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“Us + Them” Tour: Roger Waters, Pink Floyd’s Creative Genuis

By Aaron Tyler on October 13, 2016

The Creative Genius of Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters is coming to a city near you!

It’s Water’s first tour not themed around a specific Pink Floyd album since the early 2000s, and follows a few years on the heels of his three-year Wall trek, which went down as the most successful tour by a solo artist in touring history.

The title of the tour is of course derived from the Dark Side of the Moon track “Us And Them”. Roger Waters promises new material along with Pink Floyd favorites and other artifacts on this tour, plus a “high class, state-of-the-art audio visual production and breathtaking quad sound.”

Tickets for the Roger Waters Us + Them North American Tour go on sale Friday, October 21 at 10AM.

Us + Them is scheduled to begin May 26 in St. Louis and wrap up next Oct. 28 in Vancouver, covering more than 40 dates in 36 cities.

Roger’s Take:

“We are going to take a new show on the road, the content is very secret. It’ll be a mixture of stuff from my long career, stuff from my years with Pink Floyd, some new things. Probably 75% of it will be old material and 25% will be new, but it will be all connected by a general theme. It will be a cool show, I promise you. It’ll be spectacular like all my shows have been.”

“You know, if people are going to come see me in arenas or stadiums from Shreveport, Louisiana to Shanghai, China, and if I want them to listen carefully to what I have to say, and I do, I think it is absolutely essential that I give them a lot of songs that they recognize. And the fact is, because, whether it’s new material or from my solo career – from Amused to Death or Radio KAOS or Pros and Cons (of Hitchhiking) – or whether it’s anything from the records that I did in Pink Floyd, there is a general thread running through it. My basic ethos and philosophy hasn’t changed at all over the years. So it doesn’t matter which bits of my career the songs come from. They’re still me telling my truth.”

“The new show’s going to be called ‘Us + Them’ because it’s really specifically about the line from this 1973 song ‘Us and Them’ that goes ‘With, without/And who’ll deny that’s what the fighting’s all about.’ Because the main message that I have to propagate, if I can, is embodied in the (concept) that the idea of perpetual war, which has been embraced by the neocons particularly in the United States of America, is an entirely wrong way for the human race to live… There’s a different way of organizing the human race that is better than this way. This way is driven by the greed of the few. There is so much money to be made out of killing people, and incarcerating people as well, that it’s a good model for people who are emotionally dead — like Donald Trump, for instance.”

A near-complete list of dates (with shows in San Antonio and Winnipeg set to be announced later) are listed here.