The Wall – Live in Berlin | |||||
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Live album by Roger Waters | |||||
Released | 21 August 1990 | ||||
Recorded | 21 July 1990 | ||||
Genre | Progressive rock | ||||
Label | Mercury | ||||
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Roger Waters chronology | |||||
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Roger Waters live chronology | |||||
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Alternative cover | |||||
Reissued 2003 cover
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Singles from The Wall – Live in Berlin | |||||
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Allmusic |
The Wall – Live in Berlin was a live concert performance by Roger Waters and numerous guest artists, of the Pink Floyd studio album The Wall, itself largely written by Waters during his time with the band. The show was held in Berlin on 21 July 1990, to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall eight months earlier. A live album of the concert was released 21 August 1990. A video of the concert was also commercially released.
The concert was staged on vacant terrain between Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate, a location that was part of the former "no man's land" of the Berlin Wall.
The show had a sell-out crowd of over 350,000 people, and right before the performance started the gates were opened which enabled at least another 100,000 people to watch. While this broke records for a paid-entry concert, seven days earlier Jean Michel Jarre had set a new world record for concert attendance, with his free Paris la Defense show attracting a live audience of two million.
The event was produced and cast by British impresario and producer Tony Hollingsworth. It was staged partly at Waters' expense. While he subsequently earned the money back from the sale of the CD and video releases of the album, the original plan was to donate all profits past his initial investment to the Memorial Fund for Disaster Relief, a UK charity founded by Leonard Cheshire. However, audio and video sales came in significantly under projections, and the trading arm of the charity (Operation Dinghy) incurred heavy losses. A few years later, the charity was wound up, and the audio and video sales rights from the concert performance returned to Waters.
The production was designed by Mark Fisher and Jonathan Park. The stage design featured a 550-foot-long (170 m) and 82-foot-high (25 m) wall. Most of the wall was built before the show and the rest was built progressively through the first part of the show. The wall was then knocked down at the end of the show.