Pink Floyd Venice July 1989

Pink Floyd Venice July 1989

by Pete Clemons

Pink Floyd had looked all but finished after Roger Waters had left them during 1985. However, less than a year later, the remaining 2 members, David Gilmour and Nick Mason, had reconvened along with the previously sacked keyboard player Richard Wright. This then sparked a court case over the band name with Waters claiming that Pink Floyd were ‘a spent force creatively’.

David Gilmour responded by saying that ‘the strength of Pink Floyd lay in the talents of all four members. Naturally, we will miss Roger’s artistic input. However, we will continue to work together as in the past. We are surprised at recent claims that Roger believes the band to be, ‘a spent force, creatively’, as he had had no-involvement with the current project. The three of us are very excited by the new material and would prefer to be judged by the public on the strength of the forthcoming Pink Floyd album’.

And with that, during 1986, Pink Floyd went back into the studio to begin work on what would an album titled ‘A Momentary Lapse of Reason’. ‘The last time we made a record it was during a pretty awful time. The Wall was more of a static show but now, they wanted to take ‘A Momentary Lapse of Reason’ out onto the road’, Said David Gilmour at the time.

Asked, at the time if he and Roger Waters were talking, David Gilmour responded that they were ‘not at all friendly at that moment’ and how it was ‘hard to stay friendly when someone who is trying to completely fuck you up’.

The court proceedings had even spilled into the rights to famous stage effects. And this was hampering tour preparations. The inflatable pig, for example, was fought over until it was discovered that the original order for the porker had been for a sow. So, to get around that issue, the band ordered in their own version. It was a boar that had massive testicles fitted to it.

Gilmour and Mason also found it hard to raise the cash to fund the tour. So, they had to invest in it themselves. This involved the selling off, of various personal items.

However, by September 1987 off they embarked on the first of three tours that took them through to July 1989. They had completed just shy of 200 shows. The last but one of these being a televised extravaganza held on a floating pontoon in, a hundred metres or so off St Mark’s Square, in Venice.

Initially the show had due to have been staged on the square itself. But the fact that it clashed with a celebration called the Feast of the Redeemer, along with fears that vibrations from the PA could possible damage ancient architecture, meant that the gig had to be moved.

All in all, the show became quite a scandal in Italy with demands for resignations at the local council. But that didn’t deter an estimated audience of up to 150,000 locals turning up along with the estimated 100 million that watched the spectacle on TV from 20 or so different countries.

David Gilmour remembers it all as follows: ‘The Venice show was great fun, but it was very tense and nerve-wracking. We had a specific length of show to do. The satellite broadcasting meant we had to get it absolutely precise. We had the list of songs, and we'd shortened them, which we'd never done before. I had a big clock with a red digital read-out on the floor in front of me, and, had the start time of each number on a piece of paper. If we were coming near the start time of the next number, I just had to wrap up the one we were on. We had a really good time, but the city authorities who had agreed to provide the services of security, toilets, food, completely reneged on everything they were supposed to do, and then tried to blame all the subsequent problems on us’.