Fact #175314

Neil Warnock (booking agent) : The hardest thing was actually working with the KGB. We had quite a tough time. They were freaked out, quite frankly, that they had a massive audience of 70,000 people a show, for five shows and, really, they couldn’t control them. These people were going to stand up and they were going to move around. This was something they were freaked that they’d lost control of. There wasn’t any rioting, but it was like “when we say sit down, you sit down. When we say stand up, you stand up.” That was the type of thing that they were used to their audience doing at the time. There was a lot of tension from that and we couldn’t go anywhere at all without being completely surrounded by police and people talking into their sleeves and such and such. It was a pretty tough time.

Their food was awful, the stuff that they had in the hotel. We had already worked that out and we had a huge refrigerated artic of food that we brought from the UK with us. I have to say, in the end, we had more security round that than we did around the bands. There was a lot of road crew from Russia, who were very anxious to get the breakfast, lunch or dinner ticket that we were handing out to have some of our food and some of our wine. The interesting thing is they made us put every bit of our equipment through a security arch, which actually was very crude. We still never worked out what it did, but every little bit of equipment we took and it was a lot, had to go through this. It took hours and hours, but there was no other way, that was the way it was going to be and we knew we had to comply with that. This was a big thing taking Pink Floyd behind the iron curtain.
(Source : interview with Jimmy Ness, Forbes magazine, 2016)