The live shows David Gilmour said needed to be perfect: “It was incredibly hairy”
Progressive rock giants Pink Floyd ended the 1970s in a vastly different place from the decade’s start, creatively and in their internal politics. Following original songwriter Syd Barrett’s departure due to mental health issues, the band spent several albums finding their feet with a string of loose, experimental albums and live shows centred on a heady ambience and nebulous synchronicity between all members.
As they closed their classic album run with 1979’s The Wall double LP, bassist Roger Waters emerged as the band’s principal ‘director’. He pushed their output away from jazzy space psychedelia toward highly personalised rock opera narratives.
Waters conceived of a highly theatrical approach to The Wall‘s accompanying 1980-81 tour. Wishing to translate the album’s conceptual theme of a rockstar’s psychological fortifications between themselves and the audience, the live show grew into a highly innovative multimedia spectacle. It involved props and projected animation from political satirist Gerald Scarfe, state-of-the-art pyrotechnics and lightning, and a 40-foot wall of 340 cardboard bricks slowly being assembled on stage before its dramatic collapse during ‘The Trial’s explosive crescendo.
Such a show demanded precise stage run and timing, leaving zero room for improvisation that formed a prominent feature in Pink Floyd concerts only a few years prior. One foot wrong and the whole drama could collapse, a reality not lost on guitarist David Gilmour.
“It was terrific fun, but in the beginning, it was incredibly hairy and difficult to do,” Gilmour told Guitar for the Practicing Musician in 1985. “The cueing was like in a huge scale theatre. After a while, I got to know everything like clockwork. You could never risk having a drink before the show—it was so precise that I couldn’t afford to let my attention wander.”
Adding, “I had to count the whole band in and do various directing chores. If you missed a cue, you’d have a whole film going that was out of sync. You couldn’t afford to make a mistake. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but it’s not something you’d want to do that much because it’s slightly restricting musically.”
Accidents did happen. On the tour’s first night at Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, the model Luftwaffe plane that flies over the audience toward the beginning of the show crashed and exploded into the wall as intended, but sparks flicked onto the stage curtains, causing a small fire. Due to the layers of misdirection and performative sleight-of-hand that coloured the show, including a ‘fake’ Pink Floyd wearing masks of the members that opened the event, Waters had to personally convince the evacuated audience that this was no joke.
Aside from some early mishaps, The Wall tour would play 31 dates across LA, New York, Dortmund, and London to critical praise and establish a new standard in the music industry for live production. While artistic satisfaction was at a high, band morale plummeted, and Waters arrived at each venue on separate trips and stayed in different accommodations from the band each night. Keyboardist Richard Wright would be fired but brought back as a salaried member, ironically resulting in a financial return as the production lost the band £400,000.
While Pink Floyd limped on with 1982’s The Final Cut, The Wall and its live extravaganza set a standard Waters would match with 1987’s KAOS on the Road tour and ultimately returned to for 1990’s one-off Berlin show and 2010s’ series of dates, surprising the O2 Arena audience with a Gilmour guest solo for ‘Comfortably Numb’.
