Fact #63537
When:
Short story:
Ex-Pink Floyd songwriter Roger Waters stages a huge star-studded (Sinead O'Connor, Thomas Dolby, Bob Geldof, etc etc) performance of The Wall at Potzdamer Platz in Berlin, Germany, Europe, to mark the coming down of the Berlin Wall. 200,000 people attend.Full article:
Roger Waters : They came and asked me to do it in October. We went on in July 21st I think it was. And the intervening months were an absolute nightmare. It wasn't just getting the permission. I mean when we first started talking about it there were still guys wandering around with machine guns killing anybody who walked out into that piece of land. But it was also getting the other artists together. And logistically, the team of guys on the ground that put it together; how they did it I'll never know. They didn't set foot on the site until four weeks before the show. And when they got there it was like a field with huge molehills because the East German Army had dug down to five meters everywhere they found a piece of metal to make sure it wasn't an unexploded bomb. And of course a lot of them were unexploded bombs and they dug them all up and threw them away. But yeah, it was a very bizarre thing.
Roger Waters : It was very, very hard work organising that Wall concert but everyone was fabulous to work with - Bryan Adams, Van Morrison, Cyndi Lauper, bloody brilliant. All brilliant. Except for Sinead O'Connor. Oh, God! I have never ever met anybody who is so self-involved and unprofessional and big-headed and unpleasant. She is so far up her own bum it's scary. With The Wall, she was so worried that there weren't any other 'young people on the show'. I and everybody else were old farts in her opinion so 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! I am not joking! And neither was she fucking joking! That's the sad thing - she was serious! And then a couple of months after the show, when the record was out, she did an interview on American television, millions of viewers, and she rubbished the whole thing, said the Wall concert was a load of wank. I don't give a fuck what she though about it but she should have kept her fucking mouth shut because it could only hurt the charity, the memorial fund and everything that Leonard (Cheshire) had done. She doesn't understand anything. She's just a silly little girl. You can't just lie in the corner and shave your bloody head and stick it up your arse and occasionally pull it out to go 'Oh, I tink this is wrong and dat is wrong' and burst into tears.
Nick Mason (Pink Floyd) : I was rather entertained by it. When Roger first performed our old songs on his solo tours in the 80s, I was rather upset that someone else was playing music I’d played drums on. But, by 1990, it was fun listening to a different interpretation. Sinead O’Connor and all those people offered new interpretations which was great. If I had a criticism, it would’ve been that I’d have liked a different guitarist ... you had (Andy Fairweather-Low) aping Dave’s style, which is something you can’t do.
Michael Small (reviewer, Entertainment Weekly) : If the chaos, the thrills, the hassles, and the socializing had taken place anywhere else, it would have been just another monster rock concert. But as O'Connor and a few dozen other stars learned, performing at the Berlin Wall puts an absurd twist on even such mundane activities as dodging photographers, rehearsing, or getting to the VIP area. As the stars gathered there on the Wednesday before the show, a detachment of soldiers, trying to provide better access, drew lines on a remaining segment of the inner Berlin Wall, wrote "door" in the middle, then simply knocked out an opening. "It's peculiar," said Tim Curry (The Rocky Horror Picture Show), who was to play the Prosecutor in the rock opera. "We're literally right in the middle of history." The Hooters' Eric Bazilian, standing just a few yards from the bunker where Hitler died, put a finer point on it. "A year ago they would have shot us for being here."
EFFECTS OF THE WALL COMING DOWN…
Paul Landers (guitarist, Rammstein) : Rammstein is a Western band. We are a product of the reunification of Germany. In the old East Germany, there was only one major record company covering the entire country. Things were divided into professional and underground scenes. The only way you could become a professional musician was to join a high school and get a degree in music. The government offices had the last word in deciding what was possible and what was not. But it was not that bad. You always felt on the edge if you did something different, but it did not put you in a dangerous situation.
(Source : Guitar World, June 1998)
Richard Kruspe (guitarist, Rammstein) : Nobody who grew up in the Western part of Germany could make this kind of music. Living for 25 years in a special kind of society influences you. East Germans are much more emotional than West Germans, who are good technically as musicians but all sound similar to each other or the American and English bands they are influenced by.
(Source : Guitar World, June 1998)
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Roger Waters : It was very, very hard work organising that Wall concert but everyone was fabulous to work with - Bryan Adams, Van Morrison, Cyndi Lauper, bloody brilliant. All brilliant. Except for Sinead O'Connor. Oh, God! I have never ever met anybody who is so self-involved and unprofessional and big-headed and unpleasant. She is so far up her own bum it's scary. With The Wall, she was so worried that there weren't any other 'young people on the show'. I and everybody else were old farts in her opinion so 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! I am not joking! And neither was she fucking joking! That's the sad thing - she was serious! And then a couple of months after the show, when the record was out, she did an interview on American television, millions of viewers, and she rubbished the whole thing, said the Wall concert was a load of wank. I don't give a fuck what she though about it but she should have kept her fucking mouth shut because it could only hurt the charity, the memorial fund and everything that Leonard (Cheshire) had done. She doesn't understand anything. She's just a silly little girl. You can't just lie in the corner and shave your bloody head and stick it up your arse and occasionally pull it out to go 'Oh, I tink this is wrong and dat is wrong' and burst into tears.
Nick Mason (Pink Floyd) : I was rather entertained by it. When Roger first performed our old songs on his solo tours in the 80s, I was rather upset that someone else was playing music I’d played drums on. But, by 1990, it was fun listening to a different interpretation. Sinead O’Connor and all those people offered new interpretations which was great. If I had a criticism, it would’ve been that I’d have liked a different guitarist ... you had (Andy Fairweather-Low) aping Dave’s style, which is something you can’t do.
Michael Small (reviewer, Entertainment Weekly) : If the chaos, the thrills, the hassles, and the socializing had taken place anywhere else, it would have been just another monster rock concert. But as O'Connor and a few dozen other stars learned, performing at the Berlin Wall puts an absurd twist on even such mundane activities as dodging photographers, rehearsing, or getting to the VIP area. As the stars gathered there on the Wednesday before the show, a detachment of soldiers, trying to provide better access, drew lines on a remaining segment of the inner Berlin Wall, wrote "door" in the middle, then simply knocked out an opening. "It's peculiar," said Tim Curry (The Rocky Horror Picture Show), who was to play the Prosecutor in the rock opera. "We're literally right in the middle of history." The Hooters' Eric Bazilian, standing just a few yards from the bunker where Hitler died, put a finer point on it. "A year ago they would have shot us for being here."
EFFECTS OF THE WALL COMING DOWN…
Paul Landers (guitarist, Rammstein) : Rammstein is a Western band. We are a product of the reunification of Germany. In the old East Germany, there was only one major record company covering the entire country. Things were divided into professional and underground scenes. The only way you could become a professional musician was to join a high school and get a degree in music. The government offices had the last word in deciding what was possible and what was not. But it was not that bad. You always felt on the edge if you did something different, but it did not put you in a dangerous situation.
(Source : Guitar World, June 1998)
Richard Kruspe (guitarist, Rammstein) : Nobody who grew up in the Western part of Germany could make this kind of music. Living for 25 years in a special kind of society influences you. East Germans are much more emotional than West Germans, who are good technically as musicians but all sound similar to each other or the American and English bands they are influenced by.
(Source : Guitar World, June 1998)