Waters interview on Berlin concert

BBC World Service interview with Waters about the Berlin '90 show
Mon, 23 Apr 1990 21:08

Hi Floydians..re the recent discussion of Waters at "the Wall" the BBC World Service just broadcast an interview with Waters.

He's doing it with some guy called Group Captain Cheshire, who was a bomber pilot who bombed Berlin, but who has since worked mainly for charities, and who has a charity called the World Memorial Disaster Relief fund or something. The BBC said it could be the biggest rock concert ever.

I managed to record most of it, so here ya go..

RW: Well, on the 21st of July, ten o'clock GMT I and a band are going to be performing The Wall at the Potsdammerplatz which is the no-mans- land between East and West Berlin, on a very grand scale. We're building a wall which is 600 feet long and 60 feet high, and using big inflatables and three military bands, one from India, one from Australia, and one from Canada, the Red Army Choir, in aid of the Memorial Fund for disaster Relief.

BBC: For people who don't know, it's such a big album in the West, The Wall and it was such a success for PF, for people who don't know what The Wall is all about, tell us briefly about that.

RW: The album and the concert developed out of me doing a tour with PF in 1977 with an album called Animals, that we had out then. We toured America and played only in large outdoor stadiums, lots and lots of them, finishing up in the Olympic Stadium in Montreal. And I loathed it, I thought it was disgusting in every way, and I kept saying to people 'I'm not really enjoying this, you know, there is something very wrong with this'. And the answer to that was 'oh really? Yeah well, do yo know we grossed over four million dollars today' and this went on more and more, 'do you know how many people--98,000 people here' and it began to dawn on me that the only thing anybody was interested in was the grosses. Which is not why I got into music really. And so at a certain point something in my brain snapped, and I thought this is awful, and so I developed the idea of doing a rock concert where we built a wall across the front of the stage, that divided the audience from the performers, because it was a wall that I felt was really there, and that was not a physical wall, an invisible one.

BBC: Where's the money going to go to?

RW: Well it goes towards Leonard Cheshire's Fund, the World War Memorial Fund, for disaster relief, and it goes toward the lump sum of 500 million that he hopes to accumulate, and it would go to Armenia or Montserrat, or wherever, wherever there is a need.

BBC: Ex-Pink Floyd member Roger Waters talking about his mega concert this July in Berlin in aid of international disaster relief.