Roger Waters’ The Wall
Birmingham NIA
Concert review by Keith Harrison

You’d better sit down for this: Seventy five quid a ticket, plus another £11 booking fee – and yet this breathtaking show was still underpriced.

Because this wasn’t so much a modern reworking of one of the biggest albums of all time, it was a 90-minute sensory assault.

Click on the image to the right for our concert photo gallery

In the first two songs alone, fireworks had greeted Waters, a  Messerschmitt had ‘flown’ the length of the arena before crashing onto the stage in flames and a 35-foot tall inflatable teacher waved a giant cane at a school choir, each bearing a lettered t-shirt spelling out the words ‘Fear builds walls’.

That was just the start of a spectacular evening of dark imagery and special effects which had audience members nudging each other to point out things happening on and off stage they were in danger of missing.

There was the giant pig floating round the auditorium, the ‘helicopter’, the surround sound wizardry, the fold-out hotel suite and the closing shower of poppies, which on closer inspection turned out to be in the shape of the Shell oil logo, as Waters ramped up the anti-war message for 2011.

And through it all, the Wall itself; 40 foot high and spanning the width of the NIA as black shirted acolytes gradually obscured Waters and his band from view in the first half with huge cardboard bricks.

The giant screen this created was used so effectively with harrowing video and stills that there were times when the 67-year-old himself looked like a long-legged Gerald Scarfe hologram playing a bit part in his own semi-autobiographiocal tale. S

o rich was the imagery that it almost broke the spell when Waters spoke to the audience as himself before diving back into  the troubled world played out on screen before the Wall was spectacularly torn down in the finale.

Stunning doesn’t begin to describe it.

Music photography by Ian Harvey / RocktasticPix