Twenty years ago, Roger Waters saw his most ambitious idea reach fruition - the construction of a giant wall between himself and his audience. The location was London's Earl's Court, and the occasion was the live performance of Pink Floyd's double-album concept, The Wall.
During the first half of this elaborate, technically-demanding extravaganza, the band - Waters, Dave Gilmour, Rick Wright and Nick Mason - played, while stagehands built the eponymous edifice brick by brick, until everything was completely obscured by up to 500 blocks of white rectangular cardboard. During the second half of the show, the band performed mostly from behind the wall, which became the screen on which Gerald Scarfe's startling animations were projected. A gap opened in the wall, showing Waters sitting in a hotel room, and - in one of the show's highlights - Dave Gilmour materialised on top of the wall to perform Comfortably Numb. Finally, the whole thing came crashing down in a shattering climax, Pink Floyd emerging from the rubble to sing a folksy finale.
The Wall was staged just 29 times between 1980 and 1981, and the sound and fury is captured in a new double-CD boxed set, Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live 1980-81, on EMI Records.
The original concept album, The Wall, was released in 1979, and became one of the biggest-selling double albums of all time, spending 15 weeks at the top of the US charts. The single, Another Brick in the Wall Pt 2, spent five weeks in the UK Number One slot in 1979, and its refrain of "we don't need no education", sung by a children's choir, got politicians, educationalists and tabloids in a tizzy.
At the dawn of the Thatcher era, The Wall railed against the rise of fascism in Britain, expanding on some of the themes which Floyd had explored in Dark Side of the Moon and Animals. Waters had conceived The Wall as both a political polemic and a statement about the destructive relationship between a band and its audience, but it also became a metaphor for the increasing breakdown of communication within the band itself.
By the late 1970s, Pink Floyd had become a huge, faceless monolith, and Waters admitted that he had lost all sense of connection with the audiences who flocked to the band's massive, effects-driven shows. The pop-star-fan dynamic hit rock bottom at a show in the Olympic in Montreal, during the Animals tour, when Waters spat at a member of the audience who got too close to his increasingly alienated idol.
"Some crazed teenage fan, screaming his devotion, began clawing his way up the storm netting that separated the band from the human cattle pen in front of the stage, and the boil of my frustration finally burst. I spat in his face," recalls Waters in the sleeve notes of Is Anybody Out There?
"Immediately afterwards I was shocked by my behaviour. I realised that what had once been a worthwhile and manageable exchange between us (the band) and them (the audience) had been utterly perverted by scale, corporate avarice and ego. All that remained was an arrangement that was essentially sado-masochistic.
"It was quite soon after this that I came up with the idea of building a wall during a show," continues Waters. "The idea gripped me at once. Quite apart from its personal significance, I thought it would be a great piece of rock theatre."
He was right. The Wall became one of the most spectacular live events in rock history, but it took meticulous planning and problem-solving to bring this simple concept to the stage. Designers Mark Fisher and Jonathan Park were drafted in to deal with the daunting technical details, such as how to build a wall during a performance without compromising the band's creativity, how to keep the audience's attention while the wall was up, and how to knock the wall down at the end without killing anyone.
Artist Gerald Scarfe created innovative animations such as the "marching hammers" and the "f**king flowers", and provided the original drawings for the giant inflatable "teacher" and "girlfriend" puppets which appeared during the show. Throughout their career, Pink Floyd had always remained hidden behind dry ice, lasers and visual projections, becoming a faceless entity in the eyes of their fans. So when they took the stage for The Wall's opening number, In the Flesh?, they played a cosmic trick on the crowd, sending out a surrogate band disguised as Floyd. The imposters wore life masks of each Pink Floyd member, then were lowered from the stage, and the real Floyd was revealed.
Behind the masks, however, two members of Pink Floyd were shooting daggers at each other. The relationship between Waters and keyboard player Rick Wright had collapsed during the making of the album, and Wright was effectively playing his last shows before leaving the band. Tensions between Waters and the remaining members increased as Waters became more protective of his own ideas, and more single-minded in their execution.
A movie version of The Wall, directed by Alan Parker and starring Bob Geldof, stretched the concept to breaking point, emerging as a heavy-handed, unpleasant and unengaging piece of cinema.
The Wall was Floyd's final epic cut before the band fractured irrevocably, but the writs kept flying for years afterwards, as Waters tried to prevent Gilmour, Mason and the reinstated Wright from trading under the lucrative Pink Floyd brand name. Waters didn't succeed, but he did win custody of The Wall, and in 1990 he staged it again, this time in Berlin's Potzdamer Platz, at the site of the Berlin Wall. An audience of 200,000 people stood within spitting distance of this massive event, which was televised around the world, and which featured guest performances from Bryan Adams, Sinead O'Connor, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Cyndi Lauper, Ute Lemper and Marianne Faithfull.
The Wall was probably Pink Floyd's most bloated and overblown project, but it still stands as one of the most enduring conceits in rock. It even earned the band an unusual accolade: a place in the Brick Hall of Fame for services to the brick industry. There's one for the mantlepiece.
Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live 1980-81 is released by EMI
