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Fact #159421

When:

Short story:

Pink Floyd perform The Wall for the first of five nights at Nassau Coliseum, Uniondale, Long Island, New York.

Full article:

Jill Furmanovsky (photographer) : I was in New York to shoot stuff for the first issue of a new British rock magazine, The Face, so I was covering the arrival of Madness in America, and in a ten-day period I also did The Jam, the Specials and Pink Floyd.

I’d done a lot of work with Pink Floyd in previous years – for the Dark Side Of The Moon Tour they’d hired me as their photographer - but The Wall was under great wraps of secrecy. Their usual art director, Storm Thorgerson, was not involved in The Wall at that time, it was designed by Gerald Scarfe, and even though I’d been helping Gerald Scarfe by supplying him with images to draw from, I couldn’t penetrate the veil of secrecy.

There were very peculiar vibrations in the Pink Floyd organisation at that time, which I think was an indication that Roger (Waters) had taken this project as his baby and was pulling it away from everybody else. I wasn’t aware of the full shenanigans that were going on, but subsequently it all came out.

So for the first time I found myself an unwelcome presence. I got there and asked if I could photograph them, I was expecting a big welcome but on the contrary, I got this very cagey response. So I found myself a victim of Roger’s purge of all the people he’d worked with in the past, which is the nicest way I can put it.

When the management were trying to block me, I rang Dave Gilmour, because I knew where he was, and he immediately got me a crew pass. He warned me that photography had become a bit of an issue, so I should be a bit wary, and indeed when I got to the soundcheck, the manager, Steve O’Rourke, gave me dirty looks and instructed me not to shoot. He was acting under Roger’s instructions.

I’d been shooting Madness in the day and went to the Floyd in the evening, and of course The Wall was so fantastic to look at that while the show was running, I took some pictures, not with the intention of running to the News Of The World with it, but just to record it. The crew were going, ‘Oh, I’m glad you’re taking pictures of our lighting,” and all this, so I decided to shoot now and tell them later and let them decide what to do with it. So I was a little bit out of order really.
(Source : not known)