When the road leads you to London, you don't need a tour guide to know where to go. Historical shows and textbooks, films, series, books are places where you have seen Big Ben, Westminster, Tower Bridge, Trafalgar Square, St. Paul's Cathedral and many other places countless times. What is perhaps more interesting in visiting this city is experiencing places from your favorite books, so you can find yourself in front of the Senate building that served as inspiration for the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's "1984", drink a beer in the "Pillars of Hercules" pub from " A Tale of Two Cities", try your luck on platform 9 and three quarters at King's Cross station and go to Harry Potter's Hogwarts or have a picnic on Primrose Hill, imagining how the base of the Martian invaders from the book "War of the Worlds" would stand there. If we were to include key locations from movies, TV shows (mind you, "Mućka" wasn't actually filmed in Peckham so you won't recognize anything) or music (for drivers there is no intersection more frustrating than the one in front of the zebra on the famous Abbey Road) the tourist tour would lasted for months. One of those iconic places is Battersea Thermal Power Station.
It is unusual for something created solely for use, for the production of electricity, to become a symbol. A large number of films were filmed there, from "The Dark Knight" to "Sneča" and "Fahrenheit 451", it is located in the background of famous videos, and it was used allegorically in many works. What made her a symbol was the cover for the album "Animals" by the group "Pink Floyd". The famous photo of a balloon pig (called Alji) flying over a thermal power plant is etched in the memory of all rock music fans, and although such a scene is powerful in itself, it was not chosen for illustration by chance. Animals is a concept album that slightly twists the reels from Orwell's "Animal Farm". While Orwell mostly dealt with Stalinism, Waters, Gilmore and the others play on capitalism, primarily by turning the dogs - who are Orwell's secret police - into businessmen. Thus Battersea, which was slowly being prepared for shutdown in 1977, becomes an allegory of capitalism in which hordes of "sheep" work diligently and disciplinedly, providing electricity primarily to dogs, businessmen in the City (the business part of London), while pigs - politicians - hover everywhere above. The end of the album is also different from the book, because the lyrics (a twisted version of the biblical Psalm 23) talk about sheep brutally throwing off dogs and it remains unclear what will happen next when the album ends and the thermal power plant stops working.
Valorization is just one of a series of words that local politicians and the media close to them have profane, but there is no better term to describe what happened to Battersea. Moreover, his fate best describes the adaptability of capitalism and how much of a mistake Karl Marx (buried some 10 kilometers from the thermal power plant at Highgate Cemetery) made when he believed that this economic system would collapse relatively quickly. The thermal power plant, which is about to be shut down because it is no longer profitable due to dilapidation, becomes a symbol of dilapidated capitalism and its inhumanity on the cover of the album "Animals". Thanks to that cover, the million-selling album and the extravagant performances of the "Pink Floyd" group, the four white chimneys reached an iconic status and were protected as a London monument. changes the famous appearance of the thermal power plant. If nothing else, this example shows us the adaptive power of capitalism, whether we like the system or not.
Immediately after the publication of the previous text "Between the Sexes", Roger Waters, the bassist and creative force of "Pink Floyd" during the aforementioned album, came into the spotlight again. Having held a concert in Sao Paolo, he directly called out one of the candidates who entered the second round - Žair Bolsonaro. He said, among other things: "As a representative of human rights - and that includes the right to peaceful protest in accordance with the law - I would not like to live under the rule of someone who thinks that a military dictatorship is a good thing." In addition to this, on the video-beam were the names of politicians he calls out because of the growth of neo-fascism, so Bolsonaro found himself in the company of Trump, Farage, Le Pen, Kurz, Orban and Kaczynski, while Putin was put with a question mark. This kind of scenography divided the audience, as it was divided in the elections, and one part applauded, while the other showered him with insults.
One might ask, what will this do for Waters? The 75-year-old man, whose previous tour brought the highest earnings for a soloist, is only causing problems for himself with political appearances. Recently, German television stations refused to buy his live performance because of his "anti-Semitic views" - and those views are his support for a boycott of Israeli products because he believes that country practices apartheid. He also came under heavy criticism from the Western media when he refused to support the "White Helmets" in Syria, calling them a terrorist organization collaborating with Al-Qaeda. Why does he need to throw out pictures of Trump, Theresa May, Macron with derogatory inscriptions and the song "Pigs: Three Different Ones" at concerts accompanied by the huge scenery of the Battersea thermal power plant, and why did he have to play videos of Obama justifying mass wiretapping and Hillary Clinton on the previous tour how he praises drone strikes. He could just play, count the money and not think about negative publicity and angry fans. Even the concert from this tour, which I had the opportunity to attend, in Bulgaria in May, was not without controversy - in the speech towards the end, Waters fiercely referred to the imperial policy of Washington and London, their desire to start an open conflict with Tehran, which would lead until NATO's confrontation with Moscow. To all this, he added that, not only does he not want to go to war with the Russians, but that even though they have made mistakes in their history (and who hasn't?), they are to blame for the fact that we are not living under the boot of Nazism today. This speech led to a great debate in Bulgarian society, where many Atlanticists were quick to call the bass player an ignoramus, a fool, a communist and a Putin spider, which speaks volumes for the power of his words.
On the other hand, why wouldn't an artist dedicate the last years of his life fighting for the goals he considers right? Moreover, looking at Waters' activism, we see that there are few people like him left, because many of them do have foundations and give funds for some cause they consider important, but where their greatest influence is - at a concert - they just play and the only thing they say is "you are a great audience". The songs of "Pink Floyd" are equally relevant today, and some even more relevant than when they were written. The opening song from the famous "Dark Side of the Moon" has the line: "Don't be afraid to care". No one has to be an activist, everyone has the right to "spend" their fame the way they want. One of those choices is to be an anti-war activist, and when we look at it, it makes perfect sense that this man chose that for himself. Waters, who never met his father because he was taken away by World War II, and whose father never met his own because he died in World War I, is not only the author of fantastic music and some of the most powerful lyrics, but also as a man who did make mistakes, but always had a personal performance in front of the audience of a musician who cares. Certainly, his anti-war march, the song "Bring the Boys Back Home", will always be an anthem to stand up to without the need for any compulsion.
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