The Wall
The Wall is the eleventh studio album by the English rock band Pink Floyd, released on 30 November 1979 by Harvest/EMI and Columbia/CBS Records. It is the last album to include all four post-Barrett-era band members. The album is a rock opera which follows the story of "Pink", a jaded rock star, as he constructs a psychological "wall" of social isolation. The Wall topped the US charts for 15 weeks and reached number three in the UK. It initially received mixed reviews from critics, many of whom found it overblown and pretentious, but later received accolades as one of the greatest albums of all time.
The group's bassist Roger Waters conceived The Wall during Pink Floyd's 1977 In the Flesh tour, modelling the character of Pink after himself and former member Syd Barrett. Recording spanned from December 1978 to November 1979. Co-producer Bob Ezrin helped to refine the concept and bridge tensions during recording, as the band members were struggling with personal and financial problems. The group's keyboardist, Richard Wright, was fired by Waters during production but stayed on during the tour as a salaried musician.
Three singles were issued: "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2", "Run Like Hell", and "Comfortably Numb". From 1980 to 1981, Pink Floyd performed the album on a tour that featured elaborate theatrical effects. In 1982, The Wall was adapted into a feature film written by Waters.
The Wall is one of the best-known concept albums. With over 30 million copies sold, it is the second-best-selling Pink Floyd album behind The Dark Side of the Moon, the best-selling double album of all time, and one of the best-selling albums of all time. Some outtakes were used on the next Pink Floyd album, The Final Cut. In 2000, it was voted number 30 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums. In 2003, 2012, and 2020, it was included in Rolling Stones lists of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". From 2010 to 2013, Waters staged a new The Wall live tour that became one of the highest-grossing tours by a solo musician. In 2011, Waters declared The Wall to be his favourite album he recorded with Pink Floyd.
Background
Throughout 1977, Pink Floyd played the In the Flesh tour to promote their new album Animals. Roger Waters despised the experience – angered by the audience's rowdy behavior and convinced that they were not really listening to the music. During the final show on 6 July 1977 at the Montreal Olympic Stadium, a group of noisy and excited fans near the stage irritated Waters so much that he leaned over the side and spat on one of them. Said Waters of the incident, "Immediately afterwards I was shocked by my behaviour. I realised that what had once been a worthwhile and manageable exchange between us and them had been utterly perverted by scale, corporate avarice and ego. All that remained was an arrangement that was essentially sado-masochistic." That night, Waters spoke with producer Bob Ezrin and a psychiatrist friend of Ezrin's about the alienation and despair he was experiencing. He articulated his desire to isolate himself by constructing a wall across the stage between the band and the audience. The concept was an instant source of inspiration.While Gilmour and Wright were in France recording solo albums, and the drummer, Nick Mason, was busy producing Steve Hillage's Green, Waters began to write material. The spitting incident became the starting point for a new concept, which explored the protagonist's self-imposed isolation after years of traumatic interactions with authority figures and the loss of his father as a child.
In July 1978, Pink Floyd reconvened at Britannia Row Studios, where Waters presented two new ideas for concept albums. The first was a 90-minute demo with the working title Bricks in the Wall. The second was about a man's dreams on one night, and dealt with marriage, sex, and the pros and cons of monogamy and family life versus promiscuity. The band chose the first option; the second eventually became Waters's debut solo studio album, The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking.
By September, Pink Floyd were having financial problems and urgently needed to produce an album to make money. The financial planners Norton Warburg Group had invested £1.3–3.3 million, up to £ in contemporary value, of the group's money in high-risk venture capital to reduce their tax liabilities. The strategy failed when many of the businesses NWG invested in lost money, leaving the band facing tax rates potentially as high as 83 per cent. Waters said: "Eighty-three per cent was a lot of money in those days and we didn't have it." Pink Floyd terminated their relationship with NWG, demanding the return of uninvested funds. Gilmour said he became closely involved in the business side of Pink Floyd afterwards: "Ever since then, there's not a penny that I haven't signed for. I sign every cheque and examine everything."
To help manage the project's 26 tracks, Waters decided to bring in an outside producer and collaborator, feeling he needed "a collaborator who was musically and intellectually in a similar place to where I was". They hired Ezrin at the suggestion of Waters's then-wife Carolyne Christie, who had worked as Ezrin's secretary. Ezrin had previously worked with Alice Cooper, Lou Reed, Kiss, and Peter Gabriel. From the start, Waters made it clear who was in charge, telling him: "You can write anything you want. Just don't expect any credit."
Waters and Ezrin worked mostly on the story, improving the concept. Ezrin presented a 40-page script to the rest of the band, with positive results. He recalled: "The next day at the studio, we had a table read, like you would with a play, but with the whole of the band, and their eyes all twinkled, because then they could see the album." Ezrin broadened the storyline, distancing it from the autobiographical work Waters had written and basing it on a composite character named Pink. The engineer Nick Griffiths later said: "Ezrin was very good in The Wall, because he did manage to pull the whole thing together. He's a very forceful guy. There was a lot of argument about how it should sound between Roger and Dave, and he bridged the gap between them." Waters wrote most of the album, with Gilmour co-writing "Comfortably Numb", "Run Like Hell", and "Young Lust", and Ezrin co-writing "The Trial".
Concept and storyline
The Wall is a rock opera that explores abandonment, cycles of violence, and isolation, symbolized by a wall. The songs create a storyline of events in the life of Pink, a fictional rock star based on Waters and Pink Floyd's former frontman Syd Barrett. The first half of the album largely features events from Waters' childhood and young adulthood, such as the death of his father in WWII, and his wife's infidelity. The album also includes several references to Barrett, namely the track "Nobody Home", which mirrors lyrically one of Barrett's final songs for the Floyd, the unreleased B side "Vegetable Man" through descriptions of the narrator's possessions and character. "Comfortably Numb" was inspired by Waters' injection with a muscle relaxant to combat the effects of hepatitis during the In the Flesh tour in Philadelphia. In the song "In the Flesh" Waters "imagines himself as a fascist dictator".Plot
The album opens with Pink, a rock star, addressing a crowd of fans at one of his concerts, to whom he is about to give an apparently unexpected performance of his life story. A flashback on his life up to that point begins, in which it is revealed that his father was killed during World War II, leaving Pink's mother to raise him alone. Beginning with the death of his father, Pink starts to build a metaphorical wall around himself. Growing older, Pink is tormented at school by tyrannical, abusive teachers, and memories of these traumas become metaphorical "bricks in the wall".Now an adult, Pink remembers his domineering, overprotective mother and his upbringing during the Blitz. Pink soon marries, and after more "bricks" are created through more traumas, he is preparing to complete his "wall". While touring in the United States, he seeks casual sex to relieve the tedium of touring, though in making a phone call home, he learns of his wife's infidelity. He brings a groupie back to his hotel room, only to trash it in a violent fit of rage, terrifying her out of the room. Depressed, Pink thinks about his wife and fantasizes about committing violence against her. Feeling trapped, he dismisses the impact his past has had on him while rejecting human contact and medication. Pink's wall is now finished, completely isolating himself from the outside world.
Immediately after the wall's completion, Pink questions his decisions and locks himself in his hotel room. As his depression worsens, Pink turns to his possessions for comfort, and yearns for the idea of reconnecting with his personal roots. Pink's mind flashes back to World War II, with the people demanding that the soldiers return home. Returning to the present, Pink's manager and roadies break into his hotel room, where they find him unresponsive. A paramedic injects him with drugs to enable him to perform at a concert later that night.
The drugs kick in, resulting in a hallucinatory on-stage performance where he believes that he is a fascist dictator, and that his concert is a Neo-Nazi rally, at which he sets brownshirt-like men on fans that he considers unworthy. He proceeds to attack minorities, culminating in him imagining holding a violence-inciting rally in suburban London. Pink's hallucination then ceases, and he begs for everything to stop. Tormented with guilt, Pink places himself on trial before his inner judge, who orders him to "tear down the wall" as punishment for his actions. This is the opening of Pink to the outside world.
The album turns full circle with its closing words "Isn't this where...", the first words of the phrase that begins the album, "...we came in?", with a continuation of the melody of the last song hinting at the cyclical nature of Waters' theme, and that the existential crisis at the heart of the album will never truly end.