Roger Waters world tour

– by
INTERRUPTIONS  are taking  me away from football this week
On Wednesday, after a call from my friend Chris at 8.42 a.m, we went out to Bray film studios, near Windsor.
Sunny afternoon, lovely part of the country, all very English, very hip, very laidback. Stop at the gate at 12.50pm, have three names ticked off, drive in, get out, go into an aircraft hangar where about 150 chairs are set up in front of two drum kits and a lot of equipment.
The group have been here for three weeks and  now  friends  & family will  see the dress rehearsal.
We sit in the front row and Roger Waters comes on at 1p.m. and plays his Dark Side of the Moon world tour show.
An eight-piece rock band, plus three backing singers, films, graphics, psychedelic light show, lyrics of a new song projected above the stage, quadraphonic sound effects.
We are sitting in front of guitarists Snowy White and Dave Kilminster, who are thirty feet away.
In the intermission, at 2.25, I talk to a guy behind the mixing desk.
“When does the tour start?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Where are you tomorrow?”
“Lisbon.”
Chris has vacated his seat for the second half, so a blond youth of 23 asks if he can sit next to me. He is promoting the group’s show in Iceland on June 12.
They play Dark Side of the Moon with Nick Mason on drums and  at 3.50 p.m. Roger says, “Thanks for coming. It was important for us to play for an audience  before we get on a plane to Lisbon and do it for real.”
On Thursday we discover that Nick Mason then drove to the Royal Albert Hall and played with Dave Gilmour and Rick Wright ! The other Pink Floyd.
It’s not  Nick’s fault that Roger and Dave don’t speak. But Nick is not touring.
On Roger’s website I see that the Lisbon gig – Rock  In Rio Festival  comes to Portugal – is tonight, Friday.
My pal Chris is a builder/soundman who was once a singer in a rock band. They used to play Another Brick In The Wall and Chris admits that for years he used to sing “dark star chasm.”
The proper lyric is : “We don’t need no education / We don’t need no thought control / No dark sarcasm in the classroom / Teachers leave them kids alone.”
THURSDAY AFTERNOON, a call from Anna, an artist friend. “We’ve got two spare tickets for the Cottesloe Theatre tonight, two one-hour plays about young people, do you and Jan fancy it?”
In the foyer we meet Anna and Neela, her daughter, who has come down from Oxford for the night.
First play is OK and a line in it triggers an idea for a World Cup article. I’m a disgrace, I can’t stop thinking about football, even here at the National Theatre. I remember Don Howe once saying he went to a film and sat there thinking about tactics.
Second play, Citizenship, is hilarious and one scene between a teacher and a 16-year old boy has the audience shrieking with laughter. It’s half-term and half the audience are teachers, I think.
I DON’T MIND a few  nice interruptions before a  World Cup.
29 Feb 2008 : an overdue PS to the above :
An American girl wrote to me saying : Why didn’t you say what the Roger Waters show was like?
Well, it was a private dress rehearsal. I didn’t really think it was right to intrude, let alone describe the music. It was just an invitation that came up, came out of the blue, and I accepted it. No journalist should have been there.
Roger is a very smart guy and I did wonder, when he saw me in a corridor  before the show, whether he recognised me.
That was highly unlikely, since he has met thousands of people since he met me once in 1973. It was highly unlikely – but not inconceivable.
We had met at Brittania Row, their studio, when I dropped in to collect a cassette from Brian Humphries, their engineer-studio manager.The group was recording what became Animals.
I wasn’t a Pink Floyd fan but I stayed there for a quite a while, watching them work.
I never wrote about that day. I knew Dave and Rick, two lovely guys, and I’d met Nick Mason once, I think. But I’d never met Roger. I knew Brian Humphries  very well because he’d been Traffic’s engineer and worked at Island from the start.