“I had a huge cue sheet up on my amps. Except for the Comfortably Numb solo, there were no moments where I could say, ‘Forget everything. Just play’”: For David Gilmour, Pink Floyd’s wildly ambitious the Wall tour was a blast – and a challenge

In a way, the origins of Pink Floyd's original live performances of The Wall in 1980 and 1981, at that time the most ambitious rock concerts ever staged – at least on the arena scale – are a bit ironic.

The concept of The Wall itself was meant to symbolize the great chasm Floyd's bassist and chief lyricist, Roger Waters, felt between himself and the band's fans – especially during the band's previous tours of enormous football stadiums.

Nonetheless, it could be argued that the The Wall tour only made it bigger. After all, what other band of that era could stage such a show? Complete with the absolute cream of the crop of visual and practical effects of the time, the production was hammered home with an enormous, literal wall.

In any case, the show was quite the spectacle, and added many new elements to the workload of not only the band's crew, but the band members themselves.

Reflecting on the experience in a 2000 interview with Guitar World, David Gilmour lauded the show as being “terrific fun,” adding that it was “really an achievement for everyone involved, particularly Roger.”

With that said, though, Gilmour also found himself playing a much more regimented role in the band's live shows than he had previously.

“I had to take on the role of music director and deal with a lot of musical details onstage so that Roger didn’t have to think about that,” he said. “It was really tough at first. Later on it got a little easier, once we all got into it.”

On the intricacies of his duties, the guitarist explained, “I had a huge cue sheet up on my amps, because we had all these cues coming up on monitors or on screen, and there were different DDL settings which I had to transmit with very primitive equipment to all the delay lines onstage. Very tricky.

“Except for the Comfortably Numb solo, there were virtually no moments where I could say, ‘Forget everything. Just play.’ You know?

“It was very rigid,” Gilmour went on. “On all the previous tours – Wish You Were Here, Dark Side of the Moon – there were moments that could be extended longer or made shorter if you liked. The Wall, quite reasonably, because it was a different kind of project, didn’t have that.”

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The first nights of tours always bring kinks that need to be ironed out, hiccups that resolve themselves as the show gets rolling. The Wall, as Gilmour said, was no different, as he juggled with his many new music director-esque duties.

As if that weren't enough, though, the guitarist, his bandmates, and the crowd were all also treated to a, shall we say, fiery, surprise on opening night.

Speaking to Guitar World in 2000, Roger Waters remembers, “Andy Bown and Snowy [White, who served, respectively, as the band's bass and second guitar players on the tour] and those guys did their thing,” Waters recalls, “And then this drape went up to reveal us. Fireworks had gone off beforehand and one of the Roman candles had gotten into this drape and set light to it.

“I was singing away and I kept hearing this noise and I thought, ‘God, the P.A.’s going off.’ 'Cause I could hear this strange noise. Eventually I looked up and saw one of the riggers, a guy called Rocky, leap about six feet through the air, with no safety harness or anything on him, from one drape to another.

“He had a fire extinguisher in one hand and he was trying to put the thing out,” Waters continued. “And then lumps of burning drape the size of tennis balls started hitting the stage all around us. And the auditorium was beginning to fill up with smoke.”

As Waters tells it, it took a few minutes for all involved – absorbed as they were in the show – to fully comprehend what was happening.

“I stopped singing and just shouted ‘stop!’ through the PA,” Waters recounted. “Throughout rehearsals, the guys out at the mixing console were so used to me constantly yelling ‘stop’ – if something wasn’t right, you know. So when I did it during the actual show they must have all thought they were hallucinating. ’Cause they just carried on. So I shouted ‘stop!’ again. This time, they said, ‘Okay, he really does seem to be saying stop. I guess we have to.’

“I said, ‘Look, we’re going to have to lower this drape, because we’ve got a fire. Everything’s cool. We’ll put it out, go back five minutes and pick up from there.’ Which we did. But it was quite a hair-raising beginning to the first show.”