Roger Waters 'Us+Them' Tour 2018 - EUROPA / DEUTSCHLAND / SÜDAMERIKA

Bald geht muss Waters seinen Urlaub beenden - dann geht es mit Australien und Neuseeland weiter. Sein Facebook-Account pushed schon:

"Australia and New Zealand! Looking forward to seeing you soon! All dates at rogerwaters.com - Photo: Kate Izor"

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Recht netter Bericht über Rogers aktuellem Soundtüftler:

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Jon Lemon: Adelaide’s Minister of Sound - Part 1
In April last year [2017], Jon Lemon arrived in Port Willunga after a short tour in Los Angeles and London with the glamorous Lana Del Rey. He was up early next morning, jet-lagged, and heard his phone ringing in another room. It was Shaun Clair whose family owns one of the biggest sound companies in the world, Clair Global. He told Lemon the sound engineer on the massive Roger Waters Us + Them tour, Trip Khalaf, was trying to get in touch. Lemon was a friend of Khalaf who had mixed all the big names including Michael Jackson and Madonna. He also knew that Khalaf had just started a world tour with former Pink Floyd bass player and vocalist Roger Waters, now one of the top touring solo stadium acts in the world and due to perform in Adelaide on February 16. Curious, Lemon rang Khalaf straight away. “He’s said, ‘I’m quitting Roger Waters. We did the first show yesterday and I want to retire. I shouldn’t have started!’” After decades at the top, he could not face another world tour that was already shaping up to be two years long, possibly more. What he needed was someone whose work he trusted enough to hand over to. Lemon already knew Waters and others on the tour from mixing sound at the Pink Floyd reunion concert in 2005 at London Live 8, in Hyde Park, the only time the band got back together. And he knew Waters well enough to have been asked to his house. “(Khalaf) said ‘when can you get on a plane?’ and I said ‘not today, I’ve got to do laundry’,” says Lemon who lives in Port Willunga with his wife Jane. During down time he is a part of the coastal community near McLaren Vale that includes playwright Andrew Bovell and his wife, actress Eugenia Fragos, Jay Weatherill’s disruption guru Tom Hadju, and TV actor Erik Thomson. He loves the area so much he lends his considerable expertise to making sure the Fleurieu Film Festival, now in its third year, is as slick as can be. In the lead-up to this year’s festival of short films set in the picturesque Serafino Winery, Lemon has locked in the layout and requirements even though he will be away on tour. Within 15 minutes of his call the production manager was on the phone making flight arrangements. He left the following day and 30 hours later was in an arena in Denver, watching the Roger Waters show. It was the start of probably the most enjoyable and stressful weeks of his life, says Lemon, who has been legally blind since the onset of Stargardt disease in his mid-teens, a rare form of macular degeneration that has destroyed his central vision. Lemon was so jet-lagged he barely remembers the first Denver show. On the second night, he began making notes and from there flew to San Francisco where the band had a few days off. “That week I sat in my hotel room for four days solid, just listening to all the multi tracks, making notes,” Lemon said. “I know the music so that helped but, I mean, there’s 10 people on stage so it’s a lot to learn.” He went to the next show in San Jose and told Khalaf he would mix at his side in San Francisco. When the first song started, Lemon thought he may just as well just do it. “It’s such a massive set up, mixers everywhere,” Lemon said. “It’s been good, it’s been the best tour of my life, to be honest with you.” Lemon says the atmosphere on every tour starts at the top and Waters is an exceptional boss, a workaholic, and a generous leader who expects everyone to be as driven as he is. Lemon travels with Waters on his private 737 and there is food and wine on tap. At every hotel Waters keeps a bar and restaurant open – it’s called The Golden Trough in honour of Pink Floyd’s obsession with pigs – which creates a sense of togetherness and generosity. Not all tours are like it. Lemon says he stepped away from a Motley Crue tour because he couldn’t stand their culture and lack of musicianship. At the end of the first leg of the Waters tour, Lemon took him aside and said he wanted to convert the entire sound system to the equipment he preferred to work with. Waters had enough faith in him to agree so Lemon flew to Clair Global in Pennsylvania, home of the most advanced rehearsal space in the world, and redid everything. While the others took a break, he spent seven days working out a new system then went back on tour for a series of concerts in the New York area, including two in Brooklyn and two at Madison Square Gardens. “By the second show it had all locked together and everyone was knocked out, including myself,” said Lemon. Home again in November where he and wife Jane are renovating their Port Willunga home to include an outdoor kitchen, Lemon says his move there three years ago has not been quite the semi-retirement they planned. Then, the music scene had taken a dip and he thought he might pick up studio work in Australia and tour overseas for a third or even half the year. The first year home, work he thought he had fell through. Then it all seemed to change. Part of it was due to Sia, whose career hit the stratosphere after she stopped writing for others and in 2015 put out the belter hit, Chandelier. They are close friends and music colleagues, and it was Sia who’d reintroduced him to Port Willunga, in 2003. She was spending Christmas there and suggested he and Jane rent a place. They kept coming back. Lemon hasn’t lived in Australia since the early 1980s but he grew up in Mitcham and left soon after finishing school when he was rocked by the news he would be profoundly blind by the age of 21. “It was like, OK, I’m going to live a fast life here so I went to Queensland,” says Lemon who had always worked around bands, mixing sound or being a roadie. In Queensland he mixed in pubs and went on tour with John Paul Young then came back to Adelaide and met Jane whose brother, JJ Hackett, was in a local band, Rum Jungle, which included on vocals and lead guitar Sia’s father Phil Colson. When they opened for up-and-coming modern rockers Sports, Lemon was asked to mix for them, which led to work with New Zealand new wave band MiSex, rocker Billy Thorpe and Australian Crawl, to name a few. ...

Jon Lemon: Adelaide’s Minister of Sound - Part 2
Lemon’s sound engineering skills are self-taught. He is sight-impaired but his familiarity with sound equipment has grown with the industry as it moved from single column to multiple boxes, digital control and computer design. “I’ve just followed it and been on the end of a lot of designs, it’s been incremental,” he said. “It gives you a deeper understanding and that’s how you end up at this high level, because of your experience and your ability to put together giant systems for the right occasion.”
In the early 1980s he and Jane moved to London to tour with guitarist John Williams and Sky, and he had set up work there with Australian Crawl. Then their guitar player, Guy McDonough, died of an overdose and the tour was off. He worked with Shirley Bassey, Shakin’ Stevens, then got lucky with a band that was big in Europe, Level 42, which did 24 nights at London’s Wembley Arena. “They were an audiophile’s band, jazz-rock poppy stuff,” says Lemon. “That’s really when my reputation started to solidify and from there I rocketed into different bands – Pet Shop Boys, Sinead O’Connor at her peak, The Cure, Depeche Mode, I forget now, too many!” In the mid ’90s he and Jane left for the west coast of Ireland. As Lemon tells it, Depeche Mode were on a tax year out of England. While the band spent their year on tropical islands, he and Jane lived on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in Connemara where they bought a place with water frontage on to the bay with the mountains behind. While Lemon toured with INXS (while Hutchence was still alive) and Bryan Ferry, Jane, a formidable baker and dessert maker, opened a cafe. So why would you ever leave? “Because you can’t live in the country forever,” he says. “We were there for 14 years and Jane got well known for her baking skills.” After selling the business they sold the house in 2008 and moved to Chicago but after five years were beaten down by the cold. They were toying with Napa Valley, where they had friends, and then thought, three decades after leaving, what about Australia? “Jane has been following me around the planet for over 34 years or something, so why not?” he says. “It’s only a 14-hour flight, on paper, to the States.” From his Port Willunga base he had a call in 2014 inviting him on tour with American singer-songwriter Ray LaMontagne who knew him from work he did with John Mayer. At that level, it’s a small world where everyone knows of each other. Lemon is happy mixing his international connections with the pleasures of living in a small local community. In the early days at Port Willunga he got involved with a fund raiser to help pay for a double transplant for young Flynn O’Malley through an event at Penny’s Hill Winery, which raised about $50,000. “I ran it as if it was a proper show and we had a couple of good bands,” says Lemon. “It was a really interesting community effort and it was pretty slick, a great night.” It did not go unnoticed by Alison Alcock who in 2015 was planning her first Fleurieu Film Festival of short films that were reflective of an elemental theme like drought, or water, or this year’s fire. Lemon agreed to help stage it so it was professionally run and wasn’t just “a crappy blow-up screen”. The Festival has taken root and the third will have more of a festival feel with food trucks and celebrations. Lemon will plan what he can even though he will be away on the Waters tour. After returning from Sia’s Australian concerts late last year he laid out the venue at Serafino’s then handed over to a tech friend from the company Novatech. He was also inducted into the Adelaide Music Collective Hall of Fame in mid-December. He is looking forward to showing how massive the Waters show is with its Pink Floyd currents, anti-Trump protests and an arena lit up with an hallucinogenic array of acid colours – an “interstellar experience that will crash your Snapchats, your Instagrams, your Facebooks”, as one reviewer wrote. “People in Australia don’t realise how big Roger is,” says Lemon. “He would be classed as one of the four big tourers along with The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney. It’s that kind of vibe.” The tour is so big Lemon is in the throes of planning the sound system for the South American leg, which is not until the second half of 2018. They will be there for about three months in a country obsessed with music, performing at stadiums so massive they require a complete rethink of the sound. Instead of 80 speaker cabinets there will be about 240 . “It’s at the bleeding cutting edge of stuff, which is where I like being,” he says. “There will be some new bits and pieces for the surround speakers and they are being made now.” Now he is working with crew who are often 25 or 35 years his junior, Lemon is experiencing a new acceptance of his disability. He was aware that in the past people would refuse to hire him because they could not cope working with a blind man. “How can he do the job? He’s blind!,” Lemon says. “I got that a lot, all people with disabilities do.” But young people are more accepting and helpful. He noticed it on Sia’s tour, when people would see him walking by and offer to help him with directions. “That is intriguing to me,” he says. “There is a cultural change in the way young people treat disability and it’s really good.” Lemon is not sure if his sight impairment contributed in some way through neural rewiring to making him more sensitive and attuned to sound. He says it annoys Jane that he can be having a conversation with one person while listening and following another complete conversation elsewhere. He has his eyes and ears checked every year and his hearing is a good 10 per cent above average. “Clearly, I’ve thought about it, and I know I’ve got well above average hearing,” he says. “That’s two-pronged, because as someone who is legally blind, you tend to use your ears more anyway – and in my work I use my ears. That’s what I do. I listen for a living.”

Auf Facebook, Instagram und Twitter wird Stimmung für die Tour in NZ und Australien gemacht:

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Am 24. Januar in Auckland, Neuseeland:

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Dieses Mal gar nicht! Ich bin im letzten Jahr privat 1 x nach Kanada, 1 x nach London und 3 x in die USA geflogen und daher schon genug "CO2-Belastung" auf meinem persönlichen Umweltkonto. Und er kommt ja schon bald nach Deutschland...
Halte ich für eher unwahrscheinlich:
Die Show hat sich eigentlich kaum verändert - lediglich bei den Zugaben hat Waters mal das ein oder andere ausgetauscht.

Übrigens: Es gibt ja auch bei der aktuellen Show ein "verbindendes Element": Die Drohne/Orb, die während der ganzen Show immer mal wieder virtuell auf dem Screen auftaucht und zum Schluß auch körperlich durch die Halle schwebt. Sowas müsste man ja alles anpassen... Auszuschließen ist das zwar nicht, aber gerade 'Shine On' verknüpfen wohl die meisten Fans eher mit David..., eine solche Änderung könnte ich Roger gar nicht raten...