(Credits: Far Out / digboston)
Wed 11 February 2026 16:15, UK
Whenever Roger Waters takes the stage, there needs to be something more than playing a greatest-hits set.
There are plenty of opportunities for him to take the cash grab and play the best songs he wrote for Pink Floyd whenever he played live, but there’s a part of anyone’s artistic soul that dies the minute that they start going out on the road only for money. Waters still needed to have something to say beyond putting on a great show, but he also knew when some performances weren’t worth doing again.
That’s half the reason why Pink Floyd didn’t exist with Waters for decades at this point. The Final Cut was where he was finally uninspired enough to leave the band behind, and even if the band wanted to continue without him, the bassist wasn’t going to bother kissing and making up with his old friends if he wasn’t able to express himself the way that he was supposed to. The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking may have been a great idea for a concept album, but considering what had just gone on with The Wall, the band needed a break from the extravagant ideas.
After all, The Wall is responsible for breaking up the classic lineup for good. It’s still a fantastic record, but if one album is responsible for one person wanting to leave, firing a genius like Richard Wright and being too extravagant to properly tour, you’d have to wonder if it was doing more harm than good to the band by the time they got done licking their wounds after the fact.
But just because an album had a messy development didn’t mean it still had good ideas. Waters knew that he needed to keep the basis of the rock opera when he kept the rights to use it, and when he put it on again in 1990, it seemed to have a lot more significance. The Berlin Wall had just come down, so seeing all those musicians come together to celebrate with a production that literally ends with ‘TEAR DOWN THE WALL’ was too perfect not to work.
Waters also wasn’t shy about bringing out the massive stage sets again when he put on the show in the 2010s. Most of us were already blown away that he could pull off such a production at that stage of his career, but the real kicker was seeing David Gilmour up atop the wall to sing his verse in ‘Comfortably Numb’ and play the token solo. These kinds of kind gestures were not going to happen much after Live 8, but Waters admitted that he was ready to fully retire The Wall from the stage.
When asked about putting on the production again during that time, Waters felt like only resolving the issues in Palestine would be enough for him to stack those bricks all over again, saying in 2015, “I’ve stored the hydraulics with Tait Towers, and I did tell everybody that if the US government and the Israeli government ever get round to giving the Palestinians a bit of land to live on and a bit of peace and quiet, I will go back there when that wall has been torn down and put this one up and do a big free gig for everybody. But apart from that, yeah, it’s done.”
Even if we take the political discourse out of it, there’s hardly any reason to think that Waters would be able to deliver the same kind of show that he did back in the day. It would be nice to see him hire a supergroup of different musicians to perform with him, but the thought of him inhabiting the role of the disaffected rock star is bound to be tougher when as the years go by, never mind being able to hit the same notes that he did back in the day.
Then again, there might be some way to spin The Wall into a Broadway show the same way that Green Day and The Who did for their respective rock operas, but who’s to say whether the band members would be able to agree on every detail of the show? Waters might be free to do whatever he wants to with his creation, but it might be a good idea for him to fully retire the show while everyone still has fond memories of it.