What Fisher and Park do is to create instant high-performance, live architectural environments. Their palette of materials is aluminum, steel, scrim, cabling, projection cloth and fabric; their underlying structure is usually scaffolding. Their basic mechanical services are sound and lighting systems operating under sophisticated electronic control. They also include pyrotechnics launchers, video walls, cine and still projectors, lifts, cherry pickers, cranes and mobile generators. Their sites are a string of changing open spaces, sports stadiums, and arenas. And, unlike any other architecture, theirs exists only when it is being used.

Pink Floyds performances, almost from the beginning, were unlike any others. their numbers went on for half an hour and they played while being washed by images from projectors, moving oil wheels, ether-injected slides, movie films and whatever strange visual effects the developing technology of acid culture could produce. Within a couple of years their shows had become legendary, intensely visual live performance art. Their music, with its unrelenting, gut-vibrating, low frequency notes, its collaging of sounds from found sources and the extraordinary and lengthy development of single chords, was right at the sharp end of the new wave, as close as it was possible to get to the dream-like, free-form, hallucinatory ethos and imagery of psychedelia.

As seen in part 1 of this article, Fisher and Park were hired to design the stage, sets, and props for Pink Floyd's Animals shows and to tour with the Animals tour.

At the very end of the last performance of Animals in July 1978, Roger Waters spat contemptuously over the rioting front rows of the Montreal audience. He had flipped, severely stressed out by a long tour during which he had become increasingly depressed by the impossibility of establishing any musical relationship with huge stadium audiences. By the end of the year he had enlisted Mark Fisher and the brilliantly scabrous cartoonist Gerald Scarfe to work on the design of his new show. Its theme was the alienation of the rock star from his audience, symbolized by the building of a wall right across the stage.

Unlike most rock concert programs, (which were and still are a judicious mix of new songs and old favorites), The Wall was more akin to an opera. Rock critics of the performances, by then hardened on early punk, found it trivial. Audiences may not have understood the story-line, but at least they picked up on the general theme of alienation and rebellion. Nevertheless, the existence of a plot gave internal purpose and meaning to the series of spectacular special effects.

As finally developed, The Wall's plot was about a pop star called Pink, who recalls his childhood: father killed in the war, over protective mother, school, teachers, pop stardom, his distant wife's infidelity and, with the laying of the last brick, alienation. The band played behind the wall for much of the second half, a nightmare sequence involving a fascist rally, followed by a court scene in which Pink was denounced by all the characters who had persecuted him - followed by a kind of redemption with the demolition of the wall.

Various sections of this urban psychodrama were underlined with special effects. As the show opened, the father's death was relived by an aircraft swooping over the audience's heads and crashing in flames into the top of the wall. In the fifth song, "Another Brick In The Wall, Part 2," a 15 meter (49 foot) puppet of a schoolmaster menaced across the forestage - at which time stagehands start building the wall. In the song "Mother,CAFV an inflatable Mother ascended from behind the wall and at one moment a large section of inflatable wall burst from her arm. The Wife rose over the wall during the hotel room song, "Don't Leave Me Now," to dangle malevolently. IN the fascist fantasy sequence a giant pig broke through the top of the completed wall and traveled deep into the auditorium where it snorted and threatened the audience below before turning and retreating behind the wall. The familiar circular Pink Floyd screen was back-projected with images, including Scarfe's 'Fucking Flowers' animation.During the second half the wall itself was used as a projection screen for Scarfe's animation's of the rally and trial scenes.

Initially, Fisher produced a series of storyboards explaining to the band how the show could work and look. They had started the slow process of recording the album in April, but it was not until September, still recording, that they agreed to tour with the Waters-Scarfe-Fisher show concept.

When the band gave the go ahead, Fisher regrouped with Park to sort out the technicalities of making the idea work as a touring live performance. Their function was to design and supervise the making and building of the set - everything except sound and lighting - and then tour with it. Scarfe was heavily involved and an army of animators for the cine projections and with Fisher in translating his sketches into large-scale, three-dimensional inflatables. Fisher and Park were finalizing the method of constructing and demolishing the wall. With their backgrounds, they inevitably focused on creating the mechanisms which were as minimal and structurally elegant as possible; they had to be light and modular, so that they were manhandlable and could be packed with the greatest economy on the backs of trucks on tour.

More than a year before the tour, in late 1978, Fisher had worked on plans for the construction of the wall and on the studies for The Slug. If the theme of The Wall was alienation, it made a kind of sense to stage the shows in alienated environments, such as ugly, derelict city fringe sites or wastelands, or to create an alien environment in the countryside. The Slug was a 100 meter (330 foot) long inflatable venue which could be delivered flat, and blown up and supplied with services from container trucks parked outside. The show could go on - then move, packed up in trucks, to the next venue. It was eventually abandoned because of the problems of licensing temporary wasteland sites.

The primary technical problem was how to build the wall across an arena during the performance. The 80 meter by 10 meter (260 ft. by 33 ft.) wall, laid in English garden bond, had to be built from behind to avoid having stagehands and scaffolding or lifts distracting the audience. For the same reason, there could not be any scaffolding at the back: the wall had to appear to tumble down, leaving a clear space behind it. The bricks had to be lightweight and transportable in large numbers. After trying out a variety of possibilities, Fisher and Park decided on cardboard boxes with a diaphragm across the middle.

Made in the UK by a cardboard box manufacturer, they could be folded flat and shipped around in thousands of mobile pallets, whose tubular aluminum side frames could be removed to form safety railings for the bricklayer's platforms. Fisher and Park designed the puppets for the show, including the Teacher, the Wife, and the Mother, etc. from Scarfe's sketches. They also developed five 6 meter (20 foot) long wall-builders' platforms on hydraulic lifts which rose up as each course was laid. The cardboard bricks were stabilized by dropping every second one over a telescopic mast fixed along the baseline of the wall. The masts extended further upwards as each course of bricks was laid. At the top of the telescopic masts were heart shaped levers: the knockers. To collapse the wall the columns retracted under power with the knockers thrashing back and forth, knocking the bricks down course by course from the top. The ten telescopic columns with their heart shaped mechanisms were custom made, but they and the lifts were based on standard devices used in rock shows for lifting heavy lighting gear. They were extensively modified by Park in Seattle to work from a much more powerful and controllable hydraulic power source, and they were built into their own modular dollies, which became part of the stage. The platforms were made from honeycomb aluminum panels from a surplus store. All the aluminum work was done in local fabrication shops.

At the beginning of the second half of the show, a large section of the wall would fold down revealing a mock up of the inside of a hotel room, with a lamp, a TV, and an easy chair bolted to the fold-out section where Roger, sitting in the chair would sing "Nobody Home."

The inflatable pig was flown and manipulated from a 40 meter (130 foot) long aluminum track, devised by Animals rigger Rocky Paulson, and suspended from the roof. The pig could be raised and lowered and panned on its journey through the top of the wall over the audience and back. Fisher tested the system by riding on the back of the pig.

All the components were shipped to a sound stage at Culver City and the assembling of the set was begun. Fisher Parks first discovery was that they had toleranced everything too precisely. Their second discovery was that prototypes need time to be tested out, especially when the people having to operate them are battered by noise and flashing lights. On delivery, the hydraulic motors for the lifts failed to work properly. After a week immersed in hydraulic fluid, trying to redefine the laws of physics, the crew discovered that the factory had incorrectly set the electric motors for the pumps.

Pink Floyd tour manager Graeme Fleming decided to test out how easily the show could be moved from one venue to another and ordered a series of load-ins and load-outs between Culver City and the Los Angeles Arena. The band's manager Steve O'Rourke, who had not yet seen the set, came into the Arena where it had been set up in twenty-four hours and said, "Cor, fuck. Is that what it's really like?" Fisher and Park decided that everything they did thereafter would have to have a "Cor, Fuck" factor. The designers soon grasped that, however well conceived the mechanical design, it had to be operated under anarchic and unexpected conditions. The classic rock term is 'winging it.' Although The Wall was designed to travel, it played a total of only twenty-nine shows, five in the Los Angeles Arena, five at Nassau Coliseum, Long Island, and the other nineteen dates at Earls Court, London, and Westfalenhalle, Dortmund, Germany. A year later the show was staged again before a live audience for the filming of The Wall movie. That footage never appeared in the film.

Photos and excerpts reprinted with permission from "Rock Sets, The Astonishing Art of Rock Concert Design" by Sutherland Lyall, ISBN 0-500-27697-8, published by Thames Hudson Ltd. 30 Bloomsbury St. London WC1B 3QP.