Inside Roger Waters’ 1990 Star-Studded Production of ‘The Wall,’ Including Tim Curry

Of all of Pink Floyd‘s contributions to music, ambitious concept album The Wall, released in 1979, remains among their most famous. The album follows jaded rock star Pink, who isolates himself by building a metaphorical wall.

Bassist Roger Waters wrote most of the album and based Pink on himself and former bandmate Syd Barrett. A film version, featuring a mix of live action and animation, was released in 1982.

After some elaborate stagings in the early ’80s, in which a wall was constructed then destroyed, Waters had decided he wouldn’t play the album live again, at least not with all the theatrics. There was one exception, however.

“If they ever take the wall down in Berlin,” Waters said in an interview in early 1989. “I’ll put it on there as an act of celebration of that bit of freeing of the human spirit.”

The wall came down that November.

The 1990 Berlin Staging

The concert was performed on July 21, 1990, eight months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, on the vacant land between Postdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate, a location that had served as “no man’s land” close to the wall.

Like previous stagings of the album, the concert featured a 550-foot-long and 82-foot-high wall being built brick by brick, then being torn down in the concert’s final climactic moments. Rather than Waters performing the whole thing himself, he put together a star-studded cast of musicians. Sinead O’Connor sang an extended version of “Mother” and Van Morrison took on “Comfortably Numb,” and rumor has it he refused to rehearse. Tim Curry appeared in a small role at the end as The Prosecutor, along with Thomas Dolby as the Teacher, and other guests included Cyndi Lauper, the Scorpions, Joni Mitchell, and more.

The concert played to a sold-out crowd of 350,000 people, and an additional 100,000 joined when the gates were opened, making it one of the biggest rock concerts in music history. The money from ticket sales was donated to the Memorial Fund for Disaster Relief, and Waters partially funded the concert himself.

A live album of the concert was released that September, as well as a filmed version. While grainy footage is available on YouTube, high-quality video can sometimes be found on streaming platforms.

In a 2010 interview, Waters commented on the way the album’s themes related to the Berlin Wall.

“It’s strange how the macro and the micro often mirror each other, so the story of one man and his failed relationships and his shame and his problems can somehow mirror a more macro kind of global-political-religious situation. So the wall is tremendously symbolic, maybe more so now, even, than it was when I wrote it.”

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