Capacity: 20,000
Concert starts: 8pm

Address of venue: Olympic Avenue 16, Moscow, Russia. MAP

Website: www.olimpik.ru

COMMENTS

Roger's tour of The Wall arrives at the Olympiski in Moscow, a large indoor arena originally constructed for the 1980 Olympics. The tour remains in Russia as the next stop is St Petersburg.

The RogerWaters.com presales began the week starting Monday, May 31st, with advance tickets available to those who had registered their interest in particular cities. General sale tickets went on sale at the start of June (exact dates and outlets can be found via Roger's website). The public sale also saw a limited number of VIP packages made available for each show on the tour.

With many thanks to Klobukov, we can bring you three different designs of the Moscow concert tickets. They differ depending on which ticket seller sold the ticket...our favourite, of course, is the third of the tickets, which the front of is almost like a bizarre bank note!

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 nineteen of the tour, which sees the production arriving on Russian soil for the first of two shows in the country. The band have two days break before the second RUssian show, which takes place in St Petersburg. If you went to this show in Moscow, 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.

The following clip has recently appeared on Youtube, and as you can see goes through the soundcheck for Another Brick In The Wall pt 2 - putting the kids' choir through their paces in front of the teacher puppet:

CONCERT REVIEW and PICTURE by BD CONTRIBUTOR, Dmitriy Klobukov

"You can't ask people to go to the circus and just have fleas in the middle - you've got to have elephants and tigers", said Roger Waters in an interview to Rolling Stone's David Fricke on August 24, 2010. And Saturday night on April 23 at the Olympic sports complex in Moscow (SCC "Olympiyskiy"), with a delay of half an hour, Roger Waters' band with these "elephants and tigers" played, in its entirety, the theatrical version of Pink Floyd's grand opera "The Wall".

Created in 1979, "The Wall" was very personal history of the disappointed rock star becoming more and more separated not only from his audience, but also from the world as a whole as he clasped at the seedy threads of his sanity. During the brief, but gigantically conceptualized tour that followed which played but four cities, "The Wall" came to the senses as a visual metaphor for barriers that, according to Waters, we establish in life to protect us from hurt, built brick by brick onstage, while the group was completely shaded by the end of the first act.

Thirty-one years later, some of those scenic elements remained intact - the gradual construction of the Wall, approximately three floors high, and it's dumped at concert's end; the towering, grotesque puppets (an over-bearing Teacher, an over-protecting Mother, an over-lusted Wife with claws for hands, all with stern countenances and flaring eyes); Gerald Scarfe's sexually charged animations, which reminded transfers from Satan's libido.

But while the sight of the production may have reminded his earlier incarnation, its theme has been expanded considerably in the indictment of war, military-industrial complex, appreciable consumption and the organized religion.

It was a show with implied sense, each last stadium rock conceit harnessed in the offer for something the greater than an applause, namely, empathy. And in typical Waters fashion, it has been made with ground-shaking pomposity of a warhead blowing inside the arena.

During the reflective, piano-laced "The Thin Ice", images of those who have died in armed conflict, from unknown outsider officer, who is considered as Waters' father, to firefighters, have been designed onto the Wall in an obvious effort to humanize war. As the band played "Goodbye Blue Sky", a fleet of animated bombers has passed a payload of well-known symbols and signs - the critique of capitalism which certainly didn't extend to the merchandise stand, where T-shirts brought upwards of 25 Euro.

Elsewhere, the show abounded blossoming Orwellian, from images of big security cameras and surveillance videos to preventions that "Big Mother Is Watching You".

"Should I trust the government?" Waters asked in song during "Mother". "Nykogdah, bl*d" - "No F*cking Way", the projections screamed on two languages. During that number, Roger sang double-tracked version of the melody, dueting with himself, essentially, with vocals taken from the London show of "The Wall" on August 1980 as black-and-white footage of himself was projected behind him. It was one of the most explicit connections between the past and the present, and a crucial one, as this was more of a re-imagining of "The Wall" than a re-staging of it.

However, some of the same causing shivering thrills remained: the creeping delayed guitars of "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1"; the poignant two-note sequence at "Don't Leave Me Now"; the classically expressive guitar soloing during "Comfortably Numb"; the galvanized stomp of "Run Like Hell"; the inflatable pig which hovered above the Muscovites during "In the Flesh". But it is clear, the mood was different, and it began with Waters, playing air drums, swinging his fists as he struggled against some invisible opponent, looking every bit as animated as one of Scarfe's renderings.

"When I wrote The Wall, I was famously disenchanted", said Waters. "Thirty years later, that's no longer the case". But while Roger may have changed, you could tell that he doesn't feel like the world around him has kept pace. And it, probably, was a final push of this show, for the black-and-white photographs of soldiers fallen in the wars of the past looked remarkably similar to those of today.

CONCERT REVIEWS and PICTURES by other BD CONTRIBUTORS

Hopefully coming soon - we welcome all contributions!

YOUR HELP NEEDED! We want to cover Roger's concerts the best we can, to share the experience with everyone, especially those who won't be able to attend the shows. We'd love to see ANY pictures, tickets scans, reviews, newspaper reports, and anything else you come across for this show - we look forward to hearing from you!