(Credits: Far Out / digboston)
Sun 8 March 2026 17:15, UK
It’s fairly easy to paint Roger Waters as the villain of Pink Floyd when looking at his final years with the band.
He may have come up with some of the finest lyrics that the rock world had ever seen up until that point, but it wasn’t going to be easy for him to dictate everything if he had to keep satisfying everyone’s opinion whenever they came to the studio with an idea. His musical visions had overpowered the rest of the band, but there were more than a few times when his attention to detail led him to speak his mind about those who weren’t doing their job as well as they could have.
But that wasn’t only something that he did in his solo career. Floyd would have made a great album when working on The Wall with every single member, but since Richard Wright was asked to leave by Waters halfway through the record, the whole album tended to feel more like a Roger Waters production that happened to feature the other members of the band working with him in some capacity.
And since The Final Cut sounded even colder and clinical than before, Waters figured that he needed to disassemble everything that the band stood for. But even when he started working things out on his own, The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking and Radio KAOS weren’t bringing the dramatic flair that he had back in the day. So if he wanted to get everyone on the same page again, it was probably a good idea to bring back the same stage setup that he had when he was with his old band.
After all, he had earned the rights to use The Wall in whatever way he saw fit, and when the Berlin Wall finally came down, his choice to put on the show in celebration was bound to be a once-in-a-lifetime event. Getting legends like Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, and members of The Band all in one place to work on the show seemed to be one of the greatest lineups of all time, but Sinead O’Connor was a lot more standoffish than the rest of the band were in Waters’s eyes.
O’Connor had already been riding high off the back of ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, but when she started singing on ‘Mother’, Waters felt that she wasn’t giving it everything she could. The version that ended up in the concert movie of that day came from the dress rehearsal, and judging by all of the other legends standing beside him, Waters felt that there was more than a little bit of ageism going on when she showed up.
As far as Waters could tell, O’Connor needed someone else who was around her age, and the thought of working with the biggest names in classic rock didn’t really have the same spark that she was hoping for, saying, “She was worried that she was doing something that wasn’t ‘street’ enough. And because it wasn’t ‘street’ enough, she came up with this brilliant idea: she said that I should employ Ice-T or one of those people to re-work one of my songs as a rap number! She was serious! She doesn’t understand anything. She’s just a silly little girl.”
Then again, O’Connor wasn’t the only person having trouble with what Waters was doing. Mitchell had talked about the whole thing being entirely unprofessional when she got there, and even though Waters did the best he could to make the best record that he could, there was no way of trying to please everybody, even if having someone like Tim Curry playing the prosecutor during ‘The Trial’ is absolutely perfect casting.
Regardless of the people that could be more curmudgeonly about the production, you can’t say the show didn’t do exactly what it was supposed to. This was a statement to the rest of the world that things were going to feel different, and since Waters had an ace up his sleeve one album later with Amused to Death, he was ready to get his fangs out and prove to everyone the kind of musician he was once again.