inside of waves. This movie, on a double bill with Rene Laloux’s trippy animated ‘Fantastic Planet’ was a staple of late night cinema in the mid 70s and extremely popular with those still not tired of ‘experimenting’ with the Floyd.

I for one would welcome a complete season of Pink Floyd related films at one of our local art house cinemas. Until then, we have Roger Waters’ ‘The Wall’.

Roger Waters’ The Wall is on at Kino-Teatr on Saturday 2 January at 3pm, Wednesday 6 January at 3pm and Thursday 7 January at 7.30pm

For booking and more information, visit the Kino-Teatr website.

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