Capacity: 20,000
Concert starts: 8pm

Address of venue: Borror Dr, Columbus, OH 43210. MAP

Website: www.schottensteincenter.com

COMMENTS

Roger's tour of The Wall arrives in Ohio, and a venue with the full name of: Value City Arena at The Jerome Schottenstein Center. It is located on the campus of The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. The ticket scan to the right was kindly sent in by Matt Kile, and the concert advert to the right (click thumbnail) comes courtesy of BD's own Elliot Tayman.

The RogerWaters.com presales began starting Wednesday, May 5th. Starting May 3rd, American Express Cardmembers could get advance tickets, with seating available to Gold Card, Platinum Card and Centurion members. US fans could also get early access to tickets via iTunes beginning Thursday, May 6th, by purchasing the 1982 film The Wall from iTunes by April 26th. For both the American Express and iTunes presales, please note that the presale offers were available in select markets and ticket quantities were limited.

General sale tickets went on sale on Monday, May 10, via Ticketmaster.com and LiveNation.com. The public sale also saw a limited number of VIP packages made available for each show on the tour. Use of our links to Ticketmaster gives much needed assistance with site hosting costs without any additional cost to yourself - and we appreciate it!

WARNING - SPOILERS AHEAD!

Do not read on if you don't want surprises to be spoilt, regarding what the band played, and what happened as the night unfolded!

Night twenty-three of the tour, and the sole night in Columbus. The local press were there, of course, and the Columbus Despatch was full of praise for the show. They said: "Waters, with a full backing band, is pulling out all the stops by doing The Wall in its entirety, complete with all the props, puppets, extra film lyrics and Gerald Scarfe animation, including those scary marching hammers. It sounded and looked great. Waters was clearly enjoying himself, especially as real kids mocked a gigantic puppet of a teacher during Another Brick in the Wall."

Big technical issues beset the show around "The Show Must Go On" somewhat ironically, as you'll find out from the reviews we're posting here! A fifteen minute delay to proceedings but Roger kept a cool head throughout!

There's a nice selection of videos from throughout the show on BD visitor Joe's Youtube Channel - check it out, there's some nice HD footage there...

If you went to this show, please let us know what you thought of the event, and if anything interesting or different happened if you've been to previous shows and can compare.

CONCERT REVIEW by BD CONTRIBUTOR, Greg W.

Another amazing show went into the books Friday night, October 22, 2010 at Columbus' Value City Arena at The Jerome Schottenstein Center. Tickets were waiting for us at the will-call window and went to our seats, which were much closer than expected, to watch the performance. Roger seemed very animated & did a jig with a brief twist to it as Columbus exploded inside the Schott. Everything went off without a hitch until the band attempted to reconfigure for "The Show Must Go On". It appeared that Jon Carin's keyboard had given up during the intro to the song...and there was an immediate halt. The crew scrambled out in the lowly lit stage & rushed around to troubleshoot the problem. In the meantime, Roger spoke to the audience and made a remark concerning the "Roger Waters - The Wall Live" white plastic bags that folks had used to carry their purchases around in...and how he was now using them to slip his boots off & on with. A few more minutes of crowd enthusiasm and stage silence gave way to a new keyboard on-stage, a quick connect and the show went on in pristine fashion.

The sound was perfectly sculpted, the puppets properly cued & the graphics/projections were mind numbing. Other than a few overly-enthusiastic stompers bouncing the floorboards in our section combined with others that refused to stay out of the aisles for the benefit of others, I'd say this was the best show I've ever seen...bar none!

The courtesy bus transport to & from our parking lot made the overall experience just a bit better since Columbus was a very busy city that evening. The BlueJackets hockey team were playing at home and the party had already begun for the OSU Buckeyes vs. Purdue college football game the next day. But by far Roger Waters had won over Columbus, Ohio once again in an spectacular show that did go on.

CONCERT REVIEW, VIDEO and PICTURES by BD CONTRIBUTOR, James

The Wall. Full of misogyny, paranoia, darkness, isolation, you name it and if it is a dark emotion it's here. But if people just remember one little thing about Roger Waters' work – his lyrics tell you what NOT to do mostly.

This show even featured an equipment failure. One of Jon Carin’s keyboards had to be replaced just as he was starting into “The Show Must Go On”.

Photos online and video online cannot convey the raw power and tremendous excitement this show generates. This thing is huge. From my seat right on arena centerline 12 rows back, it was perfect to watch the back-activity on the stage that I usually never see. I got to see the performers themselves most of the show. I could also see all the wall projections, but they were huge.

"In The Flesh?" Explosive beginning of "The Wall” - The huge stadium rock band extravaganza, or Roger picking fun at it is more like it. Full of chest-thumping and distance pissing, this beginning piece just detonates on top of you and doesn't let up until the end. The angle I had on the ending plane crash was good; I haven't seen many videos from this angle.

"Goodbye Blue Sky" - the Jewish ADL complained that the dollar signs the bombers were dropping were coming right after Stars of David (BFD) and made a stink. It got changed. The dollar signs are before the Star of David, which has a Shell oil emblem after it now. So the fucking flowers in “Empty Spaces/What Shall We Do Now” are OK? Sure they are. Plus the Scream. These are my favorite “Old-Style” Gerald Scarfe animation done for the original production.

"The Last Few Bricks" - One of the best illusions in this production - the bricks seem to break away and recede into the blackness. Production effects on this were so good it looks like 3D.

Let's discuss The Wall itself. I suppose from some stuff I've seen online the top is about 43' to 45' above the arena floor. Sitting in my seat at Intermission reading the Wall of Remembrance it struck me how truly big this thing is. It's bigger than everything in the ARENA!!!!! It towers over people at least back to my row, because it towered over me. The huge projections tower over you. And with that towering a feeling of dread starts building when the place goes dark for “Hey You”.

End of "Comfortably Numb" – Roger starts breaking down his walls by finding the places on his wall where he to break through, and breaking it into a rainbow of colors and shapes, best suited for old-style Floyd psychedelia. As the colors recede into redness at the end, the building for the next 3 scenes is being erected in the giant black platforms that rise up and reach for the top of the wall. At the end of "Run Like Hell" the scene actually happened as it is shown. Leaked quite a few years ago by the military. Just putting fodder in Roger's hands for more “pointed review”. LOL. And again, the production values here with the wall surface “sweeping” from side to side are like WOW, the next thing would be real 3D.

"Waiting For The Worms" – as an aside, the first time I ever saw "The Wall" movie was at the Mountainlair on the campus of West Virginia University, and when these hammers started marching, I had to leave. Don't know why, (maybe some ingestibles beforehand I think) and now I just couldn't take it. They were battering my brain.

"The Trial" The wall comes down amongst more pyro.

Bravo, Roger's team! And thank you to Roger Waters himself, for bringing this experience to us. I'd been waiting 30 years to see this.... Overall – the greatest show on earth. It must be seen. It's got it all, and fire too! I can guarantee Lady Gaga ain't putting on this kind of show.

CONCERT REVIEW and VIDEOS from BD CONTRIBUTOR, Simon Wimpenny

So back in 1999 I was at this very same venue seeing Roger for the first time from front row dead centre! it was hard to imagine that this was now over 11 years ago!! It was the first time I'd been back to this venue since then but remember it was a great show, not only because it was my first time seeing Roger but the crowds reaction when he sang the lyric “a farmer in Ohio” in Its A Miracle.

Mike, Hannah and I got into the venue around 6:30 and hung around till the curtains were open so we could head down to the floor around 7pm. We went to look at the merchandise and Mike bought...well I'm not allowed to say as his wife Kim might be reading this and what happens in the Schott centre stays in the Schott centre:) but suffice to say Hannah came out with a nice new t-shirt!!, I'm joking Kim:)

Mike and Hanna headed to their seats which were towards the rear of the venue but elevated up in the second section, great seats for their first show!

Kim, Joe and Joe's friend Zak were sat 12th row to the right and I was 14th row dead centre on the aisle. We made our way to our seats just as Pink was being thrown onstage by the homeless (truck driver) Brent.

The crowd are always blown away after In The Flesh, there so much going on during that track, the flag holders, the platforms rising, Roger coming out for the first time, the pyros, the plane crashing, it's a great opening for the show and leaves the crowd stunned at the end of it.

I'm pretty sure its new as I've not seen it at all at any of the other shows but during Another Brick Pt2 there's a bit of animation that's very clever on the wall. It's of a guy's shadow that walks on and spray paints the words “we don't need no education” actually onto the wall at the left hand side. The shadow guy then walks off towards the right side of the wall. I missed the actual spray painting part but caught the shadow walking off on the video clip below:

My friend Bob's idea about the Subway train coming along depending on how many shows are in each city hasn't worked out as at the last couple of shows the trains being coming on twice where there's only once show in each place so I've no idea what governs the amount of times it happens!

The first half was great, as readers of my blog will know I'm a bigger fan of the second half of the show just due to the sheer energy in this half, however the first half is really growing on me de to all the little extras that are being added to the projections.

Just before Goodbye Cruel World there's a great bit of projection where lots of random images are projected on the screen is such a fast succession that its difficult to see a lot of them, kinda like subliminal images. What I did tonight was put the camera onto multi shot and took random pictures at random intervals to see what projection images I would capture. I might start doing this at a few shows to see what I come up with.

Everyone stayed standing for Hey You which was unusual but good, if I had my way I wouldn't let anyone sit down for the whole show!

Comfy Numb was just as good as its always been and is starting to get a touch boring now…… yeh right!! Never in a million years would this happen, it just gets better and better the more I see it.

After the instruments rise up through the stage, Roger heads off to change into his uniform for the next part of the show and Jon starts the opening chords to The Show Must Go On however as Jon was playing tonight I could hear the keyboard start cutting in and out like some sort of loose connection, Jon abruptly stopped and the techs came onstage as there was obviously some type of technical problem.

After trying for a couple of minutes to get things going again Roger entered from stage left to a huge applause and proceeded to tell everyone that they obviously had some technical issues and the show would be back soon. He also commented that he was just getting changed before he came on and started messing about with his boots. He then pointed to the white plastic bags that were sticking out of his boots and told the crowd how he needed to put plastic bags over his feet to get the boots on! There was huge laughter from the crowd and grins from Roger, he then shouted out something similar to “are you having fun” to which you can guess what the crowds reaction was!

The tech guys had by this time replaced Jon’s keyboard and were obviously rebooting the software on the new one which took a minute or two. The whole “incident” lasted probably fifteen minutes in total and just shows that anything can and does go wrong!

The show carried on as normal from this point and Roger then entered the stage at his normal place, one things he has taken to doing at the last few shows is spitting on the floor after coming onstage at this point! I'm pretty sure this is all part of the fascist act that he's putting on and he's not trying to hit a fan again! He also had something over his shoulder as he walked on and this was passed over to Robbie to hold before he took his mic to start singing.

At the end of the track Roger reached over to Robbie and was handed a machine gun!! He has been doing the fake machine gun actions since the 5th or 6th show and this was the first time he had actually used a prop for this. Not only had he got a gun but they now have shooting sound effects coming through the PA as Roger mimics the shooting action!

Instead of asking if there are any Paranoids in the audience, Roger is now adding the name of the city instead, "are there any paranoids in Columbus tonight" was tonight's phrase, this makes the crowd cheer even more than the normal line and gets a huge response.

They have increased the animation during Run Like Hell and changed the brick animation slightly, it looks a lot better and the bricks now float and roll and fly around the screen a lot more. They have also increased the speed at which the bricks tumble down and go from side to side, this fits the speed of the music much better and makes the music and images gel together even more.

The further back you are for this show the better your pictures will be of the animation on screen during the trial sequence, due to how large the images are and how much light is given off by said images.

The wall again fell in the middle only and took a while to fall down tonight.

After the band had finished the first part of Outside The Wall Roger started to introduce the band and started laughing. He said "I don't know why on earth I'm laughing, I guess it's because I'm happy" and he really was!

This was a fantastic show and despite the biggest technical issue of the tour so far this was my favourite show of the tour. The crowd were great, the sound and music was spot on, the technical issues and Roger interaction with the crowd all made this a very unique show.

Make sure you check out Simon's blog at SimonWimpenny.blogspot.com where you'll find full details of all his travels, along with more pictures and videos.

CONCERT PICTURES by BD CONTRIBUTOR, Mike Humphrey

For more of Mike's great pictures from this concert, check out his two photo albums on Facebook HERE and HERE.