“Chomped to bits”: David Gilmour on regretting cutting up ‘The Wall’
Pink Floyd were a band that undoubtedly pushed the limits of what an album was capable of.
Up until that point, the format was largely treated as a collection of singles – a singular piece of work where fans could access all songs without any wider thread being weaved between them. Come the late 1960s and early 1970s, the concept album was introduced to music, with The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On in 1971, and David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust And the Spiders from Mars in 1972.
Concept albums pushed the boundaries of creativity, enabling bands to explore cohesive sonic, thematic, and lyrical ideas across an entire record. At times, these albums blurred the lines between tracks, making it difficult to tell where one song ended and another began. They represented a bold artistic endeavour, often defying commercial norms with structures that were anything but radio-friendly.
Come 1973, the idea of the concept album was fertile ground, ready for the definitive seed to be planted. Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was perhaps the record that achieved that; a ten-song record that fluctuated between genres and time signatures with relative ease and seamlessness, leaving the listener with a fluid 42-minute listening experience that paused only for the flipping of the vinyl.
It was a truly groundbreaking album that highlighted the band’s knack for blending creative flair with meticulous musical craftsmanship. At the same time, it became a creative yardstick by which all their future projects would be measured, driving them deeper into the creative well for their subsequent records.
In 1979, they released The Wall, somewhat of a brainchild of Roger Waters, and it was an expansive double album that delved into concept imagery once more. Centred around the lead character, Pink, The Wall explores isolation and abandonment with Rock Opera tendencies, creating a dramatic soundscape that divided fans.
But perhaps album’s storyline was overshadowed by the real life opera taking place within the band, as tensions rose with growing creative differences beginning to surface. Waters was steadfast in his decision to pursue his ideas, to a point where the rest of the band were resigned to passengers in the process, with Rick Wright in particular being fired as a member of the band, only to be subsequently rehired as a session musician.
In an interview with Charlie Kendall, Gilmour reflected on the record saying, “He gave us all a cassette of the whole thing, and I couldn’t listen to it. It was too depressing and too boring in lots of places,” Gilmour reflected in a past interview with Charlie Kendall. “But I liked the basic idea. We eventually agreed to do it, but we had to chuck out a lot of stuff, rewrite a lot of things and put a lot of new bits in, throw a lot of old bits out.”
With Waters’ dogged pursuit of creating a double album being the overarching framework of The Wall, creative details were eventually sacrificed. In a 2008 interview with Gold Mine, Gilmour shared his regrets over the production of that album: “The whole side three bit with the orchestra all got shortened radically. Other songs — ‘Run Like Hell’, was chopped to bits, really. Whole chunks. One was concentrating then on vinyl. It wouldn’t matter so much today, but with vinyl, there was a finite limit of about 21 minutes a side”.
He added: “Every extra minute, you lost a db, one db of level when it’s being played on the radio. Not so much here, where they compress the shit out of it, but also [the] signal-to-noise level gets worse and over 25 minutes you’re beginning to suffer quite distinctly. So, our objective was to get it short enough to be able to get it onto two albums, and some things suffered for that.”
While the daring double album did feature some of Pink Floyd’s finest moments as a band—‘Hey You’ and ‘Comfortably Numb’—and the overall record has gone on to achieve cultural success, it came at a personal price. If Dark Side of the Moon witnessed Pink Floyd growing its wings, then The Wall is perhaps the moment they flew too close to the sun.
