The veteran producer Bob Ezrin has been talking about how he fell out with Roger Waters. But this was not due to any creative differences during the making of Pink Floyd’s The Wall album, but an indiscretion that happened afterwards.
It was 1980 - with the album complete, Floyd were planning the tour to promote it, which as we all know involved a literal wall being built between the band and audience during the performance. This idea was meant to be kept top secret, but as Ezrin explained to CBC in Canada, he slipped up, trusting a journalist he regarded as a friend.
“We had a famous falling out, Roger and I, at the end of the project, which was entirely my fault,” Ezrin said. “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?’”
Ezrin continued: “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.”
Those shows would be Waters’ last with Floyd until 2005’s Live 8 performance (which happened exactly 20 years ago tomorrow). Ezrin would go on to work with the David Gilmour-led band on a Momentary Lapse Of Reason and The Division Bell, but not with Roger Waters on any of his solo albums.
