BBC World Service interview with Waters about the Berlin '90 show

Date:    Mon, 23 Apr 90 21:08 EDT
From: "Jeremy Crampton =Master Ultan=" <ELE@PSUVM.PSU.EDU>
Subject: Waters interview on Berlin concert
To: eclipse@beach.cis.ufl.edu


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.
