Late autumn in 1979, after school one day, Nigel said we should go to his house because his dad had a copy of the new Pink Floyd album. I wasn’t a Floyd fan - I was just starting to explore heavy metal and my sole album purchase at that point was by ELO, but it was new, it was a DOUBLE ALBUM and it had RUDE BITS! We sat and listened, and were confused, stunned, and awestruck.
I slapped a copy onto a tape (TDK AD-90) and since then I’ve always had at least one copy of ‘The Wall’. It was the first CD I purchased (that tape was pretty ragged by then), and of course there’s the film (VHS then DVD), the Berlin version (CD & VHS off the telly), a photo book of the film…
Within days of us first listening to the album, ‘Another Brick In The Wall Part II’ was a hit single. Was there any school in Britain that didn’t have a teacher who looked and sounded like The Schoolmaster as portrayed on the album?
Being all of 12 years old, I didn’t get to go to the concerts in Earls Court, nor in my 20s could I make it to Berlin for the somewhat bizarre all-star rendition (performed in the wrong order due to a computer malfunction). Then when Waters announced the 2010/11 tour of The Wall, I was aghast to discover that he wouldn’t be playing Europe until after we’d moved to New York, and the New York shows had already sold out. Luckily for us, a third date was added and I got us tickets.
Madison Square Garden is big - the same size as the O2 Arena in London, but feels more intimate than the O2. It’s the place where the wrestling match is taking place at the start of ‘Highlander’. For a sports hall, it also has excellent acoustics and is a great place for a gig. We had seats about half way back on the floor, which gave us an excellent view of the video and puppet madness.
The gig started with the wall built up on either side of the stage, with a brick wall image projected on it. The wall stretched up into the seating, and the projections ran the full length, which was impressive. At the centre of the stage was a dressmaker’s dummy, which seemed odd. The band kicked off without Waters, to play ‘In The Flesh?’ and Waters arrived in full black leather secret-police outfit, whereupon a stage hand helped him very carefully take it off and hang it up on the dummy.
And then a plane crashed into the stage. Apparently it was a half-sized Stuka Dive Bomber, but all I know is it scared the hell out of us as it screamed over head with flames shooting out of it.
From then on it was a combination of visuals from the film and new material with a far more paranoid anti-government and anti-war slant than previous iterations of The Wall. I still have the giant red confetti in religious and monetary shapes that fell on us at one point.
The only technical mishap was when the Wife puppet misbehaved and wouldn’t deflate properly. Luckily it was just before the break so it was allowed to hang limp by the side of the stage until the band had left.
The central flowers are from the original tour and film, but the stems running along the wall are new for the tour There was a lot of this sort of thing, that worked seamlessly.
Yes, there was a flying pig, and the fall of the wall at the end was gob-smacking, as were many of the animations. The wall was completed in the first half of the show, so from then on the band was in front of the wall or visible through holes, or just playing unseen. There is a film of the tour, which if you can ignore the self-indulgent non-musical sections really shows the level of sophistication the staging reached. It was an incredible night out and one of the best gigs I’ve ever witnessed.
The blurred photos were taken by me, and the sharp ones by Janet
The optical illusion of the banners moving backwards and forwards was excellent.
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That is a show I would love to have seen. I was really into that album in my student years and beyond. I had a tape of it and got the live CD a while back. It's been a while since I saw the film. I think the Berlin show was just as I was about to come back from my two years in southern Germany and some people I knew went. I did get to see some of the stage props at the Pink Floyd exhibition at the V&A. That was really cool. I have just never managed to see any of the band play live.
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The film of the show is really good. Worth picking up. And an interesting contrast to the original film. If you can stand listening to it all twice :)
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