(Credit: Alamy)
No member of Pink Floyd took the concept of the stage show lightly. This wasn’t just about putting on a bunch of songs that people would intently listen to. This was about creating an experience that no one would forget, and a bunch of people just sitting there wouldn’t do justice to something like The Wall. But even when Roger Waters managed to bring his crowning achievement to life in the 1990s without the help of his bandmates, he admitted Sinead O’Connor wasn’t the best substitution.
When you’re putting on a production like this, though, you’re going to need all the help that you can possibly get. The entire premise of the rock opera is about telling the story of someone trapped inside their mind after closing themselves from society, but the amount of construction that goes into building that wall was already going to be a nightmare for the production team.
Also, pay attention to what this production is: a rock opera. This is a project that has a narrative, and all good stories need to have a lot of characters to fill out everything. Even though Waters was suited to play the protagonist, Pink, the rogue’s gallery of rock stars that he got to play, everyone else was actually fairly decent for its time.
Having Thomas Dolby yucking it up as the teacher is actually fairly demented, and Tim Curry playing the judge at the finale song ‘The Trial’ is the kind of onscreen role that Curry never got to play. Even the big substitutions are pretty awesome, including Bryan Adams managing to put some decent grit into his voice for the song ‘Young Lust’.
Considering her background in heart-wrenching material, O’Connor seemed like a sure-fire hit when taking on the song ‘Mother’. After all, the song is about a mother consoling her child while indirectly corrupting him, and that kind of tragedy absolutely drips out of her voice as she sings every line.
Since the Irish legend couldn’t make the final performance in Berlin, Waters didn’t have one good thing to say about her later, telling Q, “[They were] all brilliant. Except for Sinead O’Connor. Oh, God! I have never ever met anybody who is so self-involved and unprofessional and big-headed and unpleasant. She is so far up her own bum it’s scary. She was so worried that there weren’t any other ‘young people on the show’. I and everybody else were old farts in her opinion.”
While O’Connor’s idea to put a rap in the middle of the show probably wouldn’t have worked, hearing her interpretation of ‘Mother’ at least shows a different direction that The Wall could have gone in. Since most of the show features everyone reliving the glory of the recorded version of the production, some of the greatest moments come when they work outside the show’s usual parameters, like getting Van Morrison to perform parts of the show.
Then again, anyone who is ever going to be involved with The Wall will have to answer to Waters before all else. O’Connor could have been on the right track to making something unprecedented, but it might have been the case of the right idea at the wrong time.
