May 4, 1999 WATERS BEGINS MEDIA APPEARANCES Roger Waters has begun granting interviews regarding his coming tour. Several radio interviews have already been taped recently for broadcast in the near future, and other interviews are scheduled. On Wednesday, 14 April Waters held a conference call telephone interview with five radio disk jockeys. Among the deejays who spoke with Waters was Rick Deyulio, who supplied internet fans with a partial transcript. "It's just a question of whittling it down," Waters replied to questions about which songs he will perform. "I'll be doing stuff from the last 30 years of my writing.... 'The Wall,' I could easily play the whole thing, but that's two hours! So I can't do the whole thing. I playy a few songs from that and a few here and there... I wouldn't want to come on and play two hours of just all the tunes that people recognize because that might not create the kind of atmosphere that I'd like to create." Speaking by telephone from Barbados where he is rehearsing for the tour, Waters also mentioned that he doesn't plan to play any songs from Pink Floyd's first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and that he will only be performing songs that he wrote himself. "I'd like to do so much from [Amused to Death]. I was listening to it and thought, 'Well, I gotta do 'What God Wants' and I *have* to do 'Perfect Sense' and I really want to do 'Late Home Tonight,' and I must do 'Bravery of Being Out of Range.'" Roger laughed, and continued, "And I can't not do 'It's A Miracle', and I really want to do 'Amused to Death.' But obviously I can't do it all. I mean, that record was 72 minutes long. But I will definitely be doing 'What God Wants' and a couple of other tunes from that album." "I'm toying with the idea of doing one new song," Waters revealed. "I haven't decided yet whether to do it or not. I'm gonna try it out it rehearsal and see how it feels." Waters said that he has several new pieces of rock music ready to record. The new music will be recorded when he can get some studio time. And what will the stage for the 1999 tour look like? "Well, the plan is to cover... the background of the stage with a reflective gauze," Waters said, "so that there isn't a screen and everything is a screen, you see what I mean?.... "You'll definitely see the pig, whether it'll be there in all its glory or just pictures of it... I'm trying to work a lot with projections. I'm using quad sound, which I always have done, but I'm working with still projections. I'm gonna work with Panni-Projectors which I used a bit in Berlin [The Wall performance of 1990]. They're these very powerful projectors that you can light up the sides of skyscrapers with, and we'll be using them indoors, so it should be quite bright. "I'm not carrying a circular screen or anything like that... I don't want to use stage lighting, or very little. I've very much gone off the idea of lots of lights going on and off on stage. So many rock 'n' roll shows, there's Vari-Lites whizzing around and all kinds of flickering going on all the time, and I personally find that rather irritating. So I'm gonna use projections and spotlights and that's it, and the rest will be imagination and a few sound effects." One of the questions many people have wondered is why Waters is touring when there is no new album to promote. "Well, I did a show in '92 with Don Henley for charity, for his Walden Woods Project, and John Fogerty did some, Neil Young did some tunes, I did some tunes and Don did some tunes, and it was a great evening.... And I just used Don's band. I rehearsed with them for a couple of afternoons. We did four or five numbers, and I *loved* it. The audience were great. I thought there was a great vibe coming back from them.... And so from that moment on, I thought, 'Well I've got to do some more of this.' And this year I developed plans with my family to spend the whole summer on the East Coast, in Long Island, in fact. And I thought, well, maybe now's the time to do it. I called up Frank Barsalona in Premiere and Barbara and said, 'What do you think?' and 'Would this make sense if I put a band together and did maybe 20 shows just on the East coast, all within reasonable striking distance of where I'm staying?' "So I called a few promoters, and I got a very positive response. So I said, 'Okay, let's do it.' And, if it's successful, next year I might do the South and, maybe, the West coast, because I always love playing in the South too, you know? There's some great music towns down there like Austin and Phoenix. And I'd love to play the West coast. So if this works out, I might do some more next year." Waters also spoke about the special new DVD edition of 'The Wall' film. "I actually sat in a hotel room with [British political cartoonist and animator for 'The Wall'] Gerald Scarfe and we watched it together and we did a kind of commentary on it, so that will be on the DVD." Another addition to 'The Wall' will be the inclusion of footage filmed for 'The Wall' but left on the cutting room floor. The scenes known as Reel 7, which were to accompany the song 'Hey You', will appear at the end of the DVD version of 'The Wall'. "They were asking me if I could think of anything extra that we could put on, and I remembered that right at the end of making the movie, almost the last conversation that Alan Parker and I have had, we were talking about it and I said, 'I don't think reel seven works and we should remove it.' And he said, 'Okay.' And that was 'Hey You.' So that was never in the movie. And what we're going to do is tack it onto the end, and anybody who buys the movie this time will get 'Hey You.' "Nothing was thrown away.... James Guthrie, the engineer on 'The Wall' and who did the soundtrack of the movie as well, is putting the sound together for the DVD.... It was with him I had the conversation, I said, 'What about reel seven?' And he went, 'What a great idea. I'm gonna go and look for it.' And he went to Pinewood, and there it was!" Waters was asked whether he had a millennium concert in mind. "...I had thought that I might like to try and do 'The Wall' again in the year 2000, having done it in 1980 and 1990 and, to which end, I was tenatively looking at trying to do it in New York. But it was just too difficult to get it together because I wanted to do it on Wall Street. I thought that would be funny. But it meant closing Wall Street for about a week, and I don't think that the locals thought that was a particularly good idea. "But having said that, in Hamburg in Germany... there's some people there who are building an electronic wall, which is 400 meters long and I think, 12 meters high or 18 meters high. It's an enormous thing. It's made up of screens, and it will be run from software through hard drives. And as of now, I don't think they have anything for it. So, a friend of mine--in fact, Jonathon Park, who is part of Fisher/Park and who has work on my shows over the years--is very involved in building this thing with them. They're very interested in me doing a kind of virtual Wall performance and storing it on hard drive. And so that could easily be a performance that could happen in the year 2000, which would be great, particularly for me, because I would be able to watch it for a change! It would be stored on a hard drive, so I could go stand and watch it with Mike!" Waters also discussed his forthcoming opera, "Ca Ira." The piece is almost completed. Two choruses are to be overdubbed in June, one in French, the other in English. The opera will be released early in 2000. The two-and-a-half hour opera will be performed live. Waters mentioned that he still receives news of former bandmate Roger 'Syd' Barrett from Waters' mother who still lives in Cambridge. "He leads a reasonably quiet existence. You know, he gets his royalty checks coming through, he has very, I think, simple needs. He's still, I think, in and out of the local hospital. Mostly out. But he is, quite seriously and severely schizophrenic.... I have no contact with him, except, of course, that I remember Syd with great fondness, and it was very difficult for us when he became ill. And I wouldn't be surprised if there's a bit of a tear in the eye when I'm performing 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond' or 'Wish You Were Here,' which are kind of songs for Syd that I wrote in the aftermath of his becoming ill." Advertisments for dates on the Waters tour have been spotted in several music publications, including the April 28-May 4 edition of "The Aquarian", a music newspaper available at Tower Records.