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Roger Waters The Wall Tour Profile

RESURRECTING THE ALBUM WITH A LIVE TWIST

By Sarah Benzuly

Roger Waters (far right) performing with the rest of “The Wall” band

Photos: Steve Jennings

It’s been 30 years since Roger Waters penned Pink Floyd’s mind-blowing album The Wall . Fast-forward to today, and the same political issues, fear and stress on global matters that formed the basis of that album are still quite relevant—and Waters demonstrates this in his jaw-dropping, two-hour (with half-hour intermission) show. The double-disc album—played in its entirety on this tour—concentrates on the walls people build around themselves for survival. While this may seem like a purely philosophical topic, Waters also brings it into physical reality: By the time the first-half of his performance is complete, a 36-foot wall made of cardboard boxes has been erected onstage. Of course, the wall comes crashing down at the end of the second-half. As each box is put into its place, the audience’s view of the band and Waters is slowly blurred out. Each box also displays occasionally chaotic video images, some of which include pictures of armed forces casualties, snippets from the original The Wall video, and B-52 bombers dropping crosses, stars of David, Islamic crescents and logos of Shell Oil and Mercedes Benz.

It’s a visually stunning experience with top-notch sound, helped out by the incredible backing band: guitarists Dave Kilminster, G.E. Smith and Snowy White; background vocalists Mark Lennon, Michael Lennon, Kipp Lennon and Jon Joyce; keyboardists Harry Waters—Waters’ son—and Jon Carin; drummer Graham Broad; and, of course, Waters on bass. Taking care of David Gilmour’s vocal parts is second lead singer Robbie Wyckoff.

FOH engineer/tour manager Trip Khalaf (right) with crew chief/system engineer Robert Wiebel

Tour manager/front-of-house engineer Trip Khalaf has been mixing for Waters since 1999, watching the artist become more comfortable in the limelight. “In 1999, he hadn’t done a show in 10 years and nobody knew what to do with it,” Khalaf recalls. “It was odd because Pink Floyd always tried to avoid the spotlight, so no one really knew who was in the band, except for the real diehards. It has been interesting watching it grow to what it is now.”

ANALOG RULES AT FOH For this run of 94 dates, Khalaf is manning three boards: a Midas XL4 to handle the stereo P.A. (more on that later), another XL4 to cover the band and the end of the second-half, and a Yamaha PM5D for surrounds and effects. “For the analog side of it, it’s because of the number of inputs,” Khalaf says. “There are two bands, really. The front XL4 does all of the main stage—which is behind the wall—and the one on the left [another XL4] does all of the surrogate band, the forestage.” Inside the effects rack are Lexicon 480s and PCM91s, TC Electronic D-Twos, an H3000, a Helicon vocal double, Aphex gates on drums, Crane Song STC8 on basses, TLA100s on vocals and dbx 900 on background vocals. Why XL4s? Khalaf replies: “Because I’m tired of pretending that digital audio sounds as good as analog. It doesn’t. This record was made when people cared deeply about sound quality. These days, that is not as important as the size of the video screen on your console. If it comes at me analog, it will stay analog.”

Those surround speakers are Clair R4s clustered in three configurations—left, right and rear—that handle the playback and sound effects, provided by playback engineer Mike McKnight. “They’re there so that there’s something happening for everybody,” says crew chief/system engineer Robert Wiebel. “We’ve had quite good luck with them; they sound good.” Adds Khalaf, “The Yamaha takes care of all the surround stuff, which comes from a hard disk operator [Mike McKnight]. We tried carrying around live pigeons to make pigeon noises but it didn’t work, so we put them on hard disk. [Laughs] It also gives me the opportunity because all of the effects are digital anyway; I just bring them back into the Yamaha and leave them all there. All of the surround effects need to be controlled all the time, mostly because the height of those surround clusters varies from building to building. I have the VCAs linked between the two XL4s so that I can more or less control that left-hand board from the main board.

Monitor tech/RF tech Kevin Kapler

“I actually have snapshots in the analog board using the VCAs and the mutes,” he continues. “But you have to turn up the guitar solos and maybe the drummer’s laying out a little bit. It’s mixing the show; things aren’t always the same every night. I always change my approach a little bit. ‘Okay, I mixed it this way last night and it was pretty good, but let’s feature this a little bit and pull it out.’ It’s a constant rethink where you are and reacting to different buildings. I’m trying to maintain the balance of the chaos that is with mixing any band. This one’s a bit less chaotic than most; actually, not that chaotic—they’re a great band.”

The forward-thrusting P.A. is a prototype Clair i5D. Explains Khalaf, who has been a senior engineer at Clair for the past 37 years: “We’re the guinea pig. I like it a lot; it’s a bit more coherent. The original i4 was one 18, four 10s and a couple of horns. There’s two philosophies to this. You can either put a lot of low end into the air, which really pisses off lighting designers, or you stack a bunch of sub-lows on the floor and beat the people in the first 10 rows half to death. Clair’s philosophy has always been to put as much of the low end in the air as you can and use the sub-lows simply as an add-on to move a bit of the air and couple more effectively with the floor. Putting all that stuff into one box gave us the opportunity to smooth out a lot of the anomalies with the original cabinets. The problem with it is that it’s big. We were a bit worried about it when we first started, but we found it’s smaller than a staging dolly, so no one really cared. I wouldn’t want to push one of those across a field in Montenegro…actually, keep me out of Montenegro.” In addition, there are eight i5s for side coverage, 12 B218 subs under the stage and eight FF2s as front-fills. All of this is powered by Crown analog amps.

ALL DIGITAL ON THE MONITOR FRONT Whereas FOH is a mostly-analog affair, monitor world maintains a purely digital approach. Monitor engineer Robin Fox mans a DiGiCo SD7, working with around 60 inputs for all 16 ear mixes (on JH Audio in-ears) and the 42 12AM Series 2 wedges; monitor amps are Lab.gruppen 20ks. Monitor tech/RF tech Kevin Kapler says that they are scanning for about 42 operating channels of wireless, though he calculates for about 54. Kapler uses a TTi handheld analyzer with an A04 8200 scanner. For the Sennheiser 2000 Series transmitters, he uses a Pro Wireless IE5 program to coordinate the frequencies, citing that the beauty of this system is that he can sync it.

Included in his wireless roundup are the mic models, which include a Shure U4D (though both Waters and Wyckoff will also sing through a hard-wired 58) and wireless Shure mics for background vocals. “We’ve got about a half-dozen wireless just for the acoustic instruments,” Kapler adds. “This includes all the wireless for the end of the show, where the musicians will come out with an accordion, ukulele, et cetera.”

While Waters is very involved in the sound of his show (they record a DVD each night that he’ll review for any tweaks; in fact, Khalaf says they haven’t nailed down the arrangements quite yet), the artist and FOH engineer have a great working relationship that allows Waters to do what he does best and to give Khalaf the air to mix the show as he sees fit. “He’s absolutely involved, but the great thing about being a front-of-house engineer in the final analysis is that the artist has no idea what you’re doing out there; they just have to trust you,” Khalaf says. “He lets me do what I want to do. This is one of the last great traditional rock ’n’ roll tours. I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever be able to do something this rewarding again.”

Sarah Benzuly is

’s managing editor.

February 1, 2011

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Roger Waters Revisits 'The Wall' For Final Anniversary Tour

Will Butler

Roger Waters Courtesy the Artist hide caption

Pink Floyd's monumental ninth album, The Wall , is celebrating its 30th birthday, and to mark the occasion, creator Roger Waters has decided to take the album on the road again. "Thirty years ago when I was kind of an angry and not very young lad, I found myself driven into defensive positions because I was scared of stuff," Waters tells the Associated Press. "I've come to realize that in that personal story, maybe somewhere hidden in there, exists an allegory for more general and universal themes, political and social themes. It's really for that reason that I decided that I'd try and create a new performance of this piece using a lot of the same things that we did all those years ago."

At this point, the new tour won't include any of the other original members of Pink Floyd. The full band (minus founding member Syd Barrett) last played together in 2005 in an incredibly rare performance for Live 8. Keyboardist Richard Wright has since died while guitarist David Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason have continued working on their own projects.

Waters' new Wall tour will start Sep. 15 in Toronto and end in Anaheim, Calif. Dec. 15. While the staging will updated to make use of advances in projection systems and other technology, Waters tells the AP the album's themes are still relative. "When we did it (30 years ago), we were after the end of the Vietnam War, and we're right now in the middle of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, so there's a very powerful anti-war message in The Wall. There was then and there still is now."

Waters also tells the AP that this will likely be his last major tour. "I'm not as young as I used to be. I'm not like B.B. King, or Muddy Waters. I'm not a great vocalist or a great instrumentalist or whatever, but I still have the fire in my belly, and I have something to say. I have a swan song in me and I think this will probably be it."

Roger Waters Announces 30th Anniversary Tour for ‘The Wall’

By Daniel Kreps

Daniel Kreps

Roger Waters will take The Wall on the road this autumn, 30 years after Pink Floyd first performed the classic double album onstage. Three decades ago, Pink Floyd played the album in its entirety as a white brick wall was constructed between the band and the crowd throughout the show. Films were projected onto the wall during the performance and giant inflatable Gerald Scarfe creatures floated above the audience. In short, it was one of the greatest stage shows of its time during its brief run, and now Waters is promising to bring an updated version of the legendary set into the 21st century.

Check out our collection of classic Pink Floyd photos.

The Wall boasts Pink Floyd classics including “Comfortably Numb,” “Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2,” “Mother,” “Run Like Hell” and “Young Lust,” and ranks among the best-selling albums of all time alongside The Dark Side of the Moon , which both Pink Floyd and Waters solo have previously performed start to finish. Following Pink Floyd’s short-but-epic run of The Wall in 1980-81, which was documented on the live album Is There Anybody Out There? , Waters performed the double LP one more time as a solo artist in 1990 in Germany to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall. Twenty years later, he’ll do it again during a 35-date trek that launches September 15th at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre.

“Thirty years ago when I wrote The Wall , I was a frightened young man,” Waters told Spinner . “It took me a long time to get over my fears. In the intervening years it has occurred to me that maybe the story of my fear and loss with its concomitant inevitable residue of ridicule, shame and punishment, provides an allegory for broader concerns: Nationalism, racism, sexism, religion, whatever! All these issues and ‘isms are driven by the same fears that drove my young life.”

Roger Waters’ official Website will relaunch today at 2 p.m. ET, perhaps with ticket onsale info. Until then, check out Waters’ The Wall dates below:

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Roger Waters Sept. 15 – Toronto, ON @ Air Canada Centre Sept. 20 – Chicago, IL @ United Center Sept. 21 – Chicago, IL @ United Center Sept. 26 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Consol Energy Center Sept. 28 – Cleveland, OH @ Quicken Loans Arena Sept. 30 – Boston, MA @ TD Garden Oct. 5 – New York, NY @ Madison Square Garden Oct. 8 – Buffalo, NY @ HSBC Arena Oct. 10 – Washington, DC @ Verizon Center Oct. 12 – Uniondale, NY @ Nassau Coliseum Oct. 15 – Hartford, CT @ XL Center Oct. 17 – Ottawa, ON @ ScotiaBank Place Oct. 19 – Montreal, QC @ Bell Centre Oct. 22 – Columbus, OH @ Schottenstein Center Oct. 24 – Detroit, MI @ Palace of Auburn Hills Oct. 26 – Omaha, NE @ Qwest Center Oct. 27 – St Paul, MN @ Xcel Energy Center Oct. 29 – St. Louis, MO @ Scottrade Center Oct. 30 – Kansas City, MO @ Sprint Center Nov. 3 – New York, NY @ Izod Center Nov. 8 – Philadelphia, PA @ Wachovia Center Nov. 9 – Philadelphia, PA @ Wachovia Center Nov. 13 – Fort Lauderdale, FL @ Bank Atlantic Center Nov. 16 – Tampa, FL @ St. Pete Times Forum Nov. 18 – Atlanta, GA @ Philips Arena Nov. 20 – Houston, TX @ Toyota Center Nov. 21 – Dallas, TX @ American Airlines Center Nov. 23 – Denver, CO @ Pepsi Center Nov. 26 – Las Vegas, NV @ MGM Grand Garden Arena Nov. 27 – Phoenix, AZ @ US Airways Center Nov. 29 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Forum Dec. 6 – San Jose, CA @ HP Pavilion Dec. 10 – Vancouver, BC @ General Motors Place Dec. 11 – Tacoma, WA @ Tacoma Dome Dec. 13 – Anaheim, CA @ Honda Center

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How Roger Waters rebuilt The Wall

$15 million, 424 bricks, 56 dates: How Roger Waters took Pink Floyd's The Wall and turned it into the greatest show on Earth

Is there anybody out there?

Yes. Hundreds of people, actually, milling around outside the Atlantico Pavilion in Lisbon. They’re here for the second European date of the biggest and most expensively staged tour of the year: Roger Waters ’ revival of The Wall , more than three decades after its original staging.

Tonight’s show is a sell-out, like most of the 50-plus dates on this leg. By the time tour finishes, around a million people will have watched an 11-metre high, 70-metre wide wall being built between them and the man they’ve come to see. The band on stage will continue to play a 32-year old album behind that wall until the end of the show, when the whole edifice will come tumbling down. A similar number of people have a already seen the show in North America last autumn. Now, as then, no one is likely to complain about not being able to see the band during the show.

The Wall is a legend in the annals of live rock music , partly because it was such a alien concept and partly because Pink Floyd , the band led by Waters at that time, performed the show just 29 times, in four cities – LA, New York, London and Dusseldorf – in 1980 and 1981. It would be the last time Waters and Pink Floyd played together until they reunited for Live 8 in 2005.

Pink Floyd never showed any interest in performing The Wall after Waters departed and guitarist David Gilmour took the helm. Waters embarked on a solo career, although he was tempted into staging a grandiose Wall in 1990 in Berlin with an all-star cast to celebrate the fall of another even more famous wall.

His career stalled soon afterwards, although it was revived at the turn of the millennium with the In The Flesh world tour and has prospered since. But there was no indication that he was planning to revisit The Wall . As he says: “It was incredibly difficult to stage back in 1980 and we lost a lot of money doing it.”

Then in April last year Waters announced that he was taking The Wall on a world tour.

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“Well, I did a tour a couple of years back where I did the whole of Dark Side Of The Moon ,” he explains now. “I had been reluctant to take that piece and re-do it. But it worked well. So when I’d recovered from that I thought maybe I had one more in me. My fiancé said that maybe I should do The Wall . I said I couldn’t. But it wouldn’t go away…”

Mark Fisher is mildly exasperated. As the stage designer for both the original The Wall tour and this 21st-century update, he’s heard all the talk of this new show being the sort of thing they could only dream about 30 years ago.

“It’s the same bloody wall,” he says with a sigh. “Identical. It’s frustrating that people think we’re doing something that we could not have done in 1980. The engineering behind the building of the wall – the platforms that the men go up and down on to build the wall, the stabilising masts that go up inside the wall to stop it falling over, and the cardboard bricks themselves – are exactly what I designed back in 1980. The only things that are different are connected with how they are controlled. [In 1980] I sat behind the stage with a bank of switches and moved things up and down. Now we have a computer that does the same thing and a man that watches the computer.”

As a young architecture student, the original The Wall production was Fisher’s first major design for a rock show. It was the springboard for a career as a self-styled ‘event architect’ that has seen him become the in-house stage designer on globetrotting stadium tours by The Rolling Stones and U2, as well as the opening and closing ceremonies at the Beijing Olympics.

So when Waters started thinking of bringing back The Wall , Fisher was his first call. “He told me that it would be much easier to do now than then,” says Waters. “Technology had come a long way, and people spend a lot more money on tickets than they used to. He thought I could make the figures work, and maybe even come out of it with some gravy. So I thought, okay, let’s do it.”

Inside the empty arena the actual wall is still an imposing site – even part-built and unlit – jutting out from the upper tiers of each side and tapering down to the stage. It’s not just the height, it’s also the width: three-quarters the length of a football pitch. Behind and beneath the wall is a scaffolding warren jammed with motors, hydraulic pumps, lifts, platforms and passageways. Each piece has a diagram stuck on to show exactly where it fits. And then there are the piles of ‘bricks’ that arrived flat-packed and are assembled and waiting to be laid. (They tried making them out of plastic, but plastic cracks. So it was back to cardboard and white paint.)

The projectors have been focused, the band have sound-checked. Now there’s just an echoing, quiet calm. Everything that needed to be checked has been checked. At what used to be known as the sound desk and is now the production control centre, a couple of guys are tapping on keyboards while rows of screens flicker on standby…

The calm is broken when the venue’s doors open and groups of people run to the front of the stage and take up prime position. Unlike the American shows, the European shows are freestanding on the arena floor wherever possible. This means there’s no room for the dishevelled tramp who would wander up and down the aisles at American concerts, pushing a supermarket trolley and brandishing a placard saying ‘No thought control’, before being ushered out by a burly security guy just before the show began.

In the centre of the floor a skeleton staff are minding the control centre. Banks of screens flicker on standby, waiting to be activated. The stage is similarly quiet; there are no roadies making last-minute equipment checks or tapping microphones. Everything that needed to be checked was done earlier. The only untoward item is a tailor’s dummy placed centre stage. The PA is playing a succession of Bob Dylan songs. This is the calm before the choreographed multi-media barrage is unleashed.

The Wall famously started with a gob. During the last show of Pink Floyd’s Animals tour at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, Waters spat at a fan who was yelling drunkenly for the band to play Careful With That Axe Eugene . Afterwards Waters was so appalled by his behaviour that he sketched out the idea of a show with the band playing behind a wall to express his own feeling of alienation from the audience. He reminded the audience of the incident when the Wall tour reached Montreal’s Bell Centre last October.

“When I wrote it, it was mainly about me, a little bit about Syd Barrett, but by and large it’s about fear,” he says. “It’s about a frightened person. Fear makes you defensive, and when you’re defensive you start building defences and that could be seen as a wall.”

It has always been assumed that the original production of The Wall , which included a crashing Stuka dive bomber and giant inflatable puppets to reinforce Waters’s bleak tale of alienation, paranoia, power and war was too complex to be toured. This is another thing that irks Mark Fisher.

“The only thing that stopped it being toured in 1980 was the cost,” he says. “And it wasn’t that the show was that expensive, it was that tickets were cheap. The top price ticket at Earls Court was £8. At the O2 in May people are paying £65 to £85. That completely changes the economics of putting a touring show together.”

Fisher maintains that the ticket price reflects what the show is worth. “It allows you to spend a lot more on the hardware and the crew. We’ve spent the best part of $15 million [£9.4 million] putting this show on the road. Back in 1980 we spent about $2 million at most.”

Tour director Andrew Zweck is another veteran of the original Wall shows. He confirms that this is the biggest show Waters has put together. “There are 24 trucks parked outside,” he says backstage, with the air of someone who has spent decades keeping a close eye on the bigger picture. “There are 116 people on the road, which is more than double what we’ve had before. And that includes 14 carpenters who are just brick builders. The economics of it mean that we can now move the show overnight. The crew will be out of here by about three in the morning, and they’ll start work again around six or seven.”

While the wall itself has barely changed, other elements of the show have been greatly enhanced. The biggest advance has come with the projection. In 1980, three 35mm projectors struggled to beam Gerald Scarfe’s inimitable animations onto the wall in focus and without too much overlap. Now there are 15 HD-quality projectors pointed at the wall, with a bit-mapping grid that means that as soon as a brick is positioned on the wall it immediately becomes part of the projection. It’s a far cry from some of the early-80s shows that Mark Fisher remembers as “a mad race between the drug-crazed road crew and the band to see who could get to the intermission first”.

As Video Content Director, Sean Evans is in charge of projections. A youthful-looking, heavily tattooed American, he grew up listening to The Wall (“I know it inside-out”). Evans, Waters and editor Andy Jennison spent weeks working on ideas for the projections in an editing room.

“It was like being back at art college,” says Evans. “Right from the start Roger said: ‘I don’t want to do this as it was. I have no interest in not making this political. We have to modernise it and we have to bring a message.’”

Waters says the new show has developed from the story of one frightened man hiding behind the wall, to a more expansive look at the way nations and ideologies are divided from each other. “We are controlled by the powers that be who tell us we need to guard against the evil ones who are over there and different from us and who we must be frightened of,” he explains.

Part of the message included broadening the original album’s references to encompass other wars and acts of violence since then.

“Roger put a notice on his website asking for people to send in pictures and details of family members, civilian or military, killed in wars or terrorist acts,” says Evans. “We worked on it for months, and the first time I saw it with an audience even I welled up. During the intermission we put them all up on the wall. One night I saw a guy who’d obviously just seen a friend or relative on the wall, and he was just standing there sobbing.”

The wider message of The Wall is clear from the outset when, instead of a ‘surrogate’ Pink Floyd taking the stage and fooling the audience (the opening gambit of the original show), the PA booms out the dialogue from Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus where the Romans try to coerce the slaves into revealing the rebel leader, only to be met by a growing chorus of “I am Spartacus”.

That’s the cue for the heavy opening chords of In The Flesh? as Waters walks on and dons the long leather coat that has materialised on the tailor’s dummy. The song culminates in a bombast of old technology – lights, smoke, fireworks, and the dive-bombing plane crashing in flames – that softens you up for the barrage of images to come.

Gerald Scarfe’s remade inflatable puppets make their mark. The sylph-like wife now has a ghastly green allure (and a startling pudenda for those who are startled by that kind of thing), while the mother now cuts more of a beady, surveillance character as she scans the audience, which is reinforced by an equally inquisitive CCTV on the circular screen. Only the teacher has failed to move with the times. He may have a new jacket but he’s decidedly old-fashioned – it’s been a long time since canes were routinely swished in the classroom.

Getting Scarfe’s original animations to hold up against the new animations was another time-consuming task for Sean Evans and his team. “His stuff is legendary, you can’t mess with it. Fortunately Roger had the original film, so we were able to restore it from the best possible source, but it still took a lot of work to make it look good against the other stuff we were doing. Some of it, like the flower sequence, was actually made for the circular screen, so we extended the stems across the wall so it looked as if the flowers were coming from somewhere.”

Some of Scarfe’s other animations, such as the marching hammers, have been re-animated to fill the entire wall with a vivid brightness that borders on intimidating. Others, including the stems of the flowers, have been rendered in 3D. The projectors also make the whole edifice sway and buckle alarmingly. There are moments when you wonder if the animated trickery will upstage the climax of the show, when the wall comes crashing down.

“We’ve paced the effects so it all builds up to that point,” says Evans. “We thought about whether to add any effects to the wall as it falls. But actually it looks pretty spectacular from wherever you are in the arena, with all the smoke billowing out and stuff. But if you’re in the first five rows it feels like it’s gonna hit you. I’ve been in the pit a couple of times with a camera and gotten brained a couple of times. Those things are heavier than they look.”

Which is why, in these days of ludicrous litigation over the mildest inconvenience, a Health & Safety officer has been added to the tour payroll.

But what about the music? Waters’s current band includes guitarists Snowy White, Dave Kilminster and GE Smith, drummer Graham Broad, keyboard player John Carin and, on piano and Hammond organ, Waters’s son Harry.

Snowy White first played with Pink Floyd on their Animals tour in 1977, and he was part of the ‘surrogate’ band for the 1980 Wall shows. He has been a member of Waters’s band since 1999. And he’s happy to shed the non-committal omerta that hangs over most professional session musicians.

“This show is choreographed down to the second, because it wouldn’t work otherwise,” he explains. “The original was pretty tied down, too. People ask me if it’s boring playing exactly the same thing every night. And I thought it would be, but really it’s not. There’s a lotto think about while you’re on stage, and you’re trying to get it that little bit sweeter every night.”

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It was White who found Dave Kilminster, who takes on the ‘poisoned chalice’ of replicating David Gilmour’s epic guitar solo on Comfortably Numb . “Roger wants it just the way it is on record, and that’s a young man’s job,” White says. “I’m happy to let Dave get up on top of the wall.”

A large proportion of the Lisbon audience is surprisingly young (“They’ve been introduced to The Wall by their parents, who may in turn have been introduced to it by their parents,” says White). It’s something that makes the team behind it proud, although ultimately job satisfaction is almost as important as the cheque. Mark Fisher took particular pleasure in watching the US leg of The Wall running neck-and-neck with Lady Gaga in terms of revenue. “Roger is unambiguously about alienation, discrimination, anti-war. The audiences have been picking up on that. You’d be hard put to know what the fuck Lady Gaga is about.”

In fact Waters’s tour would eventually outstrip Gaga’s in terms of the money it made. “We were second only to Bon Jovi, who were playing stadiums,” says Andrew Zwick. “We were offered stadiums but Roger turned them down, even though it meant we needed to play another 16 dates in America to meet the business plan. That was fine by me, too.”

Another recurring theme among the technical and creative crews is Waters’s continual attention to detail. Changes are still being made at the start of the European tour. Costumes have been altered, and the furniture in the hotel room that appears out of the wall in the second half of the show has been changed.

“That’s Roger’s trademark,” says Zweck. “He’s never satisfied. He wants to be involved in everything, every note, every image, the choreography. His fingerprints are all over The Wall .”

They were all over the original show, and the album, for that matter. It’s not as if Waters needed to reclaim The Wall , but the recognition after so long in the shadow of the band he quit must be gratifying. Mark Fisher can still remember the ignominy of Waters’s Radio KAOS tour playing to less than 500 people at Wembley Arena in 1987, and the following year Pink Floyd packed out the stadium next door.

While the original The Wall album will always be associated with Pink Floyd, it’s Waters who is clearly identified with the extraordinary success of the Wall tour. Significantly, he reasserts his authority over Comfortably Numb and Run Like Hell , the two songs with which Pink Floyd climaxed their sets in the 80s and 90s. Indeed David Gilmour’s appearance on top of the wall during Comfortably Numb was for many the high point of the original Wall production. But Waters sings the lyrics with real passion and despair and, as the guitar solo comes in, smashes his hand against the wall, which shatters, sending a collective gasp through the audience. It’s yet another gobsmacking moment.

And Waters turns the largely instrumental Run Like Hell into a dictator’s rally with waving flags, strutting feet and crossed-fist salutes. By the end of the song it’s difficult to believe that Waters didn’t orchestrate the Libyan uprising as a publicity stunt for the tour.

Almost as startling is Waters’s crowd-friendly demeanour, smiling, even making eye contact with fans down the front whenever he removes the long leather coat that he wears for his dictator’s role in the show. It’s a far cry from the remote, uncommunicative figure he cut for so long, not least in the original Wall shows.

“I’m completely different, and feel completely different about being on stage now than I did then,” he admits. “In the last 30 years I’ve come round to embracing the possibilities of that connection with the audience. Now I milk it mercilessly, just because it’s fun and it feels good. Whereas back then I was so fearful that when I was on stage I was the same as I was at a party – standing in a corner, not looking at anybody, smoking cigarettes and more or less saying: ‘Don’t come anywhere near me.’ Thank goodness I’ve grown up a bit since then. I like being on stage and enjoy the feeling of warmth – what’s not to like?”

This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock 158 .

Hugh Fielder has been writing about music for 47 years. Actually 58 if you include the essay he wrote about the Rolling Stones in exchange for taking time off school to see them at the Ipswich Gaumont in 1964. He was news editor of Sounds magazine from 1975 to 1992 and editor of Tower Records Top magazine from 1992 to 2001. Since then he has been freelance. He has interviewed the great, the good and the not so good and written books about some of them. His favourite possession is a piece of columnar basalt he brought back from Iceland.

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‘The Wall’ cemented Pink Floyd’s fame – but destroyed the band

Director of Music Industry Program & Assistant Professor of Musicology, Oklahoma State University

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Mark E. Perry does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Forty years ago, on Nov. 30, 1979, the English progressive rock band Pink Floyd released its 11th studio album, “The Wall.”

Featuring 26 tracks, two records and an operatic story line, the concept album would go on to become the No. 2 bestselling double album in history. But it would also mark the last time Pink Floyd’s core members – Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright – would record an album together.

Years of touring and financial stress had taken their toll. The egomania of one member, Waters, during the recording of “The Wall” would be the tipping point.

Tensions mount

The unchecked egos of band members can often be difficult to rein in, and often lead to acrimony – to the point where the band breakup has almost become a cliché.

Tensions among the four members of The Beatles – John Lennon and Paul McCartney, in particular – famously led to the band’s breakup in 1970 . Conflict between guitarist Johnny Marr and vocalist Morrissey triggered Marr’s decision to leave The Smiths . And let’s not forget The Eagles, which broke up on such bad terms that drummer and vocalist Don Henley said the band would reunite “ when hell freezes over .”

By the time Pink Floyd started recording “The Wall” in January 1979, tensions had been simmering for years.

“ The Dark Side of the Moon ,” released in 1973, had catapulted Pink Floyd to superstardom. But the band members struggled over how to build off the success of “Dark Side” and make another hit album.

They had already fought among themselves when recording their follow-up albums, 1975’s “ Wish You Were Here ” and 1977’s “ Animals .”

Roger Waters, the band’s bassist and co-lead singer, took charge for “Wish You Were Here.” He decided which tracks would appear and essentially dictated the album’s conceptual themes, which included alienation, a critique of the music industry and a tribute to former bandmate Syd Barrett, who had left the band in 1968 due to mental health struggles .

In the process, Waters ended up cutting the songs, “Raving and Drooling” and “Gotta Be Crazy” against the wishes of guitarist and co-vocalist David Gilmour.

“Dave was always clear that he wanted to do the other two songs,” Waters recalled . “He never quite copped what I was talking about. But Rick did and Nicky did, and he was outvoted, so we went on.”

Perhaps feeling suffocated by Waters, Richard Wright and David Gilmour took a stab at solo albums in 1978, with Wright releasing “Wet Dream” and Gilmour debuting the self-titled “David Gilmour.”

Reflecting on his first solo album, Gilmour said it “was important to me in terms of self-respect. At first I didn’t think my name was big enough to carry it. Being in a group for so long can be a bit claustrophobic, and I needed to step out from behind Floyd’s shadow.”

The shadow of ‘The Wall’

“The Wall” would be the band’s next project – and, again, Waters asserted control.

Waters was partly inspired by an infamous incident that took place during the “In the Flesh” tour, which promoted the album “Animals.” Annoyed by the sound of firecrackers – and feeling as if the crowd wasn’t listening to their music or lyrics – Waters spat on the audience . He later mused about building a wall between him and his fans. The seed for “The Wall” was planted.

In July 1978, he presented a 90-minute demo to the rest of the band, proposing two concepts for the next album: “Bricks in the Wall” and “The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking.”

The band members agreed to make an album focused on the first of the two. It would be about the struggles and isolation of rock stardom, and its central character would be named Pink Floyd.

The name of the character belied the fact that this would largely be a one-man show. As musicologist Allan F. Moore observed , “Waters’ growing megalomania, much in evidence on ‘The Wall,’ became harder to handle.”

The fact that the album’s central story was semi-autobiographical, based on Waters and former band member Syd Barrett, probably didn’t help matters. The motif of walls symbolized the defense mechanisms Waters had built up against those who might hurt him: parents, teachers, wives and lovers. Some lyrics dealt with the death of his father, others with infidelity.

If David Gilmour had ideas for ways to contribute to Waters’ vision, they were barely incorporated. Waters did include fragments from demos associated with Gilmour’s solo projects. But in the end, Gilmour only received three co-writing credits – for “Run Like Hell,” “Young Lust” and “Comfortably Numb.” Drummer Nick Mason and keyboardist Richard Wright didn’t receive any at all.

On the track “Mother,” Waters even brought in Toto drummer and session percussionist Jeff Porcaro to replace Mason. On Mason’s limited drumming abilities, Roger Waters recalled :

“It’s got 5/4 bars in it. Nick, to his great credit, has no pretense about that, it was clear that he could not play it. He said ‘I can’t play that.’ Or maybe somebody said to him, ‘Nick, maybe you should get somebody else to play this because you’re struggling.’”

The aftermath

Today, “The Wall” is considered by many to be one of the best albums in rock history . But it marked the last time the four members of the band would record an album together.

Keyboardist Richard Wright left, only to return later as a salaried sideman during Pink Floyd’s tours in 1980 and 1981. Pink Floyd – minus Wright – went on to record its 1983 album, “The Final Cut.” Waters eventually quit Pink Floyd in 1985 and sued members Gilmour and Mason in an attempt to stop them from using the band name, arguing that Pink Floyd was “ a spent force creatively .”

Waters lost, and Gilmour and Mason went on to record three more albums under the name Pink Floyd: 1987’s “A Momentary Lapse of Reason,” 1994’s “The Division Bell” and 2014’s “ The Endless River .”

None would match the critical or commercial success of “The Wall.”

The making of “The Wall” reflects a common experience faced by many other rock bands: how creative tension and competing visions can deteriorate relations between band members.

Luckily, Pink Floyd was able to keep it all together to record one final masterpiece.

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• In the Flesh  ( 105 )
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• The Dark Side of the Moon Redux  ( 2 )
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• The Wall Live  ( 223 )
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Average setlist for tour: The Wall Live

• In the Flesh? ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• The Thin Ice ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1 ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• The Happiest Days of Our Lives ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2 ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• The Ballad of Jean Charles de Menezes Play Video
• Mother ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• Goodbye Blue Sky ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• Empty Spaces ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• What Shall We Do Now? ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• Young Lust ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• One of My Turns ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• Don't Leave Me Now ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• Another Brick in the Wall, Part 3 ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• The Last Few Bricks ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• Goodbye Cruel World ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• Hey You ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• Is There Anybody Out There? ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• Nobody Home ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• Vera ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• Bring the Boys Back Home ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• Comfortably Numb ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• The Show Must Go On ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• In the Flesh ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• Run Like Hell ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• Waiting for the Worms ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• Stop ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• The Trial ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video
• Outside the Wall ( Pink Floyd  song) Play Video

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A Word With: Roger Waters

The Wall Goes On, and Grows Even Longer

By James C. McKinley Jr.

• July 5, 2012

ROGER WATERS has never done anything small when it comes to “The Wall,” the 1979 album and rock show about his own psychic struggle that many music critics say signified the end of Pink Floyd’s most fertile period. The first performances, back in 1980 and 1981, were groundbreaking in their scale, requiring stagehands to erect a giant wall between the band and the audience that was knocked down at the show’s climax. With its animated graphics and giant puppets, it set a standard for rock spectacles.

For the last two years Mr. Waters, 68, has been touring through Europe and the Americas with a modern version of the show , studded with antiwar messages that allude to current events and jazzed up with high-definition graphics projected on the wall. It has grossed more than $333 million and helped Mr. Waters, who was Pink Floyd’s bassist and chief songwriter before he quit the band in 1983, to reclaim some of its legacy. This spring, for his last swing through North America, Mr. Waters has created an even larger, outdoor version of the show, which comes to Yankee Stadium on Friday and Saturday.

Speaking by telephone during a tour stop in Atlanta, Mr. Waters — a die-hard pacifist who has long blamed war on corporate greed — talked about why a Pink Floyd reunion is highly unlikely and his plan, once the tour ends, to record his first studio album in two decades. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Q. Will this be your last tour?

A. I haven’t made up my mind. I’ve become very enamored of the outdoor show. It was a super challenge to see if we could take the arena production and made it work outdoors, and it works beautifully, but it is unbelievably expensive. So we are trying to figure out ways to make the numbers add up to go to Europe late next summer, in 2013. This show is such fun to do that I think I’ve got some more in me.

A. What are the technical difficulties of performing “The Wall” in a stadium?

Q. The thing that makes it really, really difficult is the weather. You can’t guarantee good weather, so in consequence you have to travel with a roof, and because the show is so big we have to travel with a very big roof.

Q. At one point in the show, on the song “Mother,” you do a duet with a film of your younger self singing during the original show. Do these songs still have the same resonance for you as they did 30 years ago?

A. For me the songs have all stood the test of time. Clearly I’m not as close to the events that I described in the song “Don’t Leave Me Now.” All the stuff that was about my early relationships with women is very much in the past. But I can still empathize with those dilemmas. And a lot of the other songs, I have realized, have a much wider political meaning than I understood at the time.

Q. What do you see as the contemporary political message of this show?

A. When it was first done, it was 32 years ago, and I was bemoaning the fact I was a child of the Second World War, and I had lost my father, and that has a severe fracturing nature on the family, and it made me very angry about a lot of things. Since then I’ve realized that somehow the piece is not about little Roger losing his father in the Second World War; it’s more universal than that. It’s about all the children that lose their fathers and continue to lose their fathers because those of us who have the power are still almost entirely devoted to the idea that our only responsibility is to maximize the bottom line and make profits.

Q. Your relations with the other surviving members of Pink Floyd — the guitarist David Gilmour and the drummer Nick Mason — have thawed somewhat in recent years. [The keyboardist Richard Wright died in 2008.] Is a reunion tour a possibility?

A. I can’t imagine the circumstances in which anything would happen. There was talk after we did Live 8 together in 2005, when Richard was still with us, we might get back together to do something political or for a charity. But, you know, the fact is, politically we are not a very close-knit team.

Q. Why did it become increasingly hard for you to collaborate with the other members after the 1973 album “The Dark Side of the Moon”?

A. It became more and more like trying to wade through treacle, as is well known. We were increasingly at odds because we had different aspirations. Up until “The Dark Side of the Moon,” I think our thoughts and feelings were pretty concurrent: We wanted to become rich and famous and we worked together as a pretty close-knit team to that end, but once that end had been achieved, then there were other things that started to become important, certainly to me, and it became increasingly difficult to have to argue about stuff.

Q. Have you forgiven Mr. Gilmour and the other members for continuing to write and perform under the Pink Floyd name after you left?

A. Of course, yeah. He was right, I was wrong. It was really simple. I thought it should be retired but I was wrong. And I’m perfectly content with what they did. I had problems at the time. I don’t have any problems now. In a way you could say it was a great tipping of the hat because they were going all around the world playing my songs — and some of their songs — so I guess it kept my music in the public eye for a few years.

Q. Have you been writing any new music?

A. I have. I have written so much, and it’s been 20 years since I made a record. I came up with a song a few weeks ago on the road and then I started playing it a bit with the band in rehearsals. I think it may be the central part and also the kicking-off point for another album.

Q. Do you hope to work on that album when the tour ends on July 21?

A. Yes. If I don’t work on it later this year, it might disappear, and I might never do anything again. So I think I have to and I’m very enthusiastic about it. And it encompasses a lot of the other songs I’ve written over the years. There are tons of them. I just never found a big enough hook to hang them around.

Q. Is it true you have plans to visit a cemetery in Italy where your father’s remains are?

A. There is a cemetery I plan to visit, again this year, because it’s something I’ve put off and I can’t put it off any longer. There is a cemetery near where my grandfather lies. He was in a mining company — Sappers, the 256th Royal Engineers — and he was one of those guys tunneling under the Germans in the First World War. So he’s in a British cemetery in northern France. That’s George Henry Waters. The remains of my father, Eric Fletcher Waters, were never found. But he is commemorated on Plaque No. 5 in the memorial garden at Monte Casino in southern Italy. So I’m thinking I might gather my children together, if they want to go, and go to both those places, just once.

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Inside the wall: roger waters “this is not a drill” review.

Sitting anxiously and wreaking havoc on a small bag of M&Ms, I chewed, ready for the show to begin.

I didn’t know what I expected when we walked into the State Farm Arena Saturday, Aug. 20, to see Roger Waters’ “This Is Not a Drill” tour. Safe to say, the performance surpassed expectations.

Before the music, Waters narrated captioned video screens with a few safety warnings and, “If you’re one of those ‘I love Pink Floyd but I can’t stand Roger’s politics’ people, you might do well to f—k off to the bar,” which the crowd reacted to with applause and laughter. The concert then proceeded to start firmly with an acoustic version of “Comfortably Numb” and made its way through bits and pieces of Waters’ more political and solo career. 

After it had started, my pre-show anxiety eased into a mellow euphoria. My heart felt as if it had been picked up from the weights it carried tirelessly on its back. All in our own trance, each person in the room seemed connected no matter how different each of us actually were. 

Waters’ political views flashed on the big screen showing images of police brutality, guns, protests and victims of the modern political problems. “War Criminal” flashed across Reagan, Trump and Biden’s faces. As an older artist, Waters’ ideologies and political opinions still resonate. 

After his solo works (“The Powers That Be,” ”The Bravery of Being Out of Range” and “The Bar”) and a few more songs from “The Wall,” Waters sat back down at the piano and sighed.

“Now we must go back … back in time,” Waters said solemnly, the crowd moving with him as he started to perform “Have a Cigar,” “Wish You Were Here” and “Shine on you Crazy Diamond (Parts 6-9)” in a personal homage to his late friend and founder of Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett. The pieces became increasingly emotional, as Waters told stories of the pair and their journey as musicians until Barrett left the band and their friendship in 1968 due to his struggle with mental health. During “Shine on you Crazy Diamond (Parts 6-9)” Barrett’s face was shown in red on the big screens as Waters, tearing up, repetitively threw his hands up longingly towards Barrett.

Half the crowd seemed to be in tears when the first act was over, including myself. 

The second act had more of Pink Floyd’s most famous songs, complete with a giant inflatable pig, fake machine guns and a giant line of triangles made of white light. The video screens in the middle of the stage engulfed us into a technicolor haven, which Waters stood prominently in the middle of. Starting off with an entrance to “In the Flesh,” from 1979’s “The Wall,” and bleeding into songs from “Dark Side of The Moon.” All of these songs, including the songs featured in the first half, made the live recordings weak in comparison. The combination of visual emphasis, rock theatricals and musical performance created a unique experience that can’t be re-lived. 

In the grand finale, Waters spoke to the crowd, exchanging small murmurs of his gratitude whilst crossing over to the piano again to play his last few songs. The show ended with “Outside the Wall,” the last track from “The Wall.”

The venue was filled, but there was still room for people to get up and dance freely. Being at the very top of the arena, you could see the expressions and reactions of the audience. We heard a few “Pigs!” “Stand still laddie!” and “F—k the Supreme Court!”.  We also saw some people, as Roger would put it, “F—k off to the bar,” due to Waters’ rabid, yet needed, political outspokenness and activism. 

Even though its activist undertones were prominent, the performance brought the crowd together.  Waters  later recalled this during his performance, saying “I think it’s a beautiful thing we’ve done here tonight. It means so much to me that we can all come together and learn that, this, this fight in humanity, this really is not a drill.” 

The smell of weed, unity and enthusiasm really seemed to strike us, especially Waters, who during the end of the second half proceeded to thank the audience as he wiped a tear of his own. Eventually after “Outside the Wall,” Waters walked around the cross-shaped stage, introducing his band members as they left one by one. Waters then prophetically threw up his hands as the last spotlight went out and the crowd erupted in cheer.

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Graduate Ava Maddox was the Visuals Editor for the 2022-2023 school year, her fourth year with Cedar BluePrints. She is pursuing filmmaking and screenwriting, and loves music and art.

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