(Credits: Far Out / digboston)
Mon 22 December 2025 14:00, UK
Anyone who has been in the game as long as Roger Waters has to wonder how long they can keep up their track record.
Rock and roll might be considered a young man’s game half the time, but the greatest artists of them all usually know how to take the basis of rock and roll and transcend what the genre was supposed to be when they make a record. And while Waters does know his limitations better than most, he felt that the biggest names in the industry have staying power far beyond his range.
Then again, you have to remember all the moving parts of the live show that Waters practically trademarked. Pink Floyd wasn’t the first band to use amazing light shows, but whereas they sounded like the archetypal psychedelic outfit when they first began making waves, Waters was determined to move past the more acid-soaked material once they started making more extravagant pieces like on ‘Echoes’.
But those same extravagant pieces are the reason why the band needed to go the extra mile. David Gilmour may have been perfectly happy playing the same kind of music every single time he got up onstage, but Waters knew the audience didn’t have time to be bored in the middle of a stadium show. They needed to get their money’s worth, and so began some of the greatest stage designs that anyone had ever seen when making The Wall.
While the record was always designed to be part of a massive stage production, Waters wanted to go the extra mile once he left the band. Getting Waters to put those massive bricks up during his Berlin performance was already a spectacle to behold, but while a lot of his later touring days saw him reinterpreting songs from his solo career, he knew that part of the magic was getting to see the final bricks laid out in the first act and hearing everyone scream ‘TEAR DOWN THE WALL’ during the grand finale.
That’s all well and good, but that’s not the kind of production that rock and roll was built for, either. The biggest names of the early days were more interested in entertaining an audience purely through their music, and while there were more extravagant characters like Little Richard and Chuck Berry strutting their stuff whenever they performed, Waters had a great deal of respect for people like BB King being able to level an audience through the power of their music.
Compared to the cumbersome process of getting The Wall’s show together, Waters felt that people like King and the other blues legends could manage to go on until the end of time if they wanted to, saying, “Some people go out on tour until they die. Muddy Waters or BB King or some of those old blues players, they can just set up a chair and play and that’s all they need to do. I feel that my shows have to be a bit more physical. That might be harder to keep going.”
It might look like they’re doing nothing in comparison, but the fact is that most of King’s solos didn’t need to have a lot of adornment around them. He played some of the slowest licks that anyone had ever heard, and even when playing against a legend like Eric Clapton, a single guitar bend would have said a lot more than 20 to 50 notes would for any other rock and roll guitarist.
So while Waters can spend his entire life trying to make the rock and roll equivalent of a Broadway show whenever he’s onstage, it’s not all about keeping the audience’s attention that much. What King and Waters did might look boring, but they weren’t there to play for the masses. They knew what they were about, and no matter what city they went to, they were on the lookout for those who were willing to listen.
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