When Roger Waters Tore Down The Wall in Berlin
About this episode
The episode discusses Roger Waters' monumental performance of Pink Floyd's The Wall beside the Berlin Wall in 1990.
On July 21st, 1990, Roger Waters staged one of the most audacious rock spectacles ever attempted, mounting a full performance of Pink Floyd's The Wall on the no man's land beside the Berlin Wall, just months after that concrete scar through the city had actually come down. This wasn't some small club gig. Waters assembled a cast that reads like a fever dream of late twentieth century music and film, including Bryan Adams, Sinead O'Connor, Cyndi Lauper, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Thomas Dolby, and The Band, all performing pieces of the sprawling rock opera that Waters had originally written about isolation, trauma, and division. The location was deliberate and deeply symbolic. Waters chose the Potsdamer Platz, a stretch of land that had been a desolate buffer zone slicing Berlin in two for nearly three decades. Crews built a massive wall of styrofoam bricks across the stage, echoing the very structure that had just fallen, and as the show progressed performers and audience watched it topple piece by piece, mirroring the real history that had unfolded there only months before. The scale of the audience was staggering. Estimates suggest somewhere between three hundred fifty…
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