Former Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters could be set for an historic show in Israel, after speaking out against the wall in the West Bank.
Roger Waters was a founder member of Pink Floyd, with his school friend Syd Barrett. Becoming psychedelic heroes, Waters was forced to come to the fore after witnessing Barrett’s sad mental decline.
With Waters at the helm Pink Floyd would re-group and become one of the biggest bands on the planet. Their 1978 concept album ‘The Wall’ spawned a massive stage show, which culminated in the demolition of a massive wall onstage.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990 Waters played an emotional show at the site of the barrier, which became a monument to the bitter relations between the Communist bloc and the Capitalist West.
Of course, Waters wasn’t the first artist to play at the site of the Berlin Wall. As every music fan knows, David Hasselhoff, delighted his German fanbase with an impromptu set on to of the barrier.
During a recent visit to Israel Waters spoke out against the wall on the West Bank, which aims to prevent terrorism but some argue actually harms Palestinian settlements. “This is a bad thing. This is wrong. This is not helping anybody, this thing,” Waters said of the wall, which stretches for roughly 420 miles, and is eight metres high in some places.
“If they take this thing down,” he continued to Associated Press, “I would be delighted to come and do a concert here. In fact, I would insist on it.”
Pink Floyd last performed together for a set at the enormous Live8 event, but with the death of keyboard player Dave Mason it seems as if the band will never reform again.
Continuing, Roger Waters insisted that he was disappointed in the political situation in the Middle East, arguing that things have actually deteriorated.
“It’s actually very, pretty depressing, coming back here three years later and seeing that the political situation has changed very little – there are more settlements, there has been more grabbing of land,” he said.
BBC 6Music reports that Waters said “When you stand in front of an edifice like this, whether it’s here or outside a township in South Africa, or in the Warsaw ghetto during the Second World War or in Berlin in the 60s and 70s, there’s something you know instinctively, this is wrong.”