The touring version of Pink Floyd's The Wall is one of the most ambitious and complex rock shows ever staged. Cole Moreton, the only British journalist to go backstage, talks to Roger Waters in Toronto about the bewildering scale of the production - and how it was inspired by a loss he has never overcome: the death of his father at Anzio in 1944.
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| Roger Waters on stage in Toronto. His father's death inspired many of the songs he wrote for Pink Floyd, most notably on the 1979 album The Wall |
The way his son tells it, Eric Waters died on a battlefield in Italy on February 18 1944 because of the foolishness of the generals he served.
‘It was just before dawn one miserable morning in black ’44,’ sings Roger Waters, former member of Pink Floyd, in When The Tigers Broke Free, the song he wrote about that day.
‘The Anzio bridgehead was held for the price of a few hundred ordinary lives.’
Eric Fletcher Waters was the son of a County Durham coal miner and Labour Party activist. He won a scholarship to Durham University and became a schoolteacher. In 1939 he was a Communist and a committed pacifist and refused to take up arms, driving an ambulance during the Blitz instead. But he was changed by the nature and scale of the unfolding conflict. He signed up to fight against fascism.
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| Waters - on the knee of his mother, Mary - with his father, Eric and brother John, shortly before his father was killed |
That was how he came to be a second lieutenant in 8th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, part of a force that landed on the beaches at Anzio in February 1944 and was told to hold the town.
The 31-year-old’s name is one of 4,000 listed on a memorial to those who were killed in action at Anzio but whose bodies were never found. His youngest son Roger was four months old when it happened; just old enough to have appeared in a family picture with his father, taken shortly before Eric’s deployment to Italy.
By the late Forties, at school in Cambridge, Roger was becoming aware of the pain of his loss: ‘When men in uniform came to collect their children, that’s when I realised I didn’t have a father any more. I was very angry. It took me years to come to terms with it. Because he was missing in action, presumed killed, until quite recently I expected him to come home. The sacrifice of his life has been a great gift and a great burden to me.’
He means it has informed a huge amount of his work. His father’s death inspired many of the songs Waters, now 67, wrote for Pink Floyd, most notably on the 1979 album The Wall, which charts the decline and fall of a rock star so emotionally scarred by the loss of his father during the war that he retreats ever further behind a psychological barrier.
The live performances of The Wall in the early Eighties were few but became legendary. The album was used as the soundtrack to a film of the same name directed by Alan Parker in 1982, which included unforgettable animations of artwork by Gerald Scarfe, and starred Bob Geldof as the angst-ridden rock star Pink, a clear stand-in for Roger Waters.
The film opens with scenes of a soldier – Eric Waters – along with his men, storming a beachhead. As the men come under fire, the film traces a single Stuka bomber coming in for the kill. A bomb falls from the sky.
‘It was dark all around, there was frost on the ground when the Tigers broke free,’ sings Waters on the soundtrack. ‘And no one survived from the Royal Fusiliers Company C. They were all left behind, most of them dead, the rest of them dying. And that’s how the high command took my Daddy from me.’
The film later cuts to a young boy enviously watching other fathers pushing their sons on park swings while he sits on one alone, and at home wearing his father’s old uniform and cap in front of the mirror.
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| Doors within the brick wall open to show Waters sitting in a motel room |
Nearly 30 years after those scenes were shot, Waters is still mulling over his loss. Now he is about to pay homage to his father again, with the most ambitious performance of his long career.
Waters is standing alone on an unlit stage in an empty arena in Toronto. In a few hours he will attempt to surpass any of the concerts Pink Floyd did with a spectacular, supercharged version of The Wall that includes extraordinary 3D animations, explosions, a Stuka bomber that dives into the stage and – of course – a vast wall.
Black-clad stagehands will build it brick by giant brick during the show, erecting a huge divide – 35ft high and 240ft wide – between the audience and the musicians as they play. It is the first night of a world tour that has cost $60 million to stage.
‘I said I couldn’t do this,’ said Waters when the project was announced, but here he is.
The 20,000 empty seats will soon be filled. Fans are desperate to see a show that has not been performed since Waters recreated the original Floyd show for a one-off performance beside the remains of the Berlin Wall in 1990. But they also love The Wall dearly. It was the soundtrack to a generation, and if Waters gets it wrong tonight he will be stamping all over a lot of precious memories. People will feel betrayed. The pressure is on.
I’m in the privileged position of being the only British journalist allowed backstage. With showtime fast approaching, the star is taking a moment to himself in the auditorium, a still, slight figure in bomber jacket and jeans.
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| The wall is slowly built, hiding the band. Black-clad stagehands build it brick by giant brick during the show, erecting a huge divide - 35ft high and 240ft wide - between the audience and the musicians as they play |
He is startled to see Mark Fisher, the show’s designer, appear out of the wings with a journalist in tow, and swiftly disappears. Waters doesn’t like the press much and has a reputation for being difficult. He left Pink Floyd acrimoniously in 1985, after falling out with guitarist Dave Gilmour, and spent years in court fighting over who had the right to use the band’s name. He lost, and Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason and keyboard player Rick Wright continued recording and touring as Pink Floyd until 1994.
But The Wall is his to resurrect. It was written almost entirely by him and it’s personal, as a poem reproduced in the tour programme makes clear: ‘My father, distant now but live and warm and strong in uniform tobacco haze, speaks out. He says: “Stay not the passion of your loss, but rather keen and hone its edge, that you may never turn away, numb, brute, from bets too difficult to hedge.”’
The feelings for his father expressed in the poem have urged Waters to connect with the pain of others who have lost loved ones in conflict. Using Facebook, he has asked fans to post him their own memories and photographs, which will be projected onto the wall during the performance along with images of Eric.
The original production of The Wall was a remarkable achievement, establishing Pink Floyd as masters of stadium rock, but the new version goes way beyond it in both artistic and technological ambition.
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| Waters sings Mother, while a 34ft high inflatable looms behind him |
‘Everyone said that a show like this could never be toured,’ says Fisher, who also designed the original production. A year ago, when Waters asked him to get involved again, he dug out his original notes, drawings and photographs to remind him how the show had been staged back then.
In the intervening years, this bespectacled man with the look of a mad professor has become the most acclaimed designer of live shows on the planet, with recent credits including the sets for the Rolling Stones’ A Bigger Bang tour, U2’s 360-degree shows and the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics.
‘The technology has changed beyond measure,’ he says. ‘We had no mobile phones, no computers, let alone the internet in 1980 – but the rock ’n’ roll industry has also been transformed. Back then being able to move something this big from town to town was way beyond us. There were only individual promoters, not companies that arranged whole tours. We owned our own lighting equipment and took it with us because there were no companies that rented it. A complete industry has now emerged.’
That’s just as well, because once they get past this first night the road crew face 56 dates in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico before Christmas, followed by a European tour that will bring them to the London O2 in May and Manchester’s MEN Arena in June.
The production team of 66 people will travel from city to city in six buses. Ahead of them will go 21 articulated lorries carrying gear weighing 112 tons. It will be unloaded (and loaded again) at each venue by locally hired help, up to 80 people for each show.
With back-to-back concerts the schedule will be tight: the crew will arrive at a venue at dawn and work flat out to ensure a sound check can take place in the afternoon. Later, as soon as the last song ends, they will dismantle the set, load the trucks and be on their way by 2am. Four hours later – and up to 250 miles away – they will start to unload at the next arena.
‘The crew are the real heroes of this show,’ says Fisher. ‘They’re the ones who have to get up really early, put everything together, do the show, take it all down, get on the bus, have a beer, go to sleep, get up and do it all again.’
Because it’s the first night of the tour, the crew have had an extra day to set up at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto, home of the Maple Leafs ice hockey club.
They needed it, because this is no ordinary rock show – there’s the almost life-sized dive bomber, which has to fly over the crowd during the first song and explode on the stage; 30ft high inflatables, including a helium-filled pig, to be operated by wires from the stadium roof; and visuals inspired by the original work of Gerald Scarfe to be projected onto the finished wall in a high-definition format 10,000 pixels across.
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| An almost life-sized dive bomber flies over the crowd during the first song and explodes on the stage |
Meanwhile, the animations have taken the best part of a year to devise and the wall-builders rehearsed on their own in an empty stadium for a month before they practised with the lighting, sound and video crews for a week, then with the band for another week.
All the technicians have learned the script for the show and have to follow it with split-second timing to keep in sync with the computer-controlled elements – so there was considerable alarm yesterday when Waters decided to make a slew of changes.
‘I took a lot of notes from Roger,’ says Sean Evans, the show’s creative director, a cool young American whose natural calm seems to have been sorely tested.
‘There were a lot of changes to the lighting. He wanted to make it brighter and to stand in different positions during the performance. I haven’t had a day off for three months and I’m running on no sleep. I sat there with the lighting programmer and tweaked the entire show. I got back to the hotel at five in the morning.’
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| 'I said I couldn't do this,' said Waters when the project was announced |
It’s now three in the afternoon and Waters wants yet more changes. ‘For a first show this is pretty panicked,’ sighs Evans.
Mark Fisher has seen it all before. ‘It’s the nature of this kind of creative endeavour that you only see what you’ve got right at the last moment. The perfectionism that Roger has is what separates the people in this game who are very successful from the ones who never get to do shows like this. People like Roger, Bono, Mick Jagger, Lady Gaga, Madonna... they are obsessively perfectionist in what they do.’
Having said that, Waters also has a responsibility to make it work. ‘If we change lighting cues so that he can stand here, instead of there, he’d bloody well better remember that he changed his mind,’ says Fisher. Will he?
‘We’ll see.’
Fisher is just about to sit down to a late lunch in the temporary catering room at the back of the venue when two people suddenly come running at him from different directions.
‘Roger...’ says one breathlessly, ‘...wants you.’
Now it’s Fisher’s turn to sigh. He looks down at his food sadly. Radios crackle.
‘Now!’ says the other runner.
There’s no apology. The star demands it. So the designer stands up, brushes himself down and scrapes the rice and peas off his plate into the bin. Then he runs off to find Waters.
So why does Waters bother? Why try to reinvent something that was considered so effective at the time? The Wall was the show that defined Pink Floyd as the masters of stadium rock and included the band’s only UK No 1 single, Another Brick In The Wall (Pt II).
Waters had just finished touring a version of that other classic Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon in 2008 when his fiancée Laurie suggested he tackle the big one.
‘I said I couldn’t,’ Waters tells me. ‘But it wouldn’t go away and I wondered whether we could. It was incredibly difficult to do back in 1980 and we lost a lot of money, but I thought maybe it was possible now. Mark said technology had come a long way and that people spend a lot more on tickets than they used to. He thought we’d be able to break even, maybe even come out with some gravy. So I thought, “OK, we’ll do it.”’
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| The word 'Commerce' covers the wall |
So far, 110 gigs have been announced, in venues that hold around 20,000 people. The average cost of a ticket over both U.S. and European legs is £75. So although the cost of producing and touring the show is £37 million, there is a potential income of £165 million from ticket sales alone. That’s before fans have had the chance to buy the merchandising, including a tour programme for £11, a T-shirt for £19 or a limited-edition lithograph for £68.
A DVD of the tour also seems likely. And Waters has hinted at further dates in South America and Australia. So there could be quite a lot of ‘gravy’ to share between the artist and the tour promoter Live Nation.
Besides the loss of his father in childhood, the man who will later this evening sing the plaintive Mother lost his own, Mary, last year. She was 96.
‘I don’t want to whine about how miserable I was when I was a young man,’ says Waters. ‘The story is basically about a youngish man who walls himself in because of his fear of other people and relationships. I think it can be seen as an allegory for what goes on in the broader political scene around the world, with nations being encouraged by their leaders to be fearful of other nations. So we were encouraged by Bush and Blair to fear the “evil ones” and allow ourselves to be walled in by our ideologies and not listen to what’s going on with the other side.’
Heavy stuff. We’re about to see if it works.
The stadium is full now, mostly with men who look like they got into Pink Floyd at college a long time ago. The man in front of me, a powerfully built Canadian in a suit, says he hitchhiked all the way to see The Wall in Detroit in 1981. I don’t get a chance to ask what it was like because the lights go down, the roar goes up and the show begins, with a trumpet in the dark then some of the most famous power chords in rock. Cue explosions. The pyrotechnics are so blinding that most of us miss the fibreglass dive bomber that zooms over our heads and disappears in a ball of flame.
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| Digital 3D imaginary fills the screen behind the band during Run Like Hell |
This is dazzling stuff. The show consumes 3,000 amps of power, running through almost 20 miles of cable. There are 82 moving lights, some flying overhead like UFOs on racks in the roof, some beaming from the stage like Blitz searchlights.
Most are operated from the rear of the auditorium, where the video controller sits at a futuristic bank of computers. It takes three hard drives of two terabytes just to deliver the visuals for the show. The controller is working 23 projectors that beam high-definition images onto a giant circular screen at the back of the stage and on to the half-built wall.
A dozen stagehands will put up the 242 bricks in about 45 minutes. Each brick is a rectangular box of flat-pack cardboard like you might get in IKEA, fitted to a metal frame that telescopes upwards inside to hold it in place. The crew ride 30ft up into the air on hydraulic lifts to reach the top level.
‘The technique for building the wall and the machinery used are similar to 1980, but they’re just much better at building it now,’ says Waters.
‘Back then we were using sprocketed, rickety old 35mm cinema projectors and could only project an image 80ft wide in the middle of the wall. Now we’re projecting across 240ft. It’s like showing a movie on a football field. It’s pretty amazing. We could not possibly have produced the visual imagery that we’re producing for the show now.’
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| The end of the show, with children chosen from local choirs |
In 1980, cartoonist Gerald Scarfe’s assistants hand-painted images onto transparencies but this time around, the video team had the help of ten MacBook Pros. One sequence, for the song Mother, is made up of 4,000 frames, and each one of these took half an hour to render. It’s one thing putting the kit together, but you’ve got to have something to show with it, says Sean Evans.
‘We had some early meetings last year that were really panicked,’ says Evans. ‘Roger was really nervous, saying, “What are we going to do?”’
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| The album charts the decline and fall of a rock star so emotionally scarred by the loss of his father during the war that he retreats ever further behind a psychological barrier |
As the next song starts, we see what they came up with. The image of Second Lieutenant Eric Waters in uniform fills the giant disc behind Waters’ head. The details of his death are given. Then his picture gives way to those other casualties of war and conflict. There are military men and women who died in Iraq, Afghanistan, and battles going back to World War I.
Slogans and quotations in different languages are being projected all the time, including one from Dwight D Eisenhower that Waters says inspired his whole approach this time around: ‘Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.’
Finally, after three hours, the wall comes tumbling down, cardboard bricks everywhere, and nobody in the front row gets killed. Sean Evans says: ‘There was a tremendous last-minute panic. We had a lot of changes to deal with. You know Roger changed a bunch of his stage marks? Well, he missed a bunch of them during the show. You could see an empty special (spotlight) from time to time.’ He can laugh about it now. ‘That’s a first night, I guess.’
So what happens next?
‘There’s an intimate dinner with the band and Roger. He wants an immediate post mortem.’
No big rock ’n’ roll party then. But they’re going to have to do this at least 109 more times. The big rumour is that the former Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour will join Waters for one of the concerts. The two old enemies were reconciled in 2005 when Bob Geldof persuaded Waters and the three members of Pink Floyd to perform at the Live 8 concert in Hyde Park. Earlier this year Waters and Gilmour also played a four-song set at a charity gig in Oxford.
But there is a lot of packing and unpacking to do before then. The stadium is emptying now. The stage is full of shadows again.
And up there, the men in black who never sleep are already picking up the huge cardboard bricks, carefully and expertly, ready to rebuild The Wall.
The action that cost 7,000 lives and inspired The Wall
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| The Cassino War Memorial, Italy, which is inscribed with 'Waters E F' |
Field Marshall Albert Kesselring, commanding the Nazi troops in Italy, set up three defensive lines across the country, collectively known as the Winter Line, that frustrated the Allies’ advance in December 1943.
To break German defences, it was decided to land Allied troops north of the line. If the Germans committed to a response, it would weaken the line; if they ignored the landings, the Allies could push onwards to Rome.
Codenamed Operation Shingle, and commanded by American General John Lucas, the plan involved three amphibious landings, at Anzio and Nettuno, 35 miles from Rome.
Just over two infantry divisions were involved in the landing, with 40,000 troops and 5,000 vehicles carried on 238 landing craft.
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| The Cassino War Memorial |
British forces assaulted ‘Peter’ Beach, six miles north of Anzio, landing on January 22 1944. The initial landings were virtually unopposed.
Having taken the beachhead, General Lucas decided to consolidate his position rather than push on and retain the element of surprise – widely acknowledged as a serious tactical error.
The surrounding area consisted of reclaimed marshland, hemmed in by mountains, and was easily defensible once Kesselring had mustered all available forces.
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| Allied troops land at Anzio |
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| The Daily Mail reports fighting at Anzio, the day before Eric Waters died |
By Kesselring’s own estimation, an Allied offensive on January 23 would have succeeded; however Lucas delayed until the 30th, by which time his troops were outnumbered 100,000 to 76,000. Having failed to make any ground by February 22, he was relieved of his command.
It wasn’t until May that the Allies managed to sustain a successful offensive, eventually forcing the Axis troops out of Rome.
Operation Shingle had cost the lives of 7,000 Allied troops, and put paid to any hopes of a swift end to the Italian campaign.
From www.dailymail.co.uk
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