Roger Waters - Colisee de Quebec, Quebec City, Canada, 11-7-1987

Here's something that I really like. If you're a Pink Floyd/Roger Waters fan, you should definitely check it out. This isn't just a bootleg of the date and location in the title; it's something I've carefully put together. It'll take a bit for me to explain why this is special and unique.

Roger Waters, the main singer and songwriter for Pink Floyd, did a solo tour in 1985, another one in 1987, then stayed away from touring until 1999. I've already posted a excellent soundboard bootleg of a show he did in 1985 (with Eric Clapton on guitar, no less). It turns out there's no bootleg of a complete 1987 show with soundboard quality. However, I made a complete show with some editing. I started with the Quebec City show of the title. That had 20 of the 30 songs here with excellent sound quality, due to those songs being professionally recorded for a radio broadcast. Then I found another eight of the songs played that night from a different stop on the tour, in London, England. Those also have excellent sound quality, due to them being professionally recorded for another radio broadcast. That recording wasn't very long, but it was very lucky that almost all of those songs were the ones not included in the Quebec recording.

After that, there were just two songs on the Quebec City set list that I didn't have: "Not Now John" and "Going to Live in L.A." Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any soundboard level boots of those. But I listened to those songs from a bunch of audience tapes, and found what I decided was the best ones, from a concert in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. Those two don't sound quite as good as the others, but they're pretty close. Plus, it's just two songs. The result is that you can hear what a complete 1987 Roger Waters concert sounded like, with truly impressive sound quality.

However, it's more complicated than that. Waters was touring to support a pretty usual concept album, "Radio K.A.O.S." To explain what it was about, I'm going to quote a (slightly edited) review I saw for it written on social media by someone named Castovalve:

"Roger's protagonist is disabled, can hear radio waves 'in his head', moves to America after his brother is jailed, meets radio DJ Jim Ladd, fakes a nuclear Armageddon, but ultimately humanity is redeemed via the magic and sweeping majesty of the Live Aid benefit concert. I feel stupid even trying to describe the plot. ... But, this album is soaked in horrifying 80's production - it's all fake drums, synthesizers, and squealing sax solos. ... Jim Ladd contribues unfunny and annoying dialogue to the record."

So yeah, as you can guess from that summary, the album had issues. Waters himself later basically disowned it, mainly due to the production:

"Between [producer] Ian Ritchie and myself, we really fucked that record up. We tried too hard to make it sound modern. I allowed myself to get pushed down roads that were uncomfortable for me. I should never have made that record."

I agree that the album suffered from typical 1980s production excesses. But the songs sound much better live in concert, without all the studio tinkering. They're also nicely mixed with lots of classic Pink Floyd songs.

However, Waters didn't just have a regular concert. He tried to keep some of the conceits of the concert album going. For instance, there was a dialogue between the story's main character, Billy, and the radio DJ Jim Ladd. Ladd appeared live for every show of the tour and talked to the audience and/or to a computerized voice of Billy, before or even or some of the songs. Furthermore, there also was the idea that the story was playing out live over Ladd's radio station ("Radio K.A.O.S"), so there were attempts to make the concert seem like it was being played over the radio, even for the audience there live. For instance, Ladd typically started the concerts playing one or two recorded hits by other artists. A recording of the Pink Floyd classic "Arnold Layne" was played. There were fake commercials. There even was a call in section where real fans called in and had Waters answer questions live in front of the audience.

For better or worse, parts of the Quebec City concert broadcast on the radio, and thus available here in excellent sound quality, cut out nearly all of that. I'm not a big fan of the fake commercials and such myself, so I decided to cut out what was left, and just keep the songs. Thus I cut out a few remaining instances of Billy and/or Jim Ladd talking. I think this makes the concert much more amenable to repeat listening. The radio station conceits didn't really work anyway, in my opinion, because the songs from "Radio K.A.O.S." with the album concept were scattered around and mixed with Pink Floyd songs, so the very hard to follow plot became even harder to follow. I think it's better to just enjoy the songs as songs. Stripped from the concept and the talking bits, I think the "Radio K.A.O.S." songs hold up pretty well. It helps that two of the better ones, "Molly's Song" and "Going to Live in L. A." didn't actually appear on the album but showed up as B-sides instead. (Another regret Waters had was that he'd wanted to make a double album, not a single one, so a bunch of songs were left off it, including those two. Most of the rest remain unreleased.)

If you look at the set list below, you'll see a lot of songs have "[Edit]" in their titles. Those are the ones where I made significant edits. In about half of the cases, I made edits to remove the talking of Billy and/or Jim Ladd. For the other half, I had to make some edits to make the songs from different sources fit together. For instance, one might come to a sudden end, so I would add in some applause patched in from the end of another song. The bottom line is that this should sound like a single concert now, with a focus on just the songs. (By the way, Waters himself said virtually nothing between songs, since he gave that role to Jim Ladd.)

A further complication is that there were a few songs Waters didn't want to sing because they were out of his vocal range. Most of those were Pink Floyd classics that he wrote but were sung by band member David Gilmour. For this tour, Paul Carrack (of the bands Ace, Squeeze, and Mike + the Mechanics) sang most of those.

Even with all the banter, fake commercials, prerecorded songs, and such cut out, this is a longer concert than usual, at two hours and ten minutes. 

In case you want to know more about what you missed, here's a good review of a concert on this tour, with explanations about everything that happened, song by song (the set lists differed only a little bit from night to night):

Amazing Pudding , issue #26, 1987 (pink-floyd.org)

From what I understand, when Waters toured again many years later (1999 and after), he'd lost some vocal range and power, and it's said he often lip-syncs to many of his songs. So if you want one best recording of him all real in a solo concert, in my opinion this would be the one to hear.

01 Radio Waves (Roger Waters)
02 Welcome to the Machine [Edit] (Roger Waters)
03 Who Needs Information (Roger Waters)
04 Money (Roger Waters with Paul Carrack)
05 In the Flesh (Roger Waters)
06 Have a Cigar (Roger Waters with Paul Carrack)
07 Pigs [Three Different Ones] (Roger Waters)
08 Wish You Were Here (Roger Waters)
09 Mother (Roger Waters)
10 Molly's Song [Edit] (Roger Waters with Doreen Chanter)
11 Me or Him [Edit] (Roger Waters)
12 The Powers That Be [Edit] (Roger Waters)
13 Going to Live in L. A. [Edit] (Roger Waters)
14 Sunset Strip [Edit] (Roger Waters)
15 Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert (Roger Waters)
16 Southampton Dock (Roger Waters)
17 If (Roger Waters)
18 5-06 AM [Every Stranger's Eyes] (Roger Waters)
19 Not Now John [Edit] (Roger Waters)
20 Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1 [Edit] (Roger Waters)
21 The Happiest Days of Our Lives (Roger Waters)
22 Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2 (Roger Waters)
23 Nobody Home (Roger Waters)
24 Home [Edit] (Roger Waters)
25 Four Minutes [Edit] (Roger Waters with Doreen Chanter)
26 The Tide Is Turning [After Live Aid] [Edit] (Roger Waters)
27 Breathe (Roger Waters with Paul Carrack)
28 Brain Damage (Roger Waters)
29 Eclipse (Roger Waters)
30 talk (Roger Waters)

https://www.imagenetz.de/aw2vo

The cover photo comes from the Hoffman Estates concert where two of the songs here were recorded. Apparently he wore these dark sunglasses for the entire tour, because he wore them for all of the photos I saw of him on stage.