Roger Waters’ Us + Them trek was a blockbuster tour de force that visited several countries over the course of two years. He played dozens of Pink Floyd hits, bisected audiences with a replica of the Battersea Power Station on the cover of Animals and wowed them with lasers and a drone-operated moon that was all dark side. Now he’s planning on bringing the production to cinemas with a new concert film, also titled Us + Them. It will get special screenings in movie theaters around the world on October 2nd and 6th. Tickets will go on sale on July 17th.
Waters’ longtime videographer Sean Evans co-directed the picture with Waters at the tour’s four-night stop in Amsterdam last year. Evans and Waters previously co-directed a 2014 concert film of Waters’ The Wall tour.
Waters explained why he named the tour Us + Them in a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone. “The show takes its title from a song on Dark Side of the Moon, because in that song, there’s a line that goes, ‘With, without/And who will deny that’s what the fighting’s all about?’” he says. “And I’ve realized in the last few years that the interesting thing about that lyric that I wrote in 1973 is that the answer to the question would be, ‘Almost everyone.’ Almost everybody thinks that the fight is about ideology. Everybody will tell you, ‘Well the fighting is all about the Middle East.’ ‘Well, it’s about Muslims starting jihad.’ ‘It’s about terrorism.’ ‘It’s about this or that.’ And no, it’s not. It’s about money.”
Rolling Stone reviewed the tour’s stop at London’s Hyde Park last year, when the musicians played for some 65,000 fans. At the show, he included imagery that emasculated Donald Trump and encouraged the audience to resist everything from Mark Zuckerberg to neo-fascism. “Waters isn’t afraid of hiding his agenda,” Rolling Stone wrote. “Right before the evening’s final song, ‘Comfortably Numb,’ he came out with a Palestinian keffiyeh and put it around his neck. … [He] wore the keffiyeh draped around his neck until the end of the song, and he’d periodically stretch his arms out in a Christ-like pose, a look that was all the more impressive when fireworks exploded from behind the stage for the finale. … If his goal was to create something that felt like more than a rock concert in a park, then Waters is a champion.”