‘Comfortably Numb’: Pink Floyd’s most misinterpreted masterpiece
Like most pioneering bands, Pink Floyd has a long list of highlights. One of the most experimental groups of their era, their odyssey is more sprawling than almost any other’s, with them crossing an immense amount of ground and trying their hand at an array of sonic areas. From raw, freak-out psychedelia to refined prog and later ambient, they are a prime example of an artist refusing to go stale. This point is made all the more remarkable, considering they’ve experienced their fair share of animosity too.
While Pink Floyd have classics from every era, ranging from their psychedelic 1967 debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, to their final effort, 2014’s The Endless River – two markedly different albums – their best period is largely agreed upon by fans. It kicked off with 1973’s ultimate concept album, The Dark Side of the Moon, and concluded with 1979’s The Wall.
Almost every track the group produced during this extensive span is a classic, yielding nearly all of their best-loved numbers, including ‘Money’, ‘Wish You Were Here’ and ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part Two’. This list also includes ‘Comfortably Numb’, the song fans voted as the band’s best in the newsletter The Amazing Pudding in 1992.
The highlight of The Wall, ‘Comfortably Numb’ is one of the most iconic Pink Floyd songs. It features a classic chorus, an effective sonic character that dances between pitch-black darkness and glistening, hopeful light and David Gilmour’s definitive guitar solo.
It is undoubtedly one of the most profound compositions Gilmour and Roger Waters ever crafted. In the 1982 movie of the album, the song is played in the scene where the main character, Pink – played by Bob Geldof – is rapt in catatonia before a performance. This bore clear resemblances to what happened during the stark mental health decline of the band’s original frontman, Syd Barrett, at the end of the 1960s, where he quickly faded from an influential star to a storied recluse trapped in his mind.
Despite the song evoking being in such a mental state, delirious and detached from reality, it has long been the band’s most misinterpreted masterpiece due to its descriptive and surreal lyrics. Given the title and the lyrics conveying the idea of being numb to reality and the fact that Pink is a rockstar, many fans thought the lyrics were about drugs. However, Waters, who conceived the lyrics and the record’s concept, has had his say on what inspired it, as well as another more skewed interpretation of the song’s meaning.
The lyrics, “When I was a child I had a fever / My hands felt just like two balloons”, were actually inspired by the time Waters fell sick as a child with a fever. It was a truly bizarre experience, and this detachment was something he would later feel as an adult, albeit under different circumstances. Although Barrett partly inspired this sentiment, so did the tour for 1977’s Animals, where the band played in massive stadiums, increasingly further away from their fans. However, these lines would send investigative fans down a different route, landing at a surprising interpretation.
Regarding the above lines, Waters told Mojo in 2009: “I remember having the flu or something, an infection with a temperature of 105 and being delirious. It wasn’t like the hands looked like balloons, but they looked way too big, frightening. A lot of people think those lines are about masturbation. God knows why.”
Pink Floyd have covered many musical realms and themes in their time, but they were never really ones to cover sexual means. At their peak, their work was cerebral and concerned with the self and its place in the world, a philosophical edge cutting a starkly different image to the transgressive glam rock and, later, the grotty anarchy of punk.
