Roger Waters Outspoken rocker readies album, tour

By Sandy Cohen

AP Entertainment Writer

Fresh off his politically charged performance at the Desert Trip music festival in California, Roger Waters says he’ll launch a 51-city North American tour next year that will include Nationwide Arena in Columbus on July 20 and PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh on Sept. 19.

The Pink Floyd co-founder said he started work Wednesday on a new multimedia show called “Us + Them” that will include new music from an album he’s set to finish next month.

The 73-year-old singer-songwriter dazzled audiences with his Oct. 9 Desert Trip show that featured custom animation on a 240-foot-long digital screen and a quadrophonic audio system built for the event.

Waters says “Us + Them” will be “a story that’s about whether love trumps everything.”

“It’ll be more about love,” he told The Associated Press. “Because my new record, it’s got the first love songs I’ve ever written, I think, on it.”

Still, Waters says he can’t help but be political because of his parents. He said his mother was a communist and humanitarian and his father was a war objector until joining the fight against Hitler in 1941. He was killed in 1944.

“For a son, that’s a powerful story,” Waters said. “I think it would be very hard for a man like me with parents like that not to have the courage to stand up and say what’s right.”

Waters has drawn ire for his support of the Palestinian-led BDS movement, which calls for boycotts and sanctions against Israel. He raised his position at his show last week and plans to mention it again when Desert Trip repeats this weekend.

He asserts, however, that he’s “in no way anti-Semitic, and I never have been and I never will be.”

Soft-spoken throughout most of this interview, Waters becomes more vocal and animated when he talks politics and other issues, including Black Lives Matter, which he addressed in his Desert Trip show.

He also rails against the military-industrial complex and the banks, which he called “high rollers in a game of chance.”

All of these concepts could be incorporated as visual and sonic elements in his new show. He’ll collaborate with the same artists as for the Desert Trip shows. Audiences can expect a multimedia experience with quadraphonic sound, and he may use the massive video screen from Desert Trip.

“If I can afford to take that theater to stadiums around the world, I probably would, but we will see it in a much more developed theatrical context,” he said, supporting “however I tell the story about our need to love one another across international borders and across any argument that there might be.”