The Wall
- This article deals with the Pink Floyd album. For the John Hersey novel, please see The Wall (Hersey). For the war memorial, please see Vietnam Veterans Memorial
{| align="right" border=1 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=2 width=225 style="margin-left:3px"\n!align="center" bgcolor="orange" colspan="3"|
The Wall\n|-\n|align="center" colspan="3"|
\n|-\n!align="center" bgcolor="orange" colspan="3"|
LP by
Pink Floyd\n|-\n!align="left" valign="top"|Released\n|colspan="2" valign="top"|
November 30 1979 (UK)
December 8 1979 (US)\n|-\n!align="left" valign="top"|Recorded\n|colspan="2" valign="top"|
1979\n|-\n!align="left" valign="top"|
Genre\n|colspan="2" valign="top"|
Rock\n|-\n!align="left" valign="top"|Length\n|colspan="2" valign="top"|39
min 19
s (1)
42
min 01
s (2)\n|-\n!align="left" valign="top"|
Record label\n|colspan="2" valign="top"|
Columbia Records\n|-\n!align="left" valign="top"|
Producers\n|colspan="2" valign="top"|
Bob Ezrin,
David Gilmour and
Roger Waters\n|-\n!bgcolor="orange" colspan="3"|Professional reviews\n|-\n!align="left" valign="top"|
RollingStone review\n|valign="top"|Favorable\n|valign="top"|
link\n|-\n!bgcolor="orange" colspan="3"|Pink Floyd Chronology\n|-align="center" \n|valign="top"|
Animals
(1977)\n|valign="top"|
The Wall
(1979)\n|valign="top"|
A Collection of Great Dance Songs
(1981)\n|}
The Wall is a rock opera/
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 concert tour for
Animals. 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 which would later develop into the album.
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, 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.
Hit singles
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".
Live dates
Pink Floyd only performed a concert version of The Wall a handful of times. It was performed in New York, Los Angeles, London, and Dortmund.
The performances included film clips of Gerald Scarfe animations.
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 exception to Wright, who earned money from his fixed salary for the concerts.
The movie
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. It drew on (auto) biographical material from Floyd members Roger Waters and Syd Barrett, combining Waters' early childhood (Waters' lamentation over the loss of his father in World War II was well known to Pink Floyd's fans) with Barrett's withdrawal and mental breakdown. This storyline was intercut with animated sequences by Gerald Scarfe.
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."
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, Sinead O'Connor, Cyndi Lauper, The Scorpions, Jerry Hall, and Bryan Adams, to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Track Listing (album version)
\nDisc one
\n#"In The Flesh?"\n#"The Thin Ice"\n#"Another Brick In The Wall (Part I)"\n#"The Happiest Days Of Our Lives"\n#"Another Brick In The Wall (Part II)"\n#"Mother"\n#"Goodbye Blue Sky"\n#"Empty Spaces"\n#"Young Lust"\n#"One Of My Turns"\n#"Don't Leave Me Now"\n#"Another Brick In The Wall (Part III)"\n#"Goodbye Cruel World"
Disc two
\n#"Hey You"\n#"Is There Anybody Out There?"\n#"Nobody Home"\n#"Vera"\n#"Bring the Boys Back Home"\n#"Comfortably Numb"\n#"The Show Must Go On"\n#"In The Flesh"\n#"Run Like Hell"\n#"Waiting For The Worms"\n#"Stop"\n#"The Trial"\n#"Outside The Wall"
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)\n*"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)\n*"Hey You" (released as a special feature on the DVD)\n*"The Show Must Go On"
Tracks from the live concert
\nThe live version of The Wall, Is There Anybody out There? The Wall: Live 1980-1981, included the following tracks not on the orignal album:\n*"What Shall We Do Now?" after "Empty Spaces"\n*"The Last Few Bricks" after "Another Brick In The Wall (Part III)"
Quotes
\n*I heard that the rest of the Floyd wanted to do The Wall tour in stadiums. And that was one of the reasons you ultimately knocked the Pink Floyd on the head...\n**"Yes, 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 (laughs) 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, with Chris Salewicz\n*"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, with Chris Salewicz
External links
