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The German Wall
The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. Germany was reunited. In 1981, Pink Floyd travelled to the city of Dortmund to perform The Wall, a rock musical about war and separation.

This show was mastered by the fan collective known as the Progressive Rock Remaster Project who share their shows for free. Below is a very detailed account by the PRRP team.

In 1977 Pink Floyd was one of the most successful bands in England. Albums like Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and Animals had brought them money, fame and influence… but all was not well. Both artistic and financial problems existed. There have been many explanations given for how the next project The Wall developed but this one comes from Roger Waters in an interview with the BBC in 1990:

"The album and the concert developed out of me doing a tour with Pink Floyd 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 you 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."

As reported by Povey and Russell in their book, In The Flesh, despite their popularity, Pink Floyd also had serious financial difficulties at the end of the Animals tour. At that point, Waters had two new projects for the band to consider: The Pros and Cons of Hitch-Hiking and The Wall. For both artistic and financial reasons, The Wall was chosen with expectations of an album, a tour and a movie. Recording began in November 1978 and took one full year using both Superbear studios in France and the Los Angeles Production Workshop. Though the general concept for The Wall and its musical components were the creation of Roger Waters, Bob Ezrin was asked to join the project and help with the production of the show.

The Wall is thought to have many themes and messages but one of the most prominent is the impact of war on survivors who have lost family members to its violence. Though Waters has denied that The Wall is autobiographical, the loss of his own father during World War II seems to be portrayed in one of the first scenes of the show. Phil Rose, in his book Which One's Pink? notes this to be one of the first "Bricks in the Wall". For the main character -Pink- the subsequent inability to form close, mature relationships is thought by many to be the main issue of the story and has its roots in the loss of his father at an early age.

This emotional trauma not only affects Pink but also his mother. She is portrayed as over protective of her son, the only remaining member of her family. Yet, at other times she is distant and aloof as Pink is also a constant reminder of the loss of her husband. The song "The Thin Ice" shows how this significant loss is further compounded by the mother's attempts to protect her son from grief. In reality, this is just a failure on her part to help him mourn the loss of his father. Rather than understand that his father is dead, Pink has no choice but to think that he has abandoned his family. "Daddy, what d'ya leave behind for me?" is Pink's expression of anger at his lack of understanding of the situation.

With no father, Pink grows up looking for replacement father figures. Sadly, the school master not only fails to fulfill this role as a nurturing male role model, he actually compounds Pink's fragile emotional state with ridicule and criticism… "Another Brick in the Wall". The lack of connection to others stems in part from the lack of connection to his father and is repeatedly symbolized by an incomplete telephone call. As Rose explains, there is then a progression in this emotional pathology: The remorse that Pink feels over the (eventually acknowledged) loss of his father to the evils of Fascist Germany is transferred into his own Fascist hatred and is directed at his audience. The importance of this single loss and the futility of war are further emphasized by Waters by the inclusion of the song "When the Tigers Broke Free" in the movie version of The Wall and the development of the next album, The Final Cut.

It is quite interesting that Pink Floyd chose Dortmund, Germany to be one of only four cities in the world that would see a live Wall performance. Though the show describes the development of an emotional and psychological wall, at the time of these Dortmund shows, the German people were coping with a physical wall -the Berlin Wall. It is ironic that on July 21, 1990, Roger Waters returned to Germany to perform The Wall once again in celebration of the fall of this barrier and the reuniting of the country.

The show must have been difficult for the German audience on a number of levels. Again, the death of Pink's (Water's) father at the hand of the German army is made clear at the beginning of the show. With the multiple psychological difficulties for Pink clearly developing after this event, blaming the Nazi's for Pink's dysfunctional life is certainly understandable. Gerald Scarfe's animation sequences during the show only reinforce the destructiveness of war and the Nazis as one of the clear villains of the story.

The Marching Hammers, the Nazi-like arm bands, the morphing of a dove into a menacing German eagle and Pink's own transformation into a Hitleresque figure during "In The Flesh" are just some examples of this clear portrayal of the German army as evil. It is therefore also ironic that the Red Army Choir was used on stage during the 1990 performance. And yet, the audience viewing these shows must have understood Water's message since most of them in 1981 would have had no memory of a unified Germany and therefore would likely empathize with Pink (and Waters) when presented a story about separation and barriers.

There were 31 total Wall shows and eight of them occurred in Germany. The show presented here is the sixth German performance and was seen on February 18th, 1981. We were fortunate to obtain both a CD copy of the master tape and copies of pictures taken at that event. In addition, during each Wall show, Roger Waters would present a unique dialogue before the song "Run like Hell". On this night, Roger says: "Thank you, thank you. Do you like our pig? He doesn't seem to like you very much. Go on, piss off pig. We're not very keen on animals... the only good animal is a dead animal! In a minute, we're going to play a number for all the asteroids in the audience. It's called 'Run Like Hell,' and we can all CLAP, OUR HANDS! And it's gonna be fun!"

Overall, the remaster and artwork project turned out well in our estimation. In fact, with the reduction of noise and improvement in clarity the attentive listener may even hear the click of a near-by camera, especially during the song "Goodbye Cruel World". Was it the man who took the pictures we used? We will never know… Maybe!

"Between a Wall and a Hard Place", we think, symbolizes what The Wall is all about...the fact that we all live our lives with our backs against a wall, even if it is one that we build ourselves. Waters built a wall around himself to get away from the memories of his lost father, his ever-growing uneasiness with the huge crowds at rock concerts and the broken relationships brought forth by incessant writing and touring. In the end, he either had to express this on the famous double album or just go mad.

The world is a hard place, and we all build walls to shelter from its realities, but if we hide behind them for too long, or too well, we end up alone. We all have to choose between a wall and a hard place. Most of us choose the hard place because, at least, we are not alone in it ! "The Wall" was an exorcism of sorts for Roger Waters and expressing his anger in that way must have been quite liberating for him, but in the process he built another wall between his vision and his band mates, one that destroyed what had been, up until then, a wonderful association. "The Wall" was to be the end of an era. - PRRP

Master Audience Recording>unknown transfer(s) to SHN>PRRP ReMastering

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Click on the highlighted tracks to download the MP3s (these are high quality stereo MP3s - sample rate of 192 kibit/s). As far as we can ascertain, this recording has never been officially released.

These tracks are no longer available for download. Kindly email us at mybigo@bigozine.com if you want to download these tracks at a later time.

	Disc I
Track 101	Master of Ceremonies (2.4MB)
Track 102	In The Flesh? (4.0MB)
Track 103	The Thin Ice (3.7MB)
Track 104	Another Brick In The Wall Pt 1 (6.2MB)
Track 105	The Happiest Days Of Our Lives (2.3MB)
Track 106	Another Brick In The Wall Pt 2 (8.7MB)
Track 107	Mother (10.8MB)
Track 108	Goodbye Blue Sky (5.4MB)
Track 109	Empty Spaces (3.5MB)
Track 110	What Shall We Do Now? (2.6MB)
Track 111	Young Lust (7.3MB)
Track 112	One Of My Turns (5.2MB)
Track 113	Don't Leave Me Now (5.7MB)
Track 114	Another Brick In The Wall (Pt. 3) (1.7MB)
Track 115	The Few Last Bricks (4.7MB)
Track 116	Goodbye Cruel World (3.0MB)
	Disc II
Track 201	Hey You (6.6MB)
Track 202	Is There Anybody Out There? (4.4MB)
Track 203	Nobody Home (5.5MB)
Track 204	Vera (1.8MB)
Track 205	Bring The Boys Back Home (1.7MB)
Track 206	Comfortably Numb (10.1MB)
Track 207	The Show Must Go On (3.6MB)
Track 208	Master of Ceremonies (3.5MB)
Track 209	In The Flesh (5.9MB)
Track 210	Run Like Hell (10.2MB)
Track 211	Waiting For The Worms (6.1MB)
Track 212	Stop (730k)
Track 213	The Trial (8.9MB)
Track 214	Outside The Wall (4.2MB)

Lineup:
Roger Waters - bass, vocals
David Gilmour - guitar, vocals
Nick Mason - drums

The Surrogate Band:
Andy Brown - bass
Andy Roberts - guitars
Willie Wilson - drums
Peter Wood - keyboards
Rick Wright - keyboards [Mr Wright was a paid employee after leaving the band]

Backing vocals:
Joe Chemay
Jim Farber
Jim Haas
John Joyce

You can buy Pink Floyd's live Wall album, Is There Anybody Out There: The Wall Live 1980-1981, here.