David Gilmour explains how Pink Floyd’s Venice show came to be – and how they found a barge big enough

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The infamous Venice show from Pink Floyd needed a barge big enough for the band to stand on, and had a slate of problems.

David Gilmour has since broken down the hurdles he and the group had to jump to pull the performance together. It marks one of the most memorable moments in music history as the Gilmour-fronted group performed to over 200,000 people on a floating barge. The show was to promote A Momentary Lapse of Reason, the group’s first effort since The Final Cut, which was the final album Roger Waters would work on with Pink Floyd. The band would continue with Gilmour as frontman, and would play some of their biggest-ever shows. One such show was seemingly a nightmare to put together, as Gilmour explained how the band put together their Venice showcase.

In an interview with Q Magazine, Gilmour confirmed it was the Marx Brothers who inspired him to suggest the barge idea. Though the band had a great time, the city authorities, according to the guitarist, reneged on the deal the band had struck for “security, toilets, and food”.

He said: “I’d seen it in a Marx Brothers movie, but I don’t think it ever been done before on that scale. We had to hunt the world for a barge big enough – I set problems and other people are sent off to find solutions!

“The Venice show was great fun, but it was very tense and nerve-wracking. We had a specific length of show to do; the satellite broadcasting meant we had to get it absolutely precise. We had the list of songs, and we’d shortened them, which we’d never done before.

“I had a big clock with a red digital read-out on the floor in front of me, and had the start time of each number on a piece of paper. If we were coming near the start time of the next number, I just had to wrap up the one we were on.

“We had a really good time, but the city authorities who had agreed to provide the services of security, toilets, food, completely reneged on everything they were supposed to do, and then tried to blame all the subsequent problems on us.”

The huge barge on which Pink Floyd performed very nearly did not make it to its destination, either. Gilmour added: “Along one of the main waterways is an island called the Giudecca, and they’ve got a pontoon bridge all the way across, which they’d agreed to open up for us early the next morning to let us float the whole stage through, towed by tugs.

“They then refused to open it, so we had to tow this vast stage the size of a football pitch out into the open sea. Then the sea police came up and boarded and said, ‘You can’t come this way’.

“We said, ‘They won’t let us through that canal where they’d agreed’… so we had to pay out. Initially, Steven was very against the idea of playing Venice, saying it would be too difficult.

“Throughout the second leg of that tour he’d come up to me and say, ‘It’s never going to happen.’ I said, ‘Steve, if Venice doesn’t happen, you’re fired.’ Or something like that.