Pink Floyd’s frontman Roger Waters maintained for years, only half-jokingly, that he was done with “The Wall,” that he would only play it again after the Berlin Wall fell. Nobody seriously entertained the idea of it becoming a possibility, but several months after the wall was torn down a WW II veteran, Leonard Cheshire, launched an international charity to honor the fallen heroes of the war, and raise money in their memory. Cheshire invited Waters to play at the charity’s inaugural fundraising even, in Berlin.

On this day, July 21, in 1990, eight months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Waters and his group took the stage on the very spot it once stood, in front of 300,000 paid attendees.

Waters’ album, about the alienation and isolation felt in the larger world by an impersonal society and at home by overbearing parents or estranged spouses, creating the metaphorical wall, was a perfect representation for the brick-and-mortar Berlin Wall, which symbolized tyranny and oppression. Pink Floyd did more than sing: they performed, creating a stage show with a nightmarish cityscape and famous names as costumed extras: among others, Thomas Dolby as the Teacher, Albert Finney as the Judge and Marianne Faithfull as the Mother.