Yeah, reward this behavior

David Gilmour: Most of the residents just left town and hoped Venice would still be there when they came back Monday, and if anything had gone wrong they’d blame us.

Mayor Antonio Casellati: The city of Venice received a big blow as a consequence of the Pink Floyd concert. The city was invaded by masses of people that converged on St Mark’s Square. Venice is invaded by many people during the Venice Carnival, but the difference is that they are scattered around the city and not in one area.

Guy Pratt: We were staying in the Excelsior Hotel, which was out at the Lido, and it was quite difficult to actually get to the main barge, because there were so many gondolas and other boats clustered around that area. One interesting detail is that although the canals and the settings were distinctly unusual, as soon as we reached the barge everything became comfortingly familiar. I climbed up the same old flight of stars, past the usual backstage snug. The stage area was set up identically wherever we were playing. It felt almost like home.

Just before the show started, the head of the gondoliers’ union came to see Steve O’Rourke.

David Gilmour: They threatened that if we didn’t give them $10,000 immediately they would fill the entire space up in front of the stage and blow their whistles all the way through the show.

Nick Mason: We reckoned that 100 decibels of our sound system would probably outweigh their whistles. By then we were beginning to get a little beady at the ingratitude – particularly as the gondoliers had all rented their boats out for people to sit on to watch the show.

David Gilmour: So we said, “Fine, come back at the end of the show and we’ll give you the $10,000”. And when they did we said, “Piss off – you missed your chance”. There were other things where we had to bribe people to make things happen, where again they had agreed on something and then reneged, and you have to say, “Take this money and do it”.