Capacity: 44,000
Concert starts: 8:45pm

Address of venue: Mörfelder Landstrasse 362, 60528 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. MAP

Website: www.commerzbank-arena.de

COMMENTS

Roger's tour of The Wall returns to Germany, and arrives in Frankfurt for what will be the first of three in the country.

The RogerWaters.com presales have begun, with advance tickets available to those who had registered their interest in particular cities. General sale tickets are on sale through Eventim.de and other official agents (exact dates and outlets can be found via Roger's website). The public sale will also see a limited number of VIP packages made available for each show on the tour. Our thanks to Frank S for the ticket scan to the right.

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!

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!

The ninth show of the 2013 tour, and the first of the three German shows. With the light evenings in Europe currently, the roof over the venue helped but as you'll see from the In The Flesh? picture below, courtesy of our good friend Simon Wimpenny (see his excellent blog here), the roof (being a thin material) did have a fair amount of sunlight on it:

Next stop is Denmark on Sunday, for the show in Copenhagen, and then the little addition on one of Roger's night's off - the Ca Ira performance in Gothenburg. Back to this show though: if you went to this show in Frankfurt, 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, Hans-Jürgen Müller

Bring The Boys Back Home
The Wall Open Air in Frankfurt on August 09th, 2013

After the original show in Dortmund 1981, the re-staging in Berlin 1990 and 2 shows back in 2011, I never thought to see another The Wall show in my life. But the never ending world tour of The Wall returned another time to Europe with the final (?) XXL format for Arenas.

Funny enough, the bad experiences of Waters during the In The Flesh stadium tour back in 1977 were the starting point of the whole concept. Waters never wanted to perform in stadiums anymore! So what? Now The Wall is back and dressed in a perfect stadium outfit!

Besides this, the return of the show gave me the opportunity to see it together with a friend and my 12 year old daughter. She's a kind of a music freak and so I thought, this would be the one and only chance to let her whitness this event. Beforehand I gave her some information about the songs, the meaning of it all and about the show itself, so that she won't be overwhelmed by it.

We were seated in block B2 near the middle (on the left side of the mixing desk). This is near enough to the stage to see the details, but also far away enough to watch all projections on the huge wall. Near the mixing desk is always a good place to get the best sound possible, especially for the well known surround sound of floydian gigs.

I won't talk about all the songs, as there's nothing new to expect (even The Ballad Of Jean Charles De Menezes at the end of Another Brick In The Wall Part 2 is a standard in the meantime). In comparison to 2011, the show got even bigger now, including new videos and a state of the art projection equipment. This can't be beaten in terms of size and effects. This is a perfect musical event and not a simple rock show anymore. It combines different aspects for a fantastic journey for the eyes and ears of all fans. What more can one expect?

The band did a wonderful job as usual. And it was really a job! Almost all musicians stayed for most of the show in the background and had no chance, due the restrictions of the given time guideline, to put a mark on one song or another.

Waters was in top form and tried to send his message to all people. Anyone could see: The Wall is his 'baby'! It means so much to him and he wants to share this with everybody! He played his role (sometimes a bit too excessively) at the front of the stage in his typical way and even acknowledged with a "Thank you!" that his fans raised from their seats after the line "Can you stand up?" during Comfortably Numb.

Musically highlights were for me: Mother, Almost Gone, Hey You, Comfortably Numb (of course!) and Outside The Wall.

On the visual side: In The Flesh?, Empty Spaces & What Shall We Do Now, Bring The Boys Back Home, Run Like Hell and Waiting For The Worms.

Emotional highlights: Vera and Bring The Boys Back Home (in combination with the film projections on the wall).

After almost 2 hours of music and visuals, we were finally forced to get back to reality. My daughter couldn't believe what she saw! And looking at her face, I knew, I was right to take her with me. Never in her whole life she will ever forget that night together with her dad ...

... and then I thought: Was this the last night that I ever saw a show with a(n) (ex)member of Pink Floyd? Only the future can tell!

CONCERT REVIEW and PICTURES by BD CONTRIBUTOR, Andreas Claus

The weather was almost non-cloudy with lots of blue sky the afternoon and held this way. I arrived with my wife, who was accompanying me to her first RW concert, at stadionbad (bus station at commerzbank arena main entrance) around 7:30 pm cest. We bought some water to drink and took it to our seats first row unterrang block 208 (2nd block to stage left on bottom of tribune).

To find our seats properly took some challenges. After a long promenade walk from the main entrance to the actual arena it took some time to get a drink of water first, because everything was crowded. Then we walked to our seats - it was the 2nd of two times we were wrong with them - we didn't know to be in the wrong block until two people came along to tell us our seats are actually more in the front block. So we moved to the right place and the many stairs were not always a pleasure for my wife, because these were difficult to enter.

The audience was disciplined in a way I like it. No big incidents for granting superb sound, etc. but there sometimes was a slight reduction of the compact sound I was used to listen from many previous shows in smaller venues. The sound was still brilliant, especially for a stadion room like commerzbank arena, which is known for its possible distorted treble and echo sounds here and there. We had luck I think. It wasn't that bad, but could have been better. The images and graphic designs were even stronger than last times.

When we were definitely in our right seats according our tickets, we had one person behind us, who was permanently checking his cell phone and telling the latest bundesliga football results to his female neighbour while classic contemporary music was played in the background: 'Masters of War' by Bob Dylan, 'It's Been a Long Time Coming' by Sam Cooke, 'Imagine' by John Lennon, 'People Get Ready' by The Expressions amongst others. There was additionally different intro music played compared to other shows I attended, but can't remember which exactly, although I had been to at least 40 RW shows in the past.

Running order was of course the same as always since the start of the RW wall shows. Slight differences since then might be that in Australia he played 'Walzing Matilda' (the unofficial Australian national hymn) as an additional encore to the audience. according my friend gerhard, this must have been not that unusual, because other artists like Mark Knopfler already did this, just to appeal to local audiences. There must have been simmilar one-offs in the past at special places with RW like in South America. It's certainly captured anywhere on youtube while I speak.

The special thing at least for Frankfurt was, that after the usual start from the announcer to the Jean Charles de Menezes, RW thanked the kids of Anna-Schmidt-Schule in Frankfurt to be part of 'another brick in the wall (2)' and also gave his condolences to the family of Jean Charles de Menezes and his fight against state terrorism in (broken) German, to then go over to 'Mother' in a forgiving way.

The show was again a stitch into my heart, because of its statement combined with this unbeatable strong presentation. Everyone else can actually pack in against it will be my thoughts forever. 'No way' was projected in German as "auf keinen fall' after RW sung 'Mother should I trust the government?' That was like the last time in 2011, only much bigger. Not sure if an event like it can move society, but wish it would be a step forward to appeal to some officials conscience - hopefully present for political statements at least in his audience to be aware about many nuisances. That would be the only clever result for people like us - the bleeding hearts - if we all tend to be like them as RW likes. After the show was over and only 'Outside The Wall' was played, with at least authentic close-up stage live filming screened onto the side parts of the wall, which we enjoyed very much, we just saw the start of the cutback of the wall and all the other technical material expense, after it came down and the show was over. We then went out of commerzbank arena with the feeling it was too short and there should have been more. Just the typical aspiration. whereas I will be there for 3 more shows, my wife can't go with me for them. Sad, as she now likes more. Anyway, i wish us both luck to share this fate with you. As I'm surely not the only one.

CONCERT REVIEWS and PICTURES by other BD CONTRIBUTORS

Hopefully coming soon - we welcome all contributions!