When Pink Floyd tricked their audience and replaced themselves on stage
Every great rock and roll band normally has their fair share of diva moments whenever they make it big. From insane rider requests to the dressing room having to be one specific temperature before they even walk into the building, various bands have had particular preferences regarding how they should be treated before they even get on the stage.
While Pink Floyd had reached the kind of stadium rock grandeur that most bands only dream of, the tour for The Wall actually featured a completely different group performing in their place.
Before we even touch the massive stage show for The Wall, it’s important to contextualise the time that Floyd were recording it. Having tried to work through their troubles with the loss of Syd Barrett, the band finally found a way of writing grand epics that could appeal to millions of people, sending them into the stratosphere with the album Dark Side of the Moon. The band were bigger than ever, the album was selling in droves, and the musicians were pissed.
Having a sense of confusion as to why this version of the band ended up becoming one of the biggest names in the world, Roger Waters spent the rest of his career dissecting the different pieces of humanity that troubled him, including paying tribute to his former bandmate on Wish You Were Here.
Still feeling guilty that Barrett couldn’t have shared in the group’s success, The Wall became a lavish conceptual production centred around a rock star who loses his way. Loosely based on the experiences of both Waters and Barrett, the album tells the story of a rock star slowly building up bricks to close himself off from reality before realising the error of his ways.
It was never going to be a case of just turning up and running through the songs. Everything about The Wall demanded theatre, and Waters knew that if the audience were going to buy into the story, they had to be disoriented from the very first second.
That opening bait-and-switch set the tone for everything that followed. Before a single note had properly settled, the crowd were already being asked to question what was real and what was performance, which is exactly where Floyd wanted them.
If you’re putting that much effort into making that kind of bold creative vision, the live show would have to be just as lavish. Bringing in some of the biggest names in stage production, the band turned in one of the biggest concert tours of their time, culminating in a wall being erected and torn down by the end of the night.
Even though the band had some ideas of how they would play into the onstage narrative, they decided to give their audiences a surprise as the show warmed up. Once the fans settled in to hear the first notes of the opening song ‘In The Flesh’, though, they were greeted by musicians that were clearly not Pink Floyd.
Driving the point home about the superficial side of rock and roll, the beginning of the show would feature a variety of surrogate musicians performing in the band’s place, each one of them wearing off-putting masks of every band member, which made them look like they were wearing the skin of the music legends.
Many of the band members shown would end up having a hand in the band’s subsequent live shows, with David Gilmour filling in for Snowy White and working with Waters on his later solo shows. Waters would even bring a proper surrogate band to the forefront when he performed the album live in Berlin, getting German rockers Scorpions to play the song to introduce the show.
While Waters eventually made the joke that he would much rather have the surrogate band play every show while he went on vacation, the introduction of the real band is practically a subtle comment on what The Wall was all about. Even though artists might try as hard as they can to relate to the audience, they know that they can put anyone on stage who semi-looks the part and gets an equal reaction from the crowd.
