by Mark Blake
Just weeks before Wright’s death, David Gilmour had told this writer, ‘At my age I am entirely selfish and want to please myself. I shan’t tour with Pink Floyd again.’ The subsequent loss of what Nick Mason called ‘one of our dysfunctional family’ made the possibility of Gilmour changing his mind seem even more unlikely.
Pink Floyd’s brief re-formation at Live 8 was now being cited as an inspiration by other bands considering reunion tours. In December 2007, the three surviving members of Led Zeppelin had come back together to play a concert, with drummer Jason Bonham deputising for his late father, John. The media furore surrounding their charity show at London’s O2 Arena had been extraordinary, and it was said that some 20 million people had applied for tickets for the 20,000-capacity event.
The day after the gig, every national newspaper in the UK splashed photographs and reviews across its front pages. It was a reminder of how important the rock music of the 1970s still was to a current generation of media tastemakers, but also how Zeppelin, like Floyd, seemed to transcend age barriers and musical genres.
Despite big-money offers from promoters, Led Zeppelin’s lead singer Robert Plant refused to commit to a Zeppelin reunion tour. Plant used Floyd’s Live 8 reunion as an example of ‘the way it should be done’. What Plant, like David Gilmour, understood was also the value of the old showbiz axiom: always leave them wanting more.
With Gilmour showing no desire to reactivate the Pink Floyd name, though, Roger Waters stepped forward to fill the void. It was a decision that galvanised his career more than anyone, including Waters himself, could possibly have anticipated. In December 2009, the thirtieth anniversary of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Waters announced his plans to tour his own production of the Floyd’s elaborate and confrontational stage show.
‘I started to get itchy feet,’ Waters explained. ‘My wife Laurie said, “You should go out on tour again, but if you do, there’s only one thing you can do – The Wall.”’ At first, Waters was reluctant. ‘I said, “Be quiet! You don’t understand!” Then I started figuring out whether it was possible.’
For Waters, it was imperative that The Wall had something relevant to say to modern audiences. ‘I started to think that maybe there is something in the story that could be seen as an allegory for the way nations behave towards one another, or religions behave towards one another. In other words, could the piece be developed to describe a broader, more universal condition than we did in 1980 and I did in 1990 in Berlin? So I started to think about it more and more, and I started jotting a few things down on paper, and eventually I said, “Y’know what? I’m gonna do this . . .”’
Mark Fisher, who’d designed the show in 1980, was brought in to oversee the new production. Fisher vividly recalled the mood thirty years earlier. ‘[Pink Floyd] were getting to the point where they couldn’t stand the sight of each other,’ he told Rolling Stone. ‘It was all too convenient that they got to declare that the whole thing was a turkey and way too expensive and walk away from it on those grounds.’
But as Fisher also explained, ‘The rock ’n’ roll industry has been transformed since then. Back then, there were only individual promoters, not companies that arranged whole tours. Back then, being able to move something from town to town was way beyond us.’ This industry sea change, together with huge technological advances, not to mention much higher ticket prices, now made it possible for the $60 million production to turn a substantial profit.
The Wall 2010 was an unbelievably ambitious enterprise. Showing his usual painstaking attention to detail, Waters pored over every aspect of the production, pushing Fisher and his team as well as himself to ensure that they delivered the best possible results. The tour’s requirements read like the world’s most expensive shopping list: 242 flat-pack cardboard bricks for a 24ft-high and 240ft-wide wall, 82 moveable lights, one 30ft-high helium-filled inflatable schoolmaster . . . The most immediate difference was visible in the wall itself. On the original tour, Pink Floyd had only 35mm cine-projectors with which to beam an image a maximum of 80ft wide in the middle of the wall. Waters now had twenty-three projectors beaming images across the full width of the 240ft wall, and on to a circular screen behind the stage. It was a visual feast, with Gerald Scarfe’s ghoulish animations now brought to life in eye-watering high definition.
The only thing missing was Pink Floyd. ‘I feel no compunction about doing The Wall with a band, only one member of which was in Pink Floyd,’ Waters explained. ‘The contributions the others made were fundamental. Nevertheless, it stands on its own as a piece.’
This time, Waters relied on a team of eleven musicians and backing vocalists. These included long-serving drummer Graham Broad, keyboard player Jon Carin and Snowy White, the guitarist who’d served time on several Waters tours since playing second guitar on Floyd’s 1977 dates. Among the newer additions were Michigan-born session vocalist Robbie Wyckoff, who’d sung on albums by Barbra Streisand and Celine Dion. Described as ‘a vocal chameleon’, Wyckoff was brought in specifically to replicate the parts David Gilmour had sung on the original album.
With fifty-six shows already booked for the year ahead, Waters was leaving nothing to chance. Having committed to the tour, he hired a personal trainer, a vocal coach and a stylist, to, as one interviewer noted, ‘help him select clothes in various shades of black’.
Although technology alone had helped make the tour physically and financially viable, Waters was soon more convinced than ever that The Wall’s message was pertinent in 2010. ‘It has an attachment to anti-authoritarian, anti-totalitarian and anti-extreme ideology – whether political or religious,’ he declared.
Events going on in the wider world backed up his claim. In July 2010, Waters broke off from rehearsals to add his support to The Hoping Foundation, a charity supporting Palestinian children affected by the conflict with Israel. Waters had been invited to perform at a fundraiser at Kiddington Hall in Oxfordshire by David Gilmour. Some negotiations took place beforehand, though. ‘David said, and I quote, “If you do [The Teddy Bears’ 1958 hit] ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him’ at The Hoping Foundation gig I’ll come and do ‘Comfortably Numb’ on one of your Wall shows,”’ revealed Waters.
On the night, the reunited couple performed a 28-minute set backed by a group that included Waters’ son Harry playing keyboards. They rolled out ‘Wish You Were Here’ and ‘Comfortably Numb’. But it was ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him’ that raised the biggest smile, ‘what with us having famously been at each other’s throats for years’, as Waters explained. The song’s high register was also much easier for Gilmour to reach than Waters. Internet footage of the performance rather suggested one man putting the other through his paces. The question now, was: at which of Waters’ Wall shows would David Gilmour perform? Audiences would just have to wait.
The Wall tour opened with much fanfare in September 2010 with three sold-out dates at Toronto’s 20,000-capacity Air Canada Centre. A children’s choir from the city’s Regent Park School of Music helped perform the hit single ‘Another Brick in the Wall Part 2’. On ‘Mother’, Waters sang to grainy black-and-white footage of himself performing the same song with Pink Floyd at Earls Court in 1980, a time when, as he informed the audience, he was ‘miserable and fucked up’.
These were moments of vulnerability and human interaction that set the production apart from the original Wall concerts. But the scale of the show and its visual impact alone was enough to gain column inches. The Toronto Star was quick to note some teething problems, but its reporter was still dazzled by the ‘arresting digital animation and ceiling-high marionettes’, and ‘the requisite, giant, inflatable wild boar’ that soared over the audience, emblazoned with the sarcastic slogan, ‘Everything Will Be OK’. The first half of the show concluded with the plaintive ‘Goodbye Cruel World’, and the final brick placed in the wall, leaving the audience faced with a huge, imposing edifice.
The Wall was also loaded with moments of high personal drama that seemed even more poigna
nt in the light of everything that had gone on since Waters had written the original story. His estrangement from Pink Floyd and his first wife, and the decline and death of Syd Barrett were all there. During the second act, the band performed the achingly lonely ‘Hey You’ while hidden behind the wall. For ‘Nobody Home’, Waters’ tale of on-tour depression directly inspired by Barrett’s behaviour on Pink Floyd’s first American tour, he appeared, staring at a flickering TV screen in a makeshift motel room constructed in a gap in the wall. On the album’s showstopper, ‘Comfortably Numb’, Waters paced the stage in front of the giant barrier before gesturing upwards to where Robbie Wyckoff and guitarist Dave Kilminster appeared overhead to sing and play what had once been Gilmour’s parts.
From here on, the drama hardly diminished. Gerald Scarfe’s original animated marching hammers had lost none of their grotesque power in the thirty-one years since they’d first been seen. But they were now joined by an image of Waters’ father, Second Lieutenant Eric Waters, and the grim details of his death at Anzio during the Second World War. The tour programme also included a poem Waters had written about his father. Prior to the tour, Waters had requested that fans post him photos of their family members lost in any conflict. Known as ‘Fallen Loved Ones’, this scrapbook of personal images and stories made for poignant viewing when projected onto the wall. Among the many slogans and maxims that flashed up, former US president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s words from his 1953 ‘Chance for Peace’ speech seemed especially apt: ‘Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.’
As the show progressed, Waters added pictures of world leaders, past and present, and, controversially, footage of the July 2007 Baghdad air strikes in which Iraqi civilians were killed and injured by the American military. The classified footage had been taken from the cockpit of one of the US army’s helicopters and had been made public on the WikiLeaks website. Later on the tour, Waters would also include images of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician shot dead by the police on a London tube train after being mistaken for a terrorist in 2005. Members of Menezes’ family would later attend Waters’ show in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
All ‘the thunder and noise’, as Waters described it, still couldn’t drown out The Wall’s message or its relevance to the modern age. As the tour progressed, through Chicago and the American Midwest and on to a two-night stand at New York’s Madison Square Garden, the political aspects of the show started to draw media attention as well as the crashing Stuka and the flying pig.
During ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’, images of fighter planes dropping bombs shaped like the former Soviet Union’s hammer-and-sickle and corporate logos for Mercedes-Benz and Shell flashed up across the wall. A month into the tour, though, and Waters was under fire from the Anti-Defamation League, who believed that using images of bombs shaped like the Jewish Star of David next to bombs shaped like US-dollar signs was anti-Semitic.
Waters responded with an open letter in the Independent newspaper. ‘There is no anti-Semitism in The Wall show,’ he wrote. ‘The point I am trying to make in the song is that the bombardment we are all subject to by conflicting religious, political, and economic ideologies only encourages us to turn against one another, and I mourn the concomitant loss of life.’
It was not the first time Waters had been criticised for his stance on Israel. In 2005, Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall Part 2’ had been turned into a protest anthem by Palestinian children protesting against the West Bank Barrier, the wall constructed by the Israelis to separate them from the Palestinian community.
A year later, Waters was booked to play a show in Tel Aviv, but had been contacted by Palestinians arranging a cultural boycott of Israel because of its construction of the wall. Waters accepted their invitation to visit and see first-hand what he later described as ‘this appalling edifice’. As he told the Guardian, ‘In solidarity, and somewhat impotently, I wrote on their wall that day, “We don’t need no thought control”.’
Waters cancelled the Tel Aviv gig and arranged instead to play Neve Shalom, a village jointly founded by Palestinian and Israeli peace supporters, where he played to some 60,000 people, making it the largest music event in Israeli history. The decision failed to quell the argument, and now led to criticism from the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign who criticised him for not boycotting Israel completely. Waters defended his decision: ‘I would not rule out going to Israel because I disapprove of the foreign policy any more than I would refuse to play in the UK because I disapprove of Tony Blair’s foreign policy.’
But in 2011, Waters announced his support for the international BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) campaign against Israel. ‘My position is not anti-Semitic,’ he wrote. ‘This is not an attack on the people of Israel. My conviction is born in the idea that all people deserve basic human rights.’
Nevertheless, following the ADL’s complaint, the juxtaposition of the Star of David and US-dollar-shaped ‘bombs’ was amended for the remaining shows. The first leg of The Wall tour finally came to a halt three days before Christmas at Mexico City’s Palacio de los Deportes. Waters’ deeply personal tale of psychological isolation had proved a money-spinner. The tour had grossed $89.5 million, putting it at Number 2, behind stadium pop-rockers Bon Jovi, in the list of highest-grossing US tours of 2010. Next stop: Europe.
While Waters was busy building The Wall across North America, the UK electronic music duo The Orb released their new album, Metallic Spheres, featuring David Gilmour, in October. The two parties had first come together for a joint interview with Melody Maker in 1993. Back then, The Orb’s Alex Paterson had drawn a line between Meddle and The Dark Side of the Moon and nineties ambient sounds. Gilmour, in turn, had cited The Orb’s albums as his choice of ‘late-night relaxing music’.
Gilmour recorded Metallic Spheres’ tranquil-sounding guitar and lap steel at Youth’s studio, The Dreaming Cave, a hideaway constructed at the end of the producer’s garden in Wandsworth, South London. The album’s bonus track, ‘The Cult of Youth Ambient Mix’, heightened the parallels between The Orb’s signature sound and vintage Pink Floyd, with parts that even evoked the eerie middle section in ‘Echoes’. An accompanying promo film showed Gilmour wandering around the garden, soaking up the sunshine and playing lap steel on the studio’s porch. The mood of the session seemed as elegantly laid-back as the mood of The Wall was loud and declamatory.
Nevertheless, when Waters began the second run of Wall shows in Lisbon in March 2011, speculation increased about which of the forthcoming sixty-four European concerts David Gilmour would make his promised appearance at. ‘I didn’t say it would be in the UK,’ teased Waters, when asked.
After Portugal, the tour wound through the rest of Europe and into Russia for shows in Moscow and St Petersburg. Playing in the former communist countries seemed to reinforce Waters’ message that The Wall was ‘anti-authoritarian, anti-totalitarian and anti-extreme ideology’. But he was now hinting in the press that the tour would be his last. ‘I’m sixty-six, so I think there will come a point where I just don’t want the physical demand,’ he told NME. ‘I can’t imagine that aged eighty I’m gonna be one of those guys who does fifty-five-date tours.’
On stage, though, Waters showed little sign of physical decline. He basked in his role as the show’s frontman, ringmaster and all-round MC. By the time The Wall reached Britain in May, Waters looked and sounded more confident than ever.
With six nights booked at London’s O2 Arena, the question was no longer where would David Gilmour appear, but, rather, on which night? The levels of expectation were such that on the first evening it was hard not to feel a twinge of sympathy for Wyckoff and Kilminster when they appeared on top of the wall during ‘Comfortably Numb’, and 20,000 people saw that they weren’t David Gilmour.
After some deliberation, Gilmour agreed to play the second night at
the O2. Social media made it impossible for the news to stay secret for long. But then Waters himself had fully embraced the Internet and on the afternoon of the show revealed online that Gilmour was rehearsing at the venue.
The platform used to elevate the guitarist to the top of the wall was a more comfortable and hi-tech affair than the rather ramshackle hydraulic lift used in 1980. Back then, Gilmour’s guitar tech Phil Taylor would place a flight case on casters, nicknamed ‘Dave’s Pulpit’, on top of the platform to give Gilmour the extra inches to be seen over the wall. ‘Try not to dive off, cos I’ll be standing somewhere down there,’ Waters quipped, as he watched Gilmour rehearse. ‘I’ll try,’ the guitarist fired back.
That night, when Gilmour appeared during ‘Comfortably Numb’, there was a collective gasp from the audience followed by applause that almost threatened to drown out his vocals. Dressed in regulation black T-shirt, standing perfectly still and looking as unyielding as one of the giant heads on The Division Bell cover, Gilmour sang his lines and played the song’s brief first solo before being plunged into darkness. Down below, Waters, arms outstretched, smiled wolfishly.
When Gilmour reappeared and launched into the song’s second and final guitar solo, the anticipation in the arena was palpable. Meanwhile, a wonderfully unselfconscious Waters played air drums and froze in a mime-like pose. After a few seconds he started loping slowly across the stage before stopping and hammering at the wall with both fists, triggering an explosion of colours and images of flying bricks, just as Gilmour pitched into the final bars of the solo.
‘It was OK,’ Gilmour told this writer later. ‘I was strangely more nervous than I thought I might be. I made a mistake with the lyrics, I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. I sang a wrong second verse, my solo was not as good as it has been . . .’
