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The Wall was Pink Floyd’s most ambitious, sprawling concept album ever, a mammoth touring stage production, a full-length movie and, some years later, a star-studded one-off concert in Berlin. It was also, as guitarist Dave Gilmour has pointed out, “the last embers of Roger’s and my ability to work collaboratively together.”
Roger Waters still rates The Wall as the best idea he ever had, and its songs of alienation, bitterness and rage against the machines are generally viewed as the nearest he has come to an autobiography in music.
The album’s seed lies in an incident during a concert at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, on 6 July 1977. It was the end of a lengthy tour, and Waters was increasingly disillusioned about his relationship with the audience. “There was a fan clawing his way up the storm netting to try and get to us,” he remembers, “and I just snapped and spat at him. I was shocked, disgusted by myself as soon as I did it, but, after I’d thought about it, the idea of actually building a wall between us and the audience, it had wonderful theatrical possibilities.”
The band was suffering tax problems, so the double-album was recorded partly in France and partly in Los Angeles, but no expense was spared. “We got hand-built sixteen track recorders from L.A. and carted them at great expense to France,” remembers Gilmour. “They kept breaking down every two minutes. There was a whole range of new technology and all these new people we’d brought in to make this record a huge sonic advance.”
In retrospect, Gilmour has reservations about the album. “I still think some of the music is incredibly naff,” he says, “but The Wall is conceptually brilliant. At the time I thought it was Roger listing all the things that can turn a person into an isolated human being. I came to see it as one of the luckiest people in the world issuing a catalogue of abuse and bile against people who'd never done anything to him.”
The album included what would turn out to be their first single for eleven years, the controversial Another Brick In The Wall. The song, with its violently anti-education theme, was written by Waters, but the disco beat which helped propel it to No1 in the US and UK, was suggested by producer Bob Ezrin, and the kids choir was recorded in North London without any member of the band present.
The Wall’s other most memorable track, and another source of friction between Waters and Gilmour, is probably Comfortably Numb. “Roger was taking more and more of the credits,” complains Gilmour. “In the songbook for this album against Comfortably Numb it says Music by Gilmour and Waters. It shouldn't. He did the lyrics. I did the music.”
Although The Wall stalled at No3 in the UK, where punk was still in full flow, The Floyd must have taken some slight comfort when it topped the American charts for fifteen straight weeks.
(Source : Johnny Black, first published in the book Albums by Backbeat Press, 2005)
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Roger Waters still rates The Wall as the best idea he ever had, and its songs of alienation, bitterness and rage against the machines are generally viewed as the nearest he has come to an autobiography in music.
The album’s seed lies in an incident during a concert at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, on 6 July 1977. It was the end of a lengthy tour, and Waters was increasingly disillusioned about his relationship with the audience. “There was a fan clawing his way up the storm netting to try and get to us,” he remembers, “and I just snapped and spat at him. I was shocked, disgusted by myself as soon as I did it, but, after I’d thought about it, the idea of actually building a wall between us and the audience, it had wonderful theatrical possibilities.”
The band was suffering tax problems, so the double-album was recorded partly in France and partly in Los Angeles, but no expense was spared. “We got hand-built sixteen track recorders from L.A. and carted them at great expense to France,” remembers Gilmour. “They kept breaking down every two minutes. There was a whole range of new technology and all these new people we’d brought in to make this record a huge sonic advance.”
In retrospect, Gilmour has reservations about the album. “I still think some of the music is incredibly naff,” he says, “but The Wall is conceptually brilliant. At the time I thought it was Roger listing all the things that can turn a person into an isolated human being. I came to see it as one of the luckiest people in the world issuing a catalogue of abuse and bile against people who'd never done anything to him.”
The album included what would turn out to be their first single for eleven years, the controversial Another Brick In The Wall. The song, with its violently anti-education theme, was written by Waters, but the disco beat which helped propel it to No1 in the US and UK, was suggested by producer Bob Ezrin, and the kids choir was recorded in North London without any member of the band present.
The Wall’s other most memorable track, and another source of friction between Waters and Gilmour, is probably Comfortably Numb. “Roger was taking more and more of the credits,” complains Gilmour. “In the songbook for this album against Comfortably Numb it says Music by Gilmour and Waters. It shouldn't. He did the lyrics. I did the music.”
Although The Wall stalled at No3 in the UK, where punk was still in full flow, The Floyd must have taken some slight comfort when it topped the American charts for fifteen straight weeks.
(Source : Johnny Black, first published in the book Albums by Backbeat Press, 2005)