Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters: Architect of ‘The Wall’
When it comes to the greatest rock bands of all-time, there are only a handful of groups that can truly be considered. One of them is most assuredly Pink Floyd, a band that would have been largely forgotten after the mental breakdown of their original leader Syd Barrett in 1967 if the band’s bassist Roger Waters hadn’t have stepped to the forefront as the principal lyricist, songwriter and conceptual leader. Under Waters’ stewardship Pink Floyd released a slew of classic albums, including the immortal Dark Side of the Moon and 1979’s The Wall.
Guitarist and vocalist David Gilmour joined the band in ’68 and within five years Waters, Gilmour, keyboardist Richard Wright and drummer Nick Mason would be at the top of the music world. They would remain there until Waters quit the group in 1985 amidst one of the most acrimonious breakups in rock & roll history.
(Photo: Jill Furmanovsky)
So to pick up the phone on an otherwise mundane summer day in 1990 and hear that familiar English accented voice say: “Hi Steve, this is Roger Waters calling from London” was indeed a high for this longtime Floyd fan.
The reason for this particular interview was to discuss Waters bringing his masterful epic The Wall to the site of the then-recently demolished Berlin Wall. This monumental international rock event took place 29 years ago today on July 21, 1990. In addition to the estimated 400,000 people who attended the performance, it was also broadcast live to more than 300 million people in more than 50 countries.
We spoke at length only a few weeks prior to this historic concert and what follows is the long and winding road of how The Wall-Live in Berlin came to be. We also discussed the circumstances that led Waters to originally write The Wall, which not only became one of the biggest selling albums in rock history (23 million and counting), but was also turned into a feature film starring Bob Geldof, later of Live Aid fame.
The First Brick
The seeds of The Wall, Roger Waters’ epic tale of isolation, disillusionment and fear, were planted during Pink Floyd’s final concert of their record setting In the Flesh stadium tour. As the 55-city global tour that began in Germany in late January of 1977 progressed, Waters became more and more disillusioned with the often unruly stadium audiences and things came to a head at the final show at Montreal Olympic Stadium on July 6, 1977.
For Waters, it was no longer about the music as we discussed what was going on in his mind at that point in time: “I wrote [The Wall] because of the disgust I felt at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal during a concert when I found myself spitting at some kid in the crowd. He was shouting and screaming and trying to get through the barriers in front of the stage while I was trying to sing a song. And I thought, ‘This is insane. This isn’t what I joined a band for.’”
Rock & Roll Greed
But it wasn’t all just about being disgruntled with the audiences either. Money and greed was beginning to rear its ugly head as well, Waters revealed by saying: “And then backstage the only thing being discussed was, ‘Do you know how many people were out there? Do you know how much money we grossed?’ It just ceased having to do with anything about music or having a good time or communicating ideas or writing songs.
“It became just about how much did we gross from ticket sales. Not that I haven’t taken the money, but as the be-all and end-all of what Pink Floyd was about, it became extremely unpleasant. I didn’t like it. I really disliked it, and that’s where the idea of building a wall across the stage in front of a rock & roll group came from. It was my disgust with the greed of working in stadiums, so I swore that I would never do that again, and so far I haven’t.”
[With the advancements in technology available for stadium concerts today, Waters did perform The Wall live 20 years after this interview, with an extensive tour from 2010-2013, which remains the highest grossing tour ever by a solo artist].
The Building of ‘The Wall’
Following the Montreal debacle, Waters retreated into an artistic shell. So intense was his feelings about what Pink Floyd had become, he wrote and recorded demos for two different concept albums for the rest of the band to consider for their next release. One was The Wall [titled Bricks in the Wall at the time], which discussed all the walls that we as individuals begin to build around ourselves. From overprotective parents and tyrannical schools to drug use, marriage/infidelity and ultimate isolation. The other concept was a day-in-the-life look at interpersonal relationships.
Incredibly, both of these concept albums were completed by Waters in July of 1978, exactly one year after the infamous spitting incident. The other members of Floyd agreed to go with what would become The Wall. The other concept project would be used for Waters’ first solo album The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking in 1984, one year before he officially quit Pink Floyd.
While the massive double-album would top the Billboard Charts for an incredible 15 consecutive weeks and would dominate FM airplay for the next few years, the recording of the album was anything but a happy endeavor for Pink Floyd. The prolonged 11-month recording and mixing period—December 1978-November 1979—resulted in keyboardist Richard Wright quitting the band due to conflicts with Waters, who grew tired of his band mate’s lack of musical contributions to the project. Wright, who passed away in 2008, would continue on as a session player for the band in the studio and on tour before eventually once again becoming a fully fledged member of Floyd in 1994, a decade after Waters left the group and Gilmour had assumed the leadership role.
‘The Wall’ Tour
Taking The Wall on the road in 1980-81 was no easy feat as Waters refused to do another stadium tour, since the album he had just written was actually birthed because of his resentment of playing in such venues.
“We didn’t do a lengthy tour of The Wall back when the album came out,” Waters said, admitting that he was the reason. “I wouldn’t do the tour outdoors. I do have to say that the others in the band and the promoters spent days cajoling and twisting my arm trying to get me to agree to doing a stadium tour.”
Refusing to budge, the abbreviated tour, which involved a monumental production effort, including stage hands literally constructing a 30-foot high wall between the band and the audience. This hybrid of a rock concert and stage show would only be performed for multiple nights in just four cities—Los Angeles, New York, London and Dortmund, Germany.
While the shows were a huge success in terms of the presentation for the audience, it was a financial disaster for the band—reportedly leaving them half a million dollars in the red—because of the extremely high costs of the show’s production and the limited tickets available in arena venues (between 14,000-20,000 per night). In all, only 31 shows were performed and Waters refused to undertake a stadium tour to make up the difference; seemingly content with the financial loss over feelings of hypocrisy.
“Since part of the idea behind The Wall was taking a look at the overly greedy nature of having things like rock & roll concerts in stadiums,” Waters continued, “I just couldn’t see having it in a stadium.”
‘The Wall’ in Berlin
Fast forward ten years to 1990 when Roger Waters announced that on July 21 of that year, he would be doing a charity performance of his masterwork at the very site of the Berlin Wall, which had famously been torn down the previous November. But there was one thing that Waters made clear from the outset of our conversation about this monumental undertaking that involved intense negotiations with both the East German and West German governments.
“This is not a Pink Floyd reunion,” the band’s former leader told me in no uncertain terms. He was also not ready to reveal just which artists would make up the all-star lineup: “I’m not giving out any names of the people who will be performing until I know for certain everyone who will be taking part, and then I’ll give them out at the same time. So no scoop for you today, Mr. Wheeler [laughs].
“The problem with these kinds of things is that you get some people who will say ‘yes’ right away, and some people who will say ‘no’ right away, and then you have other ones, which are the worst, who say, ‘That sounds really interesting,'” he said with a laugh. “So I need to know which ones of the ‘that sounds really interesting’ folks are going to do it before I make any announcement.”
Ultimately the historic concert included an international array of diverse artists including Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Sinead O’Connor, Cyndi Lauper, the Scorpions, Bryan Adams, Paul Carrack, Thomas Dolby, Marianne Faithfull, Ute Lemper, and The Band’s Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Garth Hudson, as well as Waters himself.
Ironically, the idea of performing The Wall at the site of the Cold War’s most iconic symbol harkened back to an off-the-cuff remark Waters made two years previously during a radio interview with syndicated radio host Redbeard: “I told him that I didn’t think I would ever perform The Wall again and when he expressed disappointment about that I said, ‘Tell you what, if the Berlin Wall ever comes down I’ll go and do it there as an act of celebration.
“It was a strange and prophetic thing to say,” Waters says with a laugh, “because at that time it didn’t look as if there was any chance that it would come down. I was as surprised as everybody else at the speed in which everything happened. I think it demonstrated the extraordinary capacity for political systems to do an about-face, and it was clearly caused by the technology advances of telecommunications in general and by television in particular. That’s the most extraordinary thing that’s happening in all of our lives is the way that telecommunications are dictating the way people relate to each other and the way political systems are having to change.”
A Brick for Charity
In September of 1989, just months before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Waters had been approached by event promoter Mick Worwood to perform The Wall to help raise money for The Memorial Fund for Disaster Relief (an international UK-based charity founded by British World War II hero Leonard Chesire). A meeting between the avowed pacifist and rock & roll star and Britain’s most famous military hero resulted in Waters telling me: “I agreed to do it after I had met with Leonard Cheshire, who founded this charity and is just an amazing man. I was humbled being in his presence. I was deeply and truly impressed by him.”
At this point in time, the talk began of where this charity performance should take place and the Berlin Wall was brought up during discussions, but Waters feared that such a concert could have a negative impact on the slow rolling progress that was then being made. “This was in September of ’89 and there was a little bit of a freeing up of ideas happening in the Eastern Bloc countries,” he said. “So I was saying, ‘We can’t now go there and start yelling: Tear Down This Wall!’ I just felt it would be impolitic and stupid to go in and shout at them at that point.”
So the search for a suitable site continued. “We looked at other places,” he continued. “We looked at the Grand Canyon, Red Square and all kinds of places, and then, in November, the Berlin Wall actually came down which was totally unexpected and they decided there were also going to be elections in East Germany. So we immediately transferred our attention back to Berlin and we began to have meetings with the authorities in both East and West Berlin. It took five months but we finally got the permission to use this fantastic site.”
Not surprisingly, the toughest sell was with East Berlin. “I think the East Berlin authorities had more trouble understanding what it was that we wanted to do,” Waters said, diplomatically. To make matters worse, on New Year’s Eve two people were killed when a large video screen they were standing on collapsed in front of the Brandenburg Gate, where they hoped to stage the concert.
According to Waters, in light of that tragedy, the East Berlin Parliament passed legislation prohibiting any and all events from taking place within two miles of those deaths. Undaunted, Waters and the organizers muddled through the governmental red tape and were able to reach an agreement. “We had to get them to rescind those decisions for this event, so it has been very difficult because public officials are public officials and there’s always a lot of paperwork and channels to work through. It really is a miracle that we have gotten the permission and that this is really happening.”
A Massive Scale
After the permission was granted, Waters went about trying to bring his theatrical dreams to fruition. “If I have any reputation, it’s for the fact that when I put shows on there’s always something to look at,” he said with pride. “The site and the number of people have dictated that this show is going to be much bigger than it ever was indoors. It’s the same presentation but obviously the wall we’ll be building in Berlin will be much larger.
“It’s twice the height (80 feet versus 30 feet) and 600 feet long (as opposed to 160-feet during the 1980 tour). It’s an enormous feat of engineering.” Other ideas that weren’t feasible previously are now a reality for Waters who seems to believe that the sky is the limit, both figuratively and literally. “We found some of the aircraft I wanted to use in the show. We found two B-17s, which will fly overhead at the beginning of the concert to help set the scene. You would have needed a helluva good pilot to pull that off at an indoor concert,” he joked.
Also on display will be the now famous animations created by illustrator Gerald Scarfe. “We will also be using a lot of the animation that was used in the original concerts, but also we’ll be using animation that was later developed for the theatrical movie. For instance there was stuff that was developed for ‘Empty Spaces’ that was done for the movie and was never in the original shows.”
“And in terms of the projection,” the veteran musician continued, “apart from the four film projectors that we used in the original concerts—a 70 millimeter behind the state and three 35 millimeter projectors out front—we are also using five Pano projectors to project still images onto the wall in the second half of the show.”
As for changes, Waters pointed out that they are “rewriting and treating the hotel room scene in an entirely different way because that would not work from 300 years away.”
The basic nucleus of the behind-the-scenes crew is the same as the lineup that made the original production, including the design work being handled once again by the team of Mark Fisher and Jonathan Park, who had just recently completed the huge undertaking of the Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheels tour. “I didn’t see the Stones tour,” Waters admits, “but I gather the set they built was rather spectacular.”
The Broadcast
Unlike a normal televised concert, Waters was again looking to break precedent. “It’s not just going to be a live shoot of a rock & roll show, because that’s pretty dull stuff. We’re trying to script the show so that it’s music theater for television.
“The thing is when you’re at the event, you’ve got the very loud music and the tribal feelings associated with being among a large number of people. But when you’re sitting at home in your living room, you need other things. We’re trying to make a TV program that is stimulating and entertaining in a different way while we’re also putting on a concert. It should be interesting.”
The Berlin Aftermath
The concert that took place on July 21, 1990 was witnessed around the world on that same day, and was followed by the release of an album and video. As with any live event, there were a couple of technical difficulties, most notably during Sinead O’Connor’s performance in which the producers made a decision on the fly to switch to her stunning rendition of “Mother” at the dress rehearsal that took place the previous day. All in all, the event did raise more than two million dollars for Cheshire’s charity fund.
Last Words on Pink Floyd
During our 1990 conversation, I asked Waters about his decision to leave the band he co-founded and his feelings about Gilmour, Mason and Wright continuing on without him.
“I’ve had my say about them continuing on as Pink Floyd and they’ve had their say,” he replied. “I just feel that the band is no longer a band. Check that, I know it isn’t a band. It’s a terrific brand name, but that is not a band. It’s a marketing device for a brand name and that’s all it is.
“I was very upset for quite a long time, but I can honestly say that it’s all behind me now. I just ignore them and they do what they do and I do what I do. We don’t fight anymore. It’s over and that’s the way it should be.”
Waters did take legal action against his former band mates—Gilmour and Mason—over their continued use of the Pink Floyd name shortly after he left the group in 1985. They have since resolved their bitter differences and even reunited in 2005 at the Live 8 concert. Gilmour and Mason also each made a guest appearance onstage during Waters’ own tour of The Wall in 2011.
Although no one should expect Waters and Gilmour to be sitting down to break bread anytime soon. After the phenomenal Pink Floyd reunion at Live 8, Gilmour quickly put to rest any rumors of anything happening beyond that, saying famously: “It was like sleeping with your ex-wife.”
And with Wright’s death in 2008, a full-fledged reunion is no longer possible, but Mason still holds out a bit of hope although not much as he told Rolling Stone just this past December: “[The feud is] between the two of them rather than me. I actually get along with both of them, and I think it’s really disappointing that these rather elderly gentlemen are still at loggerheads. I don’t think we’re going to tour as Pink Floyd again. But it would seem silly at this stage of our lives to still be fighting.”
With that said, let’s end this on a positive note. Enjoy Pink Floyd’s remarkable 2005 reunion set at Live 8 in its entirety…