Roger Waters has just concluded the European leg of his Us + Them tour which featured music from the Pink Floyd albums Meddle, The Dark Side of The Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall in addition to songs from Waters’s solo albums Amused to Death and his most recent release Is This The Life We Really Want?. But in addition to playing over two hours of music throughout his tour, Waters has also challenged his always politically and philosophically charged lyrics to create a multimedia spectacular that is not only artistically valid but deeply evocative in terms of forcing audiences members to consider their own political views.
Throughout his tour Waters has criticised western military intervention in the Middle East including in Syria while he has publicly slammed the western backed White Hemlets organisation operating in Syria as fraudulent. More recently, Waters has offered support for the self-determination of the Crimean people who in 2014 voted in a referendum to reunite with the rest of the Russian Federation. This earned Waters a place on the infamous pro-Kiev regime website Mirotvorets which blacklists those who speak out against the regime’s repressive and regressive policies.
In spite of this, days after his blacklisting by the far-right website, Roger Waters stood on stage in Moscow and gave a lengthy speech prior to performing two encores. During his speech, Roger Waters reiterated his support for the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) which calls for an artistic, athletic, academic and business boycott of Israel until Palestine’s statehood is peacefully restored. It was announced just prior to Waters going on stage that the American pop singer Lana Del Rey had decided to cancel her scheduled performance in Tel Aviv after BDS communicate their desire that she do so.
Waters was informed about Del Rey’s cancellation during the interval at his Moscow performance and subsequently told his Moscow audiences that this was a significant victory for BDS. Then Waters spoke of the importance of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was adopted in Paris in the year 1948.
The Pink Floyd co-founder remarked that in the Declaration, the right to national self-determination of all people is guaranteed. He stated that this applies to the Russians of Crimea as much as anywhere else. His remark was met with loud applause from the audience.
Roger Waters’s entire closing speech from his Moscow performance can be viewed below:
