Don’t mention The Wall
Waters’ war-themed lockdown set gets first physical release. By James McNair.
Combat rock: Roger Waters gets conceptually rich on his sixth solo LP.
Roger Waters
★★★
The Lockdown Sessions
SONY MUSIC. CD/LP
ROGER WATERS will be 80 in September, but while other veterans gather dust, Pink Floyd’s irascible agitator is still fired by a key hurt, namely the death of his father Eric, who fell at WW2’s Battle Of Anzio when his son was still an infant. As Waters continues to mass the full Floydian live spectacle to indict and confront, fighting what many deem the good fight across various delicate fronts of global politics, his recent statement that Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine was “illegal but not unprovoked” seemed contrarian and prompted the query: which side are you on? By contrast, another infinitely less serious conflict – the ongoing spat between Waters and his old bandmate David Gilmour – has felt like theatre; handbags at dawn.