Roger Waters’ pioneering Us + Them Tour will come the UK next summer. Waters is set to play in Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham with his critically acclaimed show in summer 2018. In addition the rock icon is set to play London’s British Summer Time at Hyde Park on 6th July; the first headliner to be announced for the series of central London shows.
Currently touring the United States, Us + Them has received rave reviews for a spectacular setlist and the “eye-popping” production.
The show will feature tracks from Pink Floyd’s greatest albums The Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall, Animals, Wish You Were Here and more, plus new songs from his latest best-selling album Is This the Life We Really Want?.
Waters’ first solo album in 25 years, Is This The Life We Really Want? is a full-on political rock album. The former Pink Floyd member recorded the 12-track album with the help of Radiohead-producer Nigel Godrich.
Us + Them marks Roger Waters’ first return to the UK since his sold-out world tour The Wall Live in 2010-2013, which was seen by more than four million fans globally.
The album will come out as a 180-gram vinyl LP, on CD and digitally and is available for pre-order beginning Friday.
In addition to Waters, who sings, plays bass and acoustic guitar on the album, the musicians include Godrich (arrangement, sound collages, keyboards, guitar), Gus Seyffert (bass, guitar, keyboards), Jonathan Wilson (guitar, keyboards), Joey Waronker (drums), Roger Mannning (keyboards), Lee Pardini (keyboards) and Lucius (vocals) with Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig.
At the moment Waters has been tight-lipped about the album’s contents, In February he said that he has drawn inspiration from the antipathy he feels toward the Trump administration, as well as a dramatic radio play he had been writing before working on the LP about a man and his granddaughter investigating why children were being killed in faraway lands. “Two or three of the songs from that idea are on this album,” he said. “Nigel Godrich persuaded me that for the purposes of a rock & roll record, which is what this is, he felt my theatrical idea – I’d written the whole thing as a radio play was less than ideal.”
They reworked some of Waters’ ideas, though the singer-songwriter also looked outward for inspiration. The Is This the Lifetune “Wait for Her” was inspired by an English translation of “Lesson From the Kama Sutra (Wait for Her)” by the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
The album will come out shortly into Waters’ upcoming Us and Them Tour , which kicks off May 26th in Kansas City, Missouri. Gigs at arenas around the U.S. and Canada run through October 28th, when the tour wraps in Vancouver.
The tour’s concept will be built around his album title. “I will be making the point that we’re living the life that we don’t really want to live,” he said. But it also ties into the tour moniker, which comes from the Dark Side of the Moontrack of the same name. “I like to think that people would still like to live in a world where we might address the problems of climate change, where we might understand that if we empathize with others, it makes us feel happier,” he said. “Maybe we should start looking at happiness indexes rather than if we win and lose. And if we do that, then we may start to understand that the idea of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is actually an illusion.”
Is This The Life We Really Want?
Track List
1. “When We Were Young”2. “Déjà Vu”
3. “The Last Refugee”
4. “Picture That”
5. “Broken Bones”
6. “Is This the Life We Really Want?”
7. “Bird in a Gale”
8. “The Most Beautiful Girl”
9. “Smell the Roses”
10. “Wait for Her”
11. “Oceans Apart”
12. “Part of Me Died”
The Fat Angel Sings 