That said, he had no kind words for his onetime Pink Floyd bandmates. “I’m going there to celebrate the victory of the individual over bureaucracy, and specifically a victory of the East German individual to rise up against some of the more uncomfortable levels of dogma under which he was living.” He also explained that The Wall “is about redemption, and we are redeemed when we tear our walls down and expose our weaknesses to our fellow man and sit ’round the fire and talk.” “I’m in no way going to Berlin to celebrate what I consider to be a victory of capitalism over socialism, or the West over the East, or anything like that,” he said. He was excited to be working with Cheshire, since Waters’ father had died in World War II, and wanted to make a statement. “All you’re doing there is accentuating a political division. “I said, ‘No, we can’t go to Berlin and shout, “Tear down the wall.” It’s stupid,'” Waters told Rolling Stone in 1990.

Waters was originally hesitant about performing the album in Berlin, since Cheshire first proposed staging it there while the wall was still standing. Waters has since estimated some 350,000 people showed up, but Rolling Stone reported 200,000 at the time. It cost $8 million to put on and raised $4 million for the charity, as it was televised in 30 countries and attracted a sizable in-person audience.

Guitarists Rick di Fonzo and Snowy White (the latter of whom played on Pink Floyd’s original The Wall tour) played a mix of reverent and showy interpretations of the guitar solo - since Gilmour said at the time that there was “no chance whatsoever” he’d show up - and Morrison stole the show with a hearty, solo “I have become comfortably numb” at the end. Morrison belted the words with his typical gusto - “My hands felt just like two bal- looons,” he sings - as Levon Helm, Rick Danko, and Garth Hudson smile while singing along. But when the tune cut away to the chorus, it was the far more comfortably dressed Van Morrison, who sings David Gilmour’s lines, and his even more casually clad backup singers in the Band, who made it a highlight.

Waters sang his verses dressed in a doctor’s overcoat (a stagehand even hands him a stethoscope), and he faced the 60-by-600–foot Styrofoam-brick wall, rather than the 200,000-plus people in the audience, during his verses. Perhaps the greatest highlight during the show, which raised money for victims of natural disasters, was “Comfortably Numb,” which found Van Morrison and the Band joining Waters for the album’s climactic showstopper. Roger Waters’ massive, star-studded production of The Wall in Berlin in 1990, just eight months after the wall was torn down, remains one of the most surreal odysseys into the nexus of music, theater, and charity.

Van morrison killed rick phillips