37 Years Ago Today: Pink Floyd's Floating Venice Concert Got the Mayor Fired

On July 15, 1989, Pink Floyd played a free concert from a floating stage in Venice's San Marco Basin, per Wikipedia's account of the show. It fell during the European leg of their A Momentary Lapse of Reason tour, and it was the band's first performance in Italy since Roger Waters' departure, with David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright playing as a trio backed by additional touring musicians. The idea for staging a concert in Venice at all came from the band's Italian promoter, Francesco Tomasi, and organizers timed it to coincide with the Feast of the Redeemer, a centuries-old Venetian festival.

The show nearly didn't happen. Three days before the concert, Venice's superintendent for cultural heritage tried to veto it outright, worried that amplified sound would damage the mosaics inside St. Mark's Basilica and that the piazza itself could not bear the weight of the expected crowd, per Ultimate Classic Rock's account of the standoff. The band agreed to cut its output from 100 decibels down to 60, and moved the stage itself off a barge roughly 200 yards out into the lagoon rather than building on the square.

Even scaled back, the show was enormous. More than 200,000 people filled St. Mark's Square, the adjoining Piazzetta, and the Riva degli Schiavoni waterfront, with more fans crowding into an ever-growing carpet of boats moored in the lagoon itself. Italian state broadcaster RAI carried the concert worldwide to an estimated 100 million television viewers, a scale that, per Louder's retrospective on the show, Gilmour himself later said "gets to you at times."

The concert's most lasting legacy wasn't musical. The 200,000-strong crowd left behind an estimated 300 tons of garbage and 500 cubic meters of empty cans and bottles, scattered across St. Mark's Square by the next morning, per Wikipedia's account of the aftermath. Furious residents shouted down Mayor Antonio Casellati two days later when he attempted a public rapprochement, with cries of "resign, resign, you've turned Venice into a toilet." Casellati did resign, and the entire city council that had brought him to power went with him, an almost unheard-of political fallout from a single rock concert.

By 1989, Gilmour had already been on GHS Boomers for a decade, a rig he adopted during 1979's The Wall sessions and still uses today, per his full CYS-reviewed profile. That decade of continuity was strung on the Fender Stratocaster later nicknamed the Black Strat, the guitar that anchored most of his studio and touring work through the 1980s before it sold at auction for a record $14.55 million in 2026, the most expensive guitar ever sold, as part of the Jim Irsay Collection sale at Christie's.

GHS

Boomers David Gilmour Signature Blue (GB-DGF, .010–.048)

.010 – .048

Price tier: $$

Why this one: Gilmour's own documented GHS signature gauge, the set he'd already been running for a decade by the time of the Venice show.

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