The Wall

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The Wall
LP by Pink Floyd
Released	November 30 1979 (UK) December 8 1979 (US)
Recorded	April-November 1979
Genre	Rock
Length	39 min 19 s (1) 42 min 01 s (2)
Record label	Harvest Records (UK) Columbia Records (later Capitol Records) (US)
Producers	Bob Ezrin, David Gilmour and Roger Waters
Professional reviews
RollingStone review	Favorable	link
Pink Floyd Chronology
Animals (1977)	The Wall (1979)	A Collection of Great Dance Songs (1981)

The Wall is a rock opera and concept album by Pink Floyd. Hailed by critics and fans as one of Pink Floyd's best albums (along with Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here), the album is known as a rock and roll classic, and its morbid, depressing anthems have inspired many contemporary rock musicians.

Roger Waters was inspired to create the album during a 1977 concert tour for Animals, dubbed Pink Floyd - In The Flesh. In Montreal, a fan's disruptive behaviour resulted in Waters spitting in the fan's face. Immediately disgusted with himself, Waters came up with the idea of building a wall between him and the audience, an idea which would later develop into the album.

The album has been certified 23 times platinum and sits in third place on the list of best-selling albums ever in the US and hit #1 on the Billboard Album Charts in 1980. Originally released on Columbia Records in the US and Harvest Records in the UK. The Wall was then re-released as a digitally remastered CD in 1994 in the UK on EMI. Columbia issued the remastered CD in 1997 in the US and rest of the world. For The Wall's 20th Anniversary in early 2000, Capitol Records in the US and EMI for the rest of the world outside the US re-released the 1997 remastered CD.

Concept

The album's concept and most of the songs are by Waters. The album's storyline portrays the fictional life of an anti-hero ("Pink") who is hammered and beaten down by society from the earliest days of his life: smothered by his mother and oppressed at school, he withdraws into a fantasy world of his own. During a drug-induced hallucination, Pink becomes a fascist dictator only to have his conscience rebel at this and put himself on trial, his inner judge ordering him to tear down his wall and open himself to the outside world.

Recorded version

During recording, Richard Wright was fired from the band.

Around the world, the album produced a number of hit singles for Pink Floyd, including "The Happiest Days of Our Lives," "Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)," "Mother," "Empty Spaces," "Young Lust" and "Comfortably Numb."

Concert version

Pink Floyd only performed the concert version of The Wall a handful of times, in New York, Los Angeles, London, and Dortmund. This was due to the grandiosity of the performance, which involved constructing a giant wall across the stage between band and audience, not to mention staple Pink Floyd props such as giant screens, flying pigs and pyrotechnics.

The performances included film clips of Gerald Scarfe animations and giant puppets based on his designs, as well as a hotel room (where much of the story is set) emerging from the wall mid-way through the second half.

The large stage shows required huge equipment (including full sized cranes), and cost an extraordinary amount of money to realize. As such, the band lost money from them, with the exception of Wright, who returned on a fixed salary for the concerts.

Film version

A movie version of The Wall was filmed in 1982 by MGM, under the title of Pink Floyd: The Wall. The film, directed by Alan Parker and starring Bob Geldof, with a cameo by Bob Hoskins and a minor role by the young Joanne Whalley, was a heavily symbolic, feature-length music video that added new elements to the storyline of The Wall. The film told the story of a boy named Pink Floyd who lost his father in World War II at a young age.

The film had very little dialogue, most of it inconsequential. The story of the movie is told largely through the soundtrack, which reflects Pink's thoughts. Animated segments by Gerald Scarfe and various other surreal sequences are interspliced with the live action.

The film drew heavily on (auto) biographical material from Floyd members Roger Waters and Syd Barrett, combining Waters' early childhood (Waters lost his father in World War II) with Barrett's withdrawal and mental breakdown.

Roger Waters said on Australian radio in 1988 that he:

"was a bit disappointed with it in the end because, at the end of the day, I felt no sympathy at all with the lead character, the character that Geldof played. I found it was so unremitting in its onslaught upon the senses, that it didn't actually give me a chance to get involved with it."

Stage version

In 2004, it was announced that contracts had been signed for a Broadway musical version, with extra music to be written by Waters. The broadway version will feature all of the music written by Waters. It is, however, unknown what will be done with the songs co-written by Gilmour (Young Lust, Comfortably Numb, and Run Like Hell). The show is estimated to be complete by mid 2005.

Post split

After Waters left the band, a legal battle ensued over the rights to the name "Pink Floyd" and its material. Waters retained the right to use The Wall and its material, and his name has been most closely associated with the album. Waters staged a gigantic concert performance of The Wall in Berlin on 21 July 1990, with guest artists including Van Morrison, Sinéad O'Connor, Cyndi Lauper, The Scorpions, Jerry Hall, and Bryan Adams, to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall and as a fundraising effort for World War Memorial Fund for Disaster Relief.

Legal

For "Another Brick in the Wall", Pink Floyd needed a school choir, and approached music teacher Alun Renshaw of Islington Green, around the corner from their recording studio Britannia Row. Renshaw practiced the song with students and then clandestinely brought them. Though the school received a lump sum payment of GBP£1000, there was no contractual arrangement for royalties. Under 1996 UK copyright law, they became eligible, and after choir members found each other through the website Friends Reunited, they sued. Music industry professionals estimated that each student would be owed around GBP£500.

Track Listing (album version)

Disc one

1. "In The Flesh? (3:16)"
2. "The Thin Ice (2.27)"
3. "Another Brick In The Wall (Part I) (3:21)"
4. "The Happiest Days Of Our Lives (1:46)"
5. "Another Brick In The Wall (Part II) (3:59)"
6. "Mother (5:32)"
7. "Goodbye Blue Sky (2:45)"
8. "Empty Spaces (2:10)"
9. "Young Lust (3:25)"
10. "One Of My Turns (3:41)"
11. "Don't Leave Me Now (4:08)"
12. "Another Brick In The Wall (Part III) (1:48)"
13. "Goodbye Cruel World (0:48)"

Disc two

1. "Hey You (4:40)"
2. "Is There Anybody Out There? (2:44)"
3. "Nobody Home (3:26)"
4. "Vera (1:35)"
5. "Bring the Boys Back Home (1:21)"
6. "Comfortably Numb (6:23)"
7. "The Show Must Go On (1:36)"
8. "In The Flesh (4:13)"
9. "Run Like Hell (4:20)"
10. "Waiting For The Worms (4:04)"
11. "Stop (0:39)"
12. "The Trial (5:13)"
13. "Outside The Wall (1:41)"

Additional tracks from the film

• "When the Tigers Broke Free" (Released on Echoes: Best of... Disc 2, Track 05 and on the 2004 re-release of The Final Cut)
• "What Shall We Do Now?" (Extended version of "Empty Spaces" during the wall-building sequence)

Album tracks not included in the film

• "Empty Spaces" (Shorter version with backwards lyics)
• "Hey You" (released as a special feature on the DVD)
• "The Show Must Go On"

Tracks from the live concert

The live version of The Wall, Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live 1980-81, included the following tracks not on the original album:

• "What Shall We Do Now?" after "Empty Spaces"
• "The Last Few Bricks" after "Another Brick In The Wall (Part III)"

Quotes

"In 1980 when we finished in New York, Larry Maggid, a Philadelphia promoter [...] offered us a guaranteed million dollars a show plus expenses to go and do two dates at JFK Stadium with The Wall [...] and I wouldn't do it. I had to go through the whole story with the other members. I said, 'You've all read my explanations of what The Wall is about. It's three years since we did that last stadium and I swore then that I would never do one again. And The Wall is entirely sparked off by how awful that was and how I didn't feel that the public or the band or anyone got anything out of it that was worthwhile. And that's why we've produced this show strictly for arenas where everyone does get something out of it that is worthwhile. Blah-blah-blah. And, I ain't fuckin' going!'"

- Roger Waters - June 1987, to Chris Salewicz

"Maybe the architectural training to look at things helped me to visualise my feelings of alienation from rock 'n' roll audiences. Which was the starting point for The Wall. The fact that it then embodied an autobiographical narrative was kind of secondary to the main thing which was a theatrical statement in which I was saying, 'Isn't this fucking awful? Here I am up onstage and there you all are down there and isn't it horrible! What the fuck are we all doing here?'"

- Roger Waters - June 1987, to Chris Salewicz

External links

• Pink Floyd lyrics for The Wall
• Complete Analysis of the Lyrics

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