In the end it was Sinéad O’Connor who drove Roger Waters to distraction. It was the summer of 1990, and the former Pink Floyd vocalist and bassist was putting together a one-off live staging of his magnum opus The Wall to mark the fall of the real Berlin Wall. The album’s themes of alienation, isolation and the futility of war couldn’t have been more timely. To stage it in front of 350,000 people near Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate at such a pivotal moment in history was nothing short of momentous.
But there was another reason it was important. Waters’ commercial stock had fallen dramatically since he left Pink Floyd five years earlier. His two solo albums, 1984’s The Pros And Cons Of Hitch Hiking and 1987’s Radio K.A.O.S., had failed to match the success of his old group. To make things worse, his former bandmates had won a bitter legal battle to resurrect the Pink Floyd name without him, to his eternal ire. This new restaging of The Wall was a chance for Roger Waters to remind people who he was.
