The producer of Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ has recalled being tricked by a journalist and how it caused Roger Waters to go “absolutely nuclear”.
Bob Ezrin, a Canadian producer and musician who is also known for his work with Deep Purple, Aerosmith and Kiss, began a longstanding association with Pink Floyd when he produced their double album ‘The Wall’ in 1979.
With the album completed, the band were planning the extravagant stage show for the album’s accompanying tour, which involved a literal wall of cardboard bricks being built between the band and the audience over the course of each performance.
Pink Floyd were adamant that details of the show were to be kept under wraps until opening night, but as he shared in a recent interview with CBC, Ezrin was tricked into divulging key pieces of information to a Billboard journalist that he considered a friend. When news reached singer/bassist Waters, he was furious.
“We had a famous falling out, Roger and I, at the end of the project, which was entirely my fault,” Ezrin said (via Ultimate Guitar). “There was a journalist here in Canada, he’s no longer with us, and he was a friend of mine.”
“[He] had been hanging out with me in Toronto, and sort of writing about some of my projects and things. And then, when it came time to do ‘The Wall’, he said, ‘I want to come to the show. When are they going to do the show?’”
“A few weeks prior, he called me in my rent-a-house on Kings Road in Los Angeles, and said, ‘They’re not letting me go. The magazine won’t send me, and I’m dying. It’s killing me. What am I missing?’”
“I had signed an NDA, and I said, ‘I can’t tell you.’ And he said, ‘Come on, it’s me. It’s just between us. I’m dying. What am I missing?’ So, while I was making dinner, I told him a little bit about the show. Next issue of Billboard came out, and it said, ‘Over dinner with Bob Ezrin, we learned…’ and [it] said some things about the show.”
“Roger went absolutely nuclear, apoplectic. He had every right to. I was naïve at that time. I didn’t realise people would go to those lengths to get a scoop on a Pink Floyd record. To me, it was just us guys working. It taught me an incredible lesson.”
‘The Wall Tour’ ran for 31 nights across 1980 and 1981, shows that proved to be Waters’ final performances with the band before his departure in 1985. He did not reunite with them until Live 8 in London in 2005.
In other Pink Floyd news, their newly-restored concert film Pink Floyd At Pompeii MCMLXXII was released into cinemas last month. The accompanying soundtrack album reached Number One on the UK Charts, their seventh chart-topper in all.
A judge also recently ruled that Waters had defamed the director of The Dark Side Of Roger Waters after claiming he was a “lying, conniving Zionist mouthpiece”.
