Thanks to a ‘plan’ sketched hastily on a napkin by Nigel Tufnel, Spinal Tap’s Stonehenge-themed stage props were famously under-egged, their replica structures a laughable 18 inches high. When Pink Floyd toured their 1979 masterpiece The Wall, though, the staging and production impressed. Clearly no ‘back of a fag packet’ conception, it involved rigorous input from designer Jonathan Park and architect Mark Fisher. The scale of it all was daunting, vast.
Roger Waters’ exacting vision required a 33-feet-high, 260-feet-wide barrier/wall to be erected gradually during each show. This was a metaphor, he said, for our psychological defences; for the ultimately problematic shield we put between ourselves and the big bad world. But Waters’ desire to build an actual wall between himself and Floyd’s audience was real and had been seeded years earlier.
Never a huge fan of touring, Waters found his distaste for it grew after the huge success of The Dark Side Of The Moon. Gone were the days of playing Interstellar Overdrive to the in-crowd in the shadowy, intimate surrounds of London’s UFO Club. Post-Dark Side, Floyd were a household name, playing to massive audiences in huge stadiums. There was no shortage of loons shouting out during the quiet bits, proving that they, too, had ‘always been mad’. Consequently, Waters began to view the gigging experience as analogous to competitive sport; warfare, even.
“It just became more and more oppressive”, he told Sylvie Simmons in 1999. “Those places weren’t built for music. They were built for sporting events, and it’s not unnatural to experience a ritualisation of war, because that’s all sport is. What was going through my mind - my whole body - was an enormous sense of frustration, a feeling of: ‘What are we all doing here? What’s the point?’ The answer that kept clanging back monotonously was: cash and ego. That’s all this is about.”
Having first bought a country pile in Horsham in Sussex, then a grander Georgian mansion in the picturesque village of Kimbridge in Hampshire, Waters was no more immune to the trappings of success than his bandmates. Status and wealth didn’t seem to satisfy him, though. Instead he seemed a rather joyless kind of rock star who made an art form of being a curmudgeon.
Waters’ beef with corporate greed and the whole rock’n’roll circus had come to a head at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium on July 6, 1977. It was the final date of Pink Floyd’s Animals In The Flesh tour, and they played to 78,000 people that night. Miffed at a potential stage invader who was screaming at him to play Careful With That Axe, Eugene, Waters spat on - or at least at - the overzealous fan. He later re-enacted the moment in fairly graphic detail for Floyd biographer Mark Blake during an interview at London’s Mayfair hotel in 2017.
Was the structure that dominated the stage on The Wall tour designed to keep fans out, then? Or was it to fence Waters’ anger in? Either way, it was a bold piece of theatre that took ingenuity and manpower to construct and knock down.
Still, as dress rehearsals got under way in January 1980 at the MGM film lot in Culver City, Los Angeles there were concerns about the barrier’s efficacy, not least from David Gilmour, whom Waters had charged with putting the band through its paces while he fine-tuned the visuals: “Obviously, when someone says: ‘We’re going to build this fucking great wall across the front of the stage, and we’re going to be playing behind it, and the audience are going to be in front, looking at it’, you go: ‘Hang on a minute - I’m not sure I want to be part of that audience,’” Gilmour recalled.
Gerald Scarfe - the satirist leading the team transforming the cartoons he’d drawn for The Wall’s sleeve into giant puppet grotesques and stunning animated projections that would make the live show a multimedia extravaganza – was of the same mind regarding Waters’ on-stage barricade. “Everyone, including [The Wall album’s producer] Bob Ezrin said to Roger: ‘You can’t invite the fans into Earls Court and then shut them out,’” Scarfe remembered.
In the end, Waters was persuaded to allow a few peepholes in the gradually materialising wall. That way, perhaps Floyd fans wouldn’t feel as alienated as he did. Through missing bricks, the singer could be spied in a mock-up seedy motel room during Nobody Home’s bleak portrayal of an isolated rock star’s drug-addled unravelling. An armchair sourced from West Hollywood’s Tropicana Inn, as frequented by Jim Morrison, Led Zeppelin and the like, lent the on-stage tableau veracity.
In essence, though, Waters wasn’t for turning, and brokered few compromises. He even ruled out any kind of encore once the wall was toppled during performances of the album’s penultimate song, The Trial. He felt The Wall album, tour and feature film marked the likely high-water mark of his creative agency and opportunity, so he was determined to do it his way.
“Being a purist, Roger didn’t want a medley of old favourites at the end,” Gerald Scarfe told me in 2009. “I think he saw The Wall concerts as being a bit like an opera, a piece that had a clear beginning and a definite end. Encores would have diluted that.”
On The Wall, Waters’ cathartic, sometimes emotionally raw songs (witness Don’t Leave Me Now) addressed themes even more personal than usual for him. Rooted in his own childhood trauma and feelings of rock-star estrangement, but inhabited by Pink, the concept record’s key protagonist and anti-hero, they had a key tragedy at their core, namely Waters losing his father when he was just five months old.
Eric Fletcher Waters had been a second lieutenant in the Royal Fusiliers, and was killed in Aprilia, Italy in 1944 at the Battle Of Anzio. The resulting pain his son carried with him never diminished. Instead it increased, becoming an all-consuming spur.
Respectful of this truth, but wary of The Wall becoming suffocated by it, Bob Ezrin and others around Waters advised him to make its themes more universal. Thus the album grew to explore madness, authoritarianism, substance abuse, lust, paranoia, child-parent bonds and more. Darkly relatable, The Wall had axes to grind; causes to get behind; a whole casebook of dents to the psyche. No wonder it went on to sell more than 30 million copies.
Waters’ artistic vision was hugely impressive, then, but participating in it came at a growing cost for his bandmates and other key collaborators. While making the double album that was primarily his baby, Waters snuffed out perceived power grabs and dictated the terms of engagement. He had long since seen himself as Pink Floyd’s de facto leader. And given that he was writing much more material than his bandmates at a time when the group’s tax affairs were such that they really needed to earn, why shouldn’t he?
“Roger’s attitude was: ‘It’s my record and I’ve let the rest of you play on it,’” Bob Ezrin told Blake in Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story Of Pink Floyd. “With everything that was going on financially with the band, he was the one standing there with what he saw as a satchel full of pound notes.”
Further asserting himself, Waters even dished out badges celebrating the fact that Ezrin would receive a lower royalty rate for his work on The Wall than the band. Reading ‘NOPE’, shorthand for No Points Ezrin, these badges were daft, but also slightly cruel, the stuff of schadenfreude.
Ezrin later recalled that Waters’ behaviour reminded him of being bullied at school in his native Toronto. Quite the indictment, given that Waters’ lyric for The Happiest Days Of Our Lives railed against his own childhood weaknesses being exposed by bullying teachers. Perhaps The Wall’s pain-infused bricks never crumbled. Perhaps they just got passed down the line.
Floyd’s keyboard player Rick Wright also fell foul of Waters’ realpolitik during the making of The Wall, and the ramifications for the tour were significant. How Wright came to be sacked by Waters, taking part in the live shows only as a kind of glorified session player, takes unravelling.
Even while making the previous album, 1977’s Animals, tensions had arisen between the pair. “Roger started rejecting what I came up with,” Wright told Sylvie Simmons. “It was partly my fault because I didn’t push my material. Or I was too lazy to write anything. My personal life wasn’t happy; my marriage was breaking up.”
By Waters’ account, he and Wright’s relationship soured further as their US record company Columbia’s delivery deadline for The Wall pressed. While the band vacationed in August 1979 (separate destinations, natch), Waters asked Floyd manager Steve O’Rourke to contact Wright and impress upon him that it was now imperative that he haste back to LA’s Cherokee Studios to finish his keyboard parts if Floyd were to deliver The Wall on time.
Additionally, Columbia were dangling a carrot: Floyd would receive an extra royalty percentage point if they met the deadline. But Wright, now moving towards divorce from his first wife, Juliette Gale, was enjoying rare, sacred time with his kids. To him, Waters’ demand to return to the studio a week early seemed pig-headed.
“[O’Rourke] found Rick in Greece, and Rick’s message was: ‘Tell Roger to fuck off,’” Waters said. “So I gave him an ultimatum to do as he was told and finish the record, keep [his] full share [of the recording royalties] and leave quietly afterwards, or I’d see him in court. He very wisely accepted the former proposal.”
Blake’s book also includes David Gilmour and Nick Mason’s reactions to Wright’s dismissal. These help explain why tensions were running especially high as Pink Floyd completed The Wall and began preparing to tour.
“I called [Roger] from a phone box in Chapelizod, just outside Dublin,” Gilmour recalled. “I said: ‘You can’t do that. [Rick’s] been in the band all the way along. If you don’t like it, your choice is to leave. It isn’t to throw someone out… You’re letting this get very personal, aren’t you?’ I won’t quote what Roger said,” Gilmour added, pointedly.
In truth, the guitarist also felt that Wright’s commitment wasn’t what it had been, but he considered the keyboard player’s position in Floyd “sacrosanct”, and clarified his views once they were all back in Los Angeles.
“Rick said: ‘Do you still want me in the band?’ I said, ‘Not particularly, because you’re not doing anything, but I’ll support your right to be in it till the end.’”
“He [Wright] had been forced to hang around, really, not doing anything for months,” Nick Mason told Prog’s Daryl Easlea in 2019. “So he had gone stir-crazy and just said: ‘No, I am not giving up my summer holidays.”
Wright also contested the claim that he had told Waters to fuck off. But ultimately, all concerned were outflanked by Waters.
“Roger carried out a brilliant campaign to get what he wanted by a certain amount of cajoling and threatening,” said Mason. “Looking back, I should have stuck up for Rick, but I utterly failed to do so and aligned myself with the forces of safety.”
In May 2022, the Swedish group ABBA’s pioneering, avatar-enabled virtual residency ABBA Voyage opened at London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Had the technology been available in 1980, Pink Floyd’s singer and bassist might have utilised it too. “Roger told me he dreamed of having a surrogate band play gigs so he could avoid the tedium of long tours and play golf instead,” Gerald Scarfe recalled. Eighteen holes while the group played on? Even Waters knew this was a pigs-might-fly scenario. Yet his surrogate band fantasy became a reality during key moments of The Wall live shows.
Additional musicians and backing vocalists were required to aid the core Floyd quartet bringing the LP’s sometimes complex music to stage. These included guitarist Snowy White, then moonlighting from Thin Lizzy, sometime Status Quo bassist Andy Bown, plus drummer John ‘Willie’ Wilson and keyboard player Peter Wood, both of whom had played with folk-rock band Sullivan Brothers & Quiver.
Between them, these four wore specially moulded latex masks in the images of Waters, Gilmour, Wright and Mason during concert opener In The Flesh. “I had been around Pink Floyd for years,” recalled Wilson, a long-term pal of Gilmour’s, “but it was very weird wearing a mask of Nick Mason’s face.”
Naturally, when the real Pink Floyd appeared it was a coup de théâtre: as In The Flesh closed, a model of a Stuka dive bomber crashed into the stage, then the surrogate band froze, the real Floyd stood up, and the crowd realised they’d been hoodwinked. Today, fan-shot YouTube spoilers would have sunk the surrogate set-piece after the opening night, but in 1980 it retained its element of surprise for a little longer.
Nonetheless, some details of the show had been leaked. Bob Ezrin explained how, while he was going through a divorce and fighting for custody of his children, a journalist friend had teased information from him about the performances while he was not at his best, and leaked the story to Billboard. The magazine’s spoiler article appeared before the opening night. Consequently, Waters/Ezrin relations were ruined, albeit temporarily.
“Roger went nuclear and had me banned from seeing the show,” the producer recalled. But when the production reached Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, New York in February 24, Ezrin’s cachet there was such that he was able to gain admittance anyway: “I went backstage at the interval, and I think Roger hid in the dressing room.”
Initially, Pink Floyd played a seven-night run at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena after three weeks of intensive rehearsals.
Surrogate band member Andy Bown recalled: “I remember [Floyd manager] Steve O’Rourke saying: ‘I hope this fucking works, Andy, because we’re two-point-eight million dollars down the pan already.”
“It was the gigantic scale that was so terrifying,” Scarfe remembered. “The whole Roman circus of it. But I just had to generate the ideas - someone else had to work out how things would actually happen technically, architecturally or mechanically.”
Things happening included the 49-foot-high incarnation of Waters’ psychotic Scottish schoolteacher during Another Brick In The Wall Part 2, while the 500lb, 35-feet high inflatable mother who arrived during the song of the same name was another grotesque. In Waters and Scarfe’s world, unlike that of a certain Kate Bush song, mother did not stand for comfort. Rather, the maternal bond was portrayed as suffocating and controlling, a poisonous thing.
Clearly, The Wall live was all risk, a deliberate detonation of normal audience/performer conventions. Or as Prog’s Daryl Easlea put it, “a mere 31 [dates] in four cities that fundamentally reshaped the concept of the stadium concert”. Adding to the slap in the face that was the wall’s part obfuscation of the band, Waters arranged for the shows to be introduced by warm-up MCs whose job was to rile the crowd with some creative trolling. Who said prog had learned nothing from punk?
One of these MCs, sometime Saturday Night Live comedian Gary Yudman, recalled the script Waters showed him by way of instruction prior to Floyd’s five-night stand at the Nassau Coliseum: “It said: ‘The MC comes out and talks to the crowd and gets them so pissed off…' Then Roger said to me: ‘I want this, Gary. Can you make them angry? Can you do it?’”
There was tension and bile galore during Floyd’s performances of The Wall, but also moments of extraordinary poignancy. For example, who could fail to be moved by Scarfe’s animation sequence for Goodbye Blue Sky? Especially as the voices of backing vocalists Jon Joyce, Stan Farber, Jim Haas and Joe Chemay merged in Beach Boys-style harmonies as the darkly compelling images played out.
“Whenever I give a talk about my work,” Scarfe said in 2009, “those images I used for Goodbye Blue Sky come up. In many ways they explain my childhood experiences of the war as well as Roger’s. Roger and David’s music was incredibly inspiring, because the song is sort of this sad counterpoint to (There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs Of Dover. Goodbye Blue Sky is about the ones that didn’t make it back, who of course included Roger’s father.”
Talking to journalist Phil Sutcliffe in 1995, Rick Wright aired mixed feelings about The Wall tour - although not because he was bitter about being demoted to hired hand.
“We were hidden half the time,” he recalled. “While you were playing, you had lots of roadies running around, putting things up, taking things down. It felt very impersonal.
“I was quite prepared to swallow my pride to go out and play with Dave and Nick,” he added. “Strangely there wasn’t any animosity on stage. I think it’s the nature of my character - I accept what’s happened and make the best of it.”
Elsewhere, when Wright was asked why he agreed to do the tour given Waters’ shenanigans, he responded with admirable honesty. “Maybe I couldn’t handle the idea of just standing up and saying: ‘Right, that’s it. Bye bye.’ I thought if I’m going to leave, at least I know I’ve got another month or so to carry on working - possibly with the hope that things might change.”
Things didn’t change, of course. Waters stuck to his guns, and Gilmour and Mason bent to his will - for now, anyway. But Wright had the last laugh. No longer an official member of Pink Floyd after Waters’ manoeuvring, he wasn’t personally responsible for the hefty financial losses (some $600,000, Waters later said) that The Wall tour incurred. Wright was on $5,000 a show, and recalled “making a little money”.
Meanwhile, Gilmour - very much responsible for the musical, rather than theatrical side of the shows - recalled them being “terrific”, although with some reservations. “I enjoyed them thoroughly, but as they went along I became more aware of the restrictions imposed by something that was so choreographed,” he told Sylvie Simmons.
But there was one piece of choreography that Gilmour wouldn’t have missed for the world. During Comfortably Numb, he sang the song’s choruses and delivered its magnificent guitar solo atop the wall. No matter that he was perched precariously on a flight case that his guitar tech Phil Taylor was holding in place on top of a hydraulic lift platform, from the audience’s perspective the guitarist appeared to be floating in mid-air, much more rock god than Humpty Dumpty.
Gilmour’s elevated platform had a safety rail, which is why Floyd’s road crew dubbed it ‘Dave’s pulpit.’ Dispensing his bluesy benediction, and enjoying crowds and a vantage point not dissimilar to that popes must experience looking out on St. Peter’s Square, Gilmour felt the buzz. “It was a fantastic moment,” he recalled. “Every night there’d be this sort of gasp as the audience looked up and saw me.”
Comfortably Numb was Gilmour’s chance to shine; the equivalent of that bit in Simon & Garfunkel’s famed free show in NYC’s Central Park where Art Garfunkel steps forward to sing Bridge Over Troubled Water, and its writer Paul Simon must play second fiddle.
There were grave tensions between Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, and there were grave tensions in Floyd. Beneath the surface lay a hotbed of resentment. The band’s middle-class, very English reserve papered over the cracks, but the fissures were there all right, complex and far-reaching, festering away. Waters recalled backstage being “pretty separatist. Separate trailers, none facing each other, with all our little camps. The atmosphere was awful, but the show was so important that I don’t think that affected me at all,” he claimed.
Was that really true, though? If you read that last quote again you can almost smell the cement; almost hear Waters slot another brick of his defensive wall into place. Credit is due, though, regarding Pink Floyd’s frontman’s adherence to one of The Wall tour’s key principles.
At the end of February 1980, after the Los Angeles and New York dates, promoter Larry Maggid offered Floyd a cool $1 million (four million in today’s money) to stage the show at Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium. The vast space’s capacity was around 102,000 - about 85,000 more than Waters considered desirable or defensible at the time. Waters flatly declined Maggid’s offer, and explained his rationale to his bandmates.
“I said to the others: ‘You’ve all read my explanation of what The Wall is about,’” he told journalist Chris Salewicz. “‘It’s three years since we did that last stadium, and I saw then that I would never do one again. The Wall was entirely sparked by how awful that was and how I didn’t feel the public or the band got anything out of it that was worthwhile. And that’s why we’ve produced this show for arenas, and I ain’t fucking going.’”
Waters also inferred that his bandmates had considered playing the JFK Stadium show without him: “There was a lot of talk about whether Andy Bown could sing my parts, but in the end they bottled out.”
“I immediately said yes and would have been delighted to do it,” Bown told Mark Blake, seemingly confirming that such a conversation had taken place.
Unsurprisingly, though, Gilmour’s take on Maggid-gate was very different. “Going on tour without Roger never got beyond a band fantasy/joke,” he said. “We never seriously considered doing The Wall without Roger.”
All the same, the very idea that touring without Waters was a fantasy his bandmates and supporting cast enjoyed seemed like a dig, Gilmour’s attempt to take Waters down a peg. However you looked at it, the ground was shifting, the power dynamics that governed Floyd’s activities in flux.
By the time Waters, by then solo, performed The Wall in Berlin in 1990, moreover, vast crowds no longer seemed to concern him. Still, commemorating the recent historic fall of the actual Berlin Wall, performing where it once stood, in front of an estimated 400,000 people, was a pretty good reason to cut loose and break your own rules. Especially as the concert’s esteemed special guests included Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison and Scorpions.
At the end of February 1980, the original Floyd-performed version of The Wall took an extended hiatus after the first 12 dates in Los Angeles and New York. That April, Run Like Hell became the last ever Waters/Gilmour co-write to be released as a single, although nobody knew it at the time.
Spring also saw the group return to the UK after a year in various overseas locations as tax exiles. A voluminous shipment of props and state-of-the-art audio-visual tech for The Wall tour came with them, as did the show’s 80-strong production crew. It was time for rehearsals at Shepperton film studios to begin for a six-night run at London’s Earls Court.
Rick Wright’s demotion to hired hand had not yet been made public, but in a candid interview with Newsweek Waters aired Floyd’s dirty laundry. “We have been pretending we’re all jolly good chaps together, but that hasn’t been true in seven years,” he carped. “I make the decisions. We pretended it was a democracy for a long time, but this album was the big own-up.”
Fortunately, Floyd’s music was still special enough to drown out the white noise of internal bickering. For fans, including future Prog writer Daryl Easlea, then 14, the shows at Earls Court that August were mind-blowing, a near religious experience. “I knew my life would never again be the same again,” he wrote some 40 years later.
Just post-punk, Pink Floyd and their latest elaborate concept album were still being pilloried in the press, The Wall’s music deemed a snorefest. Unsurprisingly, the record’s attendant live spectacular - the very antithesis of punk’s no-frills music and staging - didn’t get an easy ride either, certainly not from Melody Maker.
“If Roger Waters had hung around much longer, I’d have been down the front with a trowel and a bowl of cement, helping the bugger brick himself up,” wrote Allan Jones, reviewing an Earls Court show on August 8. Later in the run, Waters took revenge from the stage, calling Jones “a stupid shit”. No slight against Floyd’s frontman went unnoticed. No battle, it seemed, was too small for him.
As the year played out, Floyd’s four members busied themselves with other projects. Gilmour and his first wife Ginger moved to Hookend Manor in Oxfordshire with their children Alice and Clare. Wright licked his wounds. Mason finished his solo album Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports. Waters turned his attention to the movie version of The Wall that would be directed by Alan Parker and released in 1982.
First though, came further live performances of The Wall. In February 1981 Floyd played an eight-night run at Westfalenhallen in Dortmund, Germany, then in June a final five-night stand back at Earls Court. The London shows were filmed with a view to using some of the footage in The Wall film, but the footage was ultimately deemed unsuitable and canned.
In his afterword for his 2025 book Pink Floyd Shine On: The Definitive Oral History, Mark Blake characterises the group’s infighting thus: “If Pink Floyd were a family wedding, Nick Mason would be the toastmaster and the other two would be sat at opposite ends of the top table, complaining about each other to anyone who’ll listen.”
Keyboard player Rick Wright had sadly passed away due to lung cancer in 2008, so the “other two” were of course Waters and Gilmour. Warring stakeholders at the nub of Floyd’s creative flow, the pair somehow made one more Pink Floyd album together. But The Wall album and tour’s tensions had shook the band’s foundations, and that album, 1983’s The Final Cut, was deeply flawed, and a Waters solo record in all but name. He and Gilmour argued about its political stance. Gilmour thought several songs sub-standard, not good enough to release. Rick Wright didn’t play on the record, and Nick Mason had a restricted role, as much mediator as musician.
“We’d been arguing since 1974, for god’s sake,” Waters told Sylvie Simmons, talking about The Final Cut in 1999. “Too long. At a certain point you have to say this is not working, the point has come to break up.”
Waters was the instigator, and shortly after he left Pink Floyd in 1985 he began a legal battle with his former bandmates regarding their continued use of the name Pink Floyd and Pink Floyd material. Once more unto the breach…
Back in June 1981, when the original tour of The Wall ended at Earls Court, no one knew that it would be the last time Waters, Gilmour, Wright and Mason would perform on stage together for 24 years. But hell eventually froze over – for one night only. Appearing as Pink Floyd at the Live 8 benefit in Hyde Park, London on July 2, 2005, the four men seemed fully aware of the moment’s significance, Waters at times grinning broadly.
For a blissful 23 minutes, walls came tumbling down as they played Breathe (In The Air), Money, Wish You Were Here, Comfortably Numb… and no encores, then or since.
With special thanks to Mark Blake for material from his books Pink Floyd: Shine On – The Definitive Oral History, and Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story Of Pink Floyd. See markrblake.com for details.
