Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (58 page)

Two years before, when asked if he’d ever stage a production of
The Wall
again, Waters said no, but quipped that he ‘might do it outdoors if they ever take the wall down in Berlin’. News of this comment found its way back to Worwood and Cheshire. ‘I said I would do what I could, but I thought it was unlikely that it would come off,’ said Waters. ‘This was before Berlin opened up and so we were looking at other venues.’ In the meantime, Waters had been in discussions with producer Tony Hollingsworth, who had recently helped oversee the Nelson Mandela seventieth birthday tribute concert, an event which had been broadcast in sixty-seven different countries. Hollingsworth was now heading up a conference entitled ‘Looking East’, which aimed to bring Western entertainers to Eastern Bloc countries. While Waters was pondering the logistics of staging
The Wall
on New York’s Wall Street or in Arizona’s Grand Canyon, they received the unexpected news in November that the wall was officially coming down.

Ticket prices alone wouldn’t cover the estimated $8 million needed to stage the show, and Hollingsworth was called in to produce the event for a global TV audience. As well as a planned live album and video, the idea was also sold to TV, with the show eventually broadcast live by satellite to thirty-five countries. Waters also put up his own $500,000 publishing advance. He planned to perform
The Wall
with a supporting cast of special musical guests in place of Pink Floyd. It was also agreed that all participants would donate their royalties from the live album and video to the fund. Despite rumours beforehand, Pink Floyd were not invited, though, according to Nick Mason, Waters made a point of sending invites to all of their ex-wives.

The Floyd’s former set designers, Jonathan Park and Mark Fisher, were brought back to help stage the show. The wall itself was now 82ft high, 591ft long and constructed out of 2,500 fire-retardant bricks. Three cranes were positioned behind it to help with the dismantling during the show. One of the cranes also supported a giant-sized version of Gerald Scarfe’s schoolteacher puppet. Scarfe, meanwhile, pitched in with a new design: a giant inflatable pig’s head with spotlights for eyes.

Even by Pink Floyd standards, this was a grandiose project. In addition, before work could begin on Potsdamer Platz, which was essentially ‘no man’s land’ on the East Berlin side of the wall, the authorities had to scan the area for unexploded mines and bombs lying dormant since the Second World War. During their examination, they discovered a mound of earth that had once housed the main entrance to one of Hitler’s bunkers. ‘It’s an extraordinary, historic piece of land,’ raved Waters.

However, with just eight weeks to go and with countless TV deals in place, the only act definitely confirmed to appear were German heavy rock band the Scorpions. Waters called an emergency meeting and agreed to accompany Tony Hollingsworth on a talent-scouting trip to Los Angeles.

Ex-Bleeding Heart Band member Paul Carrack was now playing in Genesis’ bass guitarist Mike Rutherford’s side project, Mike and The Mechanics, when he took the call. ‘Roger gave me this twenty-minute spiel about how it was going to be the biggest concert of all time, and so on,’ recalls Carrack. ‘Finally, he came to the point and asked me: did I have Huey Lewis’s phone number. I did and I gave it to him, then asked, “What about me, Roger?” and he just said, “You’re not famous enough!” There was no attempt to spare my feelings,’ laughs Carrack. ‘In fact, Roger probably took great delight in telling me that. I thought it was perfectly reasonable, though. Nobody did know who the bloody hell I was.’

Progress was slow, though, as various musicians, including Neil Young and Eric Clapton, were unable to commit, and others agreed in principle but failed to respond later. Nevertheless, with Hollingsworth’s diligence, Waters’ unswerving self-belief and Cheshire’s saint-like reputation, they were able to commandeer the use of two US military helicopters to recreate the intro for ‘Another Brick in the Wall Part 2’, a hundred-strong Soviet Army marching band and the Rundfunk East Berlin Radio Orchestra and choir. Six weeks before the show, when builders working on the site threatened to down tools unless they were paid the $200,000 they were owed, in cash, within an hour, Cheshire was able to sweet-talk a London bank into helping them out.

However, the retired group captain felt compelled to intervene when Waters proposed ‘buzzing’ the audience with two Second World War bombers. ‘He felt bad about it, knowing he’d once been up there, dropping bombs on the poor bastards,’ Waters told
Q
magazine. ‘He said, “You can’t do that!” ’ Waters reluctantly backed down.

On the night, the cast of supporting extras included, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson and Rick Danko from The Band, Van Morrison, Bryan Adams, Cyndi Lauper, Sinead O’Connor and Joni Mitchell. Actors Tim Curry and Albert Finney played the prosecuting lawyer and judge for ‘The Trial’ (though Sean Connery had been one of the first choices for the Finney role until Waters vetoed it), Marianne Faithfull (playing Pink’s mother), Jerry Hall (as the groupie in ‘One of My Turns’), German torch singer Ute Lemper (as Pink’s wife) and Thomas Dolby, as the schoolteacher. And, lurking behind the wall, Paul Carrack.

‘A week before the gig, Roger rang me up again,’ says Paul. ‘They were already over there rehearsing, and I think they were having one or two problems with the special guests. Roger said, “I want you to listen to these six songs and learn them, just in case.” And then, two days before it all kicked off, I got the call to go over.’

Leonard Cheshire officially opened the 21 July show with the blowing of a First World War whistle. From here on, it was straight into ‘In the Flesh’, Waters’ spoof heavy metal song performed by the Scorpions. Midway through ‘The Thin Ice’, disaster struck when the sound blew out, leaving Waters alone and unheard on stage. Showing a welcome and all-too-rare glimpse of humour, he broke into a tap dance before the sound resumed and they jumped straight to ‘Another Brick in the Wall Part 2’, with an irritating guest vocal from eighties pop star Cyndi Lauper, and some extended soloing from Bleeding Heart Band guitarists Andy Fairweather-Low, Snowy White and Rick di Fonzo. Sadly, the presence of so many satellite TV links to the site meant that sound problems and power failures persisted. Meanwhile, Sinead O’Connor emoted wildly on ‘Mother’, Joni Mitchell tried hard on ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’, Jerry Hall fouled up the ‘Wow, what a fabulous room . . .’ routine as the air-headed groupie on ‘One of My Turns’, and Van Morrison growled his way through an edgy version of ‘Comfortably Numb’, with support from various members of The Band; the Dylan-approved folk-country rockers that had wowed all of Pink Floyd back in the early seventies.

Huey Lewis was nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, faithful understudy Paul Carrack sang ‘Hey You’ from behind the wall itself. ‘Had I known I’d have offered to wear a paper bag over my head,’ he jokes. ‘It was very scary, it really
was
the biggest gig of all time. If the cameras could have seen me, they’d have caught my knees knocking.’

Staying faithful to the original stage show, much of the original drama was maintained, despite the ever-changing cast of special guests. Using the wall again as a giant screen on which to project images, Waters updated the original films. During ‘Bring the Boys Back Home’ the wall showed a roll call of all those soldiers that had died during the war. However, more than one eyewitness pointed out the uncomfortable parallels between the scenes later in the show, when rock star Pink imagines himself as a fascist dictator, and events in Germany’s still recent past. Seeing Waters, in military uniform and black sunglasses, jackbooting and ranting through ‘Waiting for the Worms’ (‘Would you like to see our coloured cousins home again?’), might have stirred some disturbing memories for those old enough to remember life in Berlin before the wall. ‘Everybody understands that that’s satire,’ claimed Waters.

The audience were nevertheless united for ‘The Trial’ and the closing chant of ‘tear down the wall’, the Berliners imbuing the words with more personal sentiment than the standard Pink Floyd fan. In this context, the choice of the
Radio K.A.O.S.
ballad ‘The Tide is Turning’ - a song celebrating faith in the human race - as the show’s finale made sense. The official attendance figure for the gig was given as 200,000, with others maintaining that there were twice that number on site, with an estimated billion more watching on TV around the world.

In the aftermath, one rumour began circulating that the whole show had to be re-staged due to those earlier power failures; something Paul Carrack staunchly denies. However some parts had to be repeated for the video cameras. While most of the guests obliged, Sinead O’Connor refused to re-sing her performance of ‘Mother’, resulting in her dress rehearsal performance being used in the final video.

‘Everyone was fabulous to work with,’ said Waters later. ‘Bryan Adams, Van Morrison, Cyndi Lauper, all brilliant. All except Sinead O’Connor.’

The forthright Irish singer-songwriter had also, according to Waters, complained about the lack of ‘young people on the show’, and suggested that Waters should have hired ‘Ice-T or one of those people to rework one of my songs as a rap number’.

Yet still the lack of the Pink Floyd brand proved a problem. Released in September, neither the commemorative live album nor video did the level of business Waters or Leonard Cheshire might have hoped for. The album scraped into the Top 30 in the UK, but remained outside the American Top 50, generating a fraction of the anticipated amount for the Memorial Fund for Disaster Relief. Asked for their opinions on the staging of
The Wall
in Berlin, Pink Floyd were guarded, if quietly critical: ‘I was rather entertained by it,’ insisted Nick Mason. ‘If I had a criticism it would have been that I’d have liked a different guitarist.’ Gilmour was sniffier: ‘I suspect that the motivation for putting
The Wall
show on in Berlin was not charitable.’

In October 1987, Waters had taken The Bleeding Heart Band to Nassau to record songs for a follow-up to
Radio K.A.O.S
. His plan then had been to revive the character of Billy and to continue the narrative. The working title for this new album was
Amused to Death
, taken from a book titled
Amusing Ourselves to Death
by Neil Postman, a critique of television’s hold over the Western world. Rumours circulated that Gerald Scarfe had designed an album sleeve, featuring three figures (the current members of Pink Floyd?) floating in a Martini glass. Although Scarfe denies this.

Work resumed on the album after the
Radio K.A.O.S.
tour, and in fits and starts throughout 1988 and the early part of 1989, until news filtered out that Waters had put the album on hold. Around the same time, rumours circulated that he was also working on an opera based on the history of the French Revolution. It would be a further fourteen years before that came to completion.

Mindful of
Radio K.A.O.S.
’s poor sales, EMI were, it transpired, in no mood for
Radio K.A.O.S. Part 2.
Waters’ relationship with the label had also soured during the legal war with Pink Floyd, as he believed that the company would always be more supportive of Pink Floyd to the detriment of his solo career. Following the Berlin Wall show, Waters would withdraw from public view, while dealing with upheaval in his professional and personal life.

In 1990, he appointed a new manager, Mark Fenwick, part of the Fenwick’s department store dynasty, who had previously co-run the EG Records label, home to Robert Fripp and Brian Eno. That same year, Waters left EMI and signed a new worldwide deal with his US label Columbia. A year later he turned up for his first live performance since Berlin, playing ‘Another Brick in the Wall Part 2’ and other Floyd classics at the Guitar Legends concert in Seville. There was further turmoil in his private life. Waters left his second wife Carolyne Christie after sixteen years together. He had, he claimed, met someone else, American actress Pricilla Phillips. Waters would divorce Carolyne in 1992 and marry Pricilla a year later. The two also would go on to have a son, Jack Fletcher, together in 1997.

In August 1992,
Amused to Death
, the product of several years’ work in ten different recording studios, was released. It arrived five years after
Radio K.A.O.S.
, the longest gap between albums in Waters’ career. The Floyd-in-a-Martini-glass cover had been dumped for a picture of an ape staring at a single eye peering back at him through a TV set. The sleeve mirrored the theme of the album, and the thinking behind Neil Postman’s book. While some of the remaining ideas dated back to 1987, Waters had revised many of the songs following specific world events. The most topical themes were the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square and the first Gulf War, both of which had been heavily televised. Waters was in his element.

‘I’ve always been intrigued by this notion of war as an entertainment to mollify the folks back home, and the Gulf War fuelled that idea,’ he explains. ‘
Amused to Death
deals with the idea of whether TV is good or bad.’ As a positive, Waters recalled a TV documentary about the First World War (‘an example of television taking its responsibilities seriously’), in which veterans from the conflict recounted their experiences. The album’s first track, ‘The Ballad of Bill Hubbard’, featured dialogue from the programme, in which an old soldier, Alf Razzell of the Royal Fusiliers, can be heard detailing his failed attempts to save a comrade’s life.

For much of the album, Waters focused on the negative effects of the medium. ‘I had this rather depressing image of some alien creature seeing the death of this planet and coming down in their spaceships and finding all our skeletons sitting around our TV sets,’ he announced. The televising of the Gulf War on CNN had demonstrated the power of the global communications network, and Waters was not impressed. Also in his sights was US President George Bush Snr (‘I get gobsmacked when I hear him saying that God was on their side during the Gulf War’), whose predecessor Ronald Reagan had been given a thorough drubbing on
Radio K.A.O.S
.