Today's UK newspaper The Independent publishes an interesting interview with Roger Waters. Despite it being three months since the headline-grabbing Pink Floyd reunion at Live 8, it is still an event uppermost in Roger's mind, alongside his recently released opera, Ca Ira.
"It was terrific. It was really good fun and the music sounded great. Dave sang and played beautifully, I managed to croak out my bits all right, we all played in tune, so it was good. I've seen a rough cut of the performance and I'm really happy because the DVD is going to raise tons of money."
Roger talks of how the reunion came about, helped in part by the appearance of Nick Mason at Roger's 2002 Wembley shows, to play "Set The Controls". "Those were good nights," Waters says. "It was sort of a precursor to the rapprochement."
He talks of how rehearsals went, and the decisions made over which songs to sing. Most of all, "it was a great weight off my back to have a rapprochement with the three guys after all the enmity. Constantly, in my work, I am exhorting people to let go of entrenched positions, and that could be seen as hypocritical in view of the fact that, for all those years, I held an entrenched position in terms of the history and the internal politics of Pink Floyd. So to be able to relinquish that enmity was very important to me. If that's the only time we play together for the rest of our lives, I will reap the benefits of those few days for the rest of my life."
He then turns his attention to the opera, and how it came to be. The problems staging an original iteration of it, back in 1989, are mentioned, as is the 2002 premiere of The Overture, which had Etienne Roda-Gil in the audience at the Royal Albert Hall.
He stresses the relevance of Ca Ira: "France in the 1780s is a microcosm of what's going on in the world. At the top, there is a monarch, or somebody very powerful like George Bush or Tony Blair, and a small political hierarchy, and then the rest basically have fuck all, live on a dollar a day. The conditions are ripe for a bloodbath. The only realistic option is to divide the cake differently. After Live8 and the G8 summit, at least people are beginning to make noises about changing the deep imbalance in the world."
The full interview can be read over at The Independent website.
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