The Rehearsal

Rehearsal and Problems!

 

In the actual concert on live television, the second song, "The Thin Ice" and part of the third song, "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)", were disrupted when a circuit breaker tripped. It was reset, but immediately tripped again so they had to rewire some equipment. Those two songs had to be re-recorded for the issue of the videotape. After 'The Thin Ice' was interrupted, the original, live American broadcast of the show said:

 

"This is radio-aid live in Berlin. If you're wondering what's happening, is, a production involving some thousands of people, has stopped. And when that has to happen, Roger walked out in front of the crowd, sort of waved to them and said, 'Oh well, this happened a couple of times during rehearsal' - in fact, if you were lucky enough to have seen 'The Wall' in L.A., when it was performed, I think, the second night, there was a curtain that caught fire, some very similar situation has happening   They have to back up tapes, they have to re-cue lighting, get everybody ready, and then they're gonna roll it. He's actually kind of jovial about the whole thing, he's walking across the stage and just kinda went 'Aw, shucks,' and the crowd is laughing, they know what happened, that somebody missed a cue and they're gonna rewind, uh, get everything going again, and take the film back...because this is what happens with The Wall...is so tall...they end up using it as a kind of like a drive-in movie projector - uh, screen, rather -

they project images on it and everything, so there's a lot of things that have to be re-wound, re-cued...and then they're gonna re-start it and then they're gonna come back to it....You're listening to 'The Wall, Live from Berlin' on the Global Satellite Network.

 

The live performance of "Mother" was also hounded by a power failure. Roger Waters tried to get Sinéad O'Connor to sing her parts anyway, or mime the song, while the error was being fixed. Offended by being asked to mime, she didn't return after the show to re-record the performance (which is how "The Thin Ice" was saved for the CD/Video release.) Instead, the release version of "Mother" comes from the dress rehearsal on the previous night before the concert. Consequently, the large projection of Gerald Scarfe's mother character that was projected on the screen during the concert cannot be seen on the video or DVD versions.