Pink Floyd – ‘The Wall’
It’s a message so faint that you’d never catch it on your first listen. Hell, before the age of the internet, most listeners didn’t hear it at all. But right as you put needle to vinyl, the words “…we came in” can faintly be heard over the mournful sound of a clarinet. It’s impossible to know from the initial discovery, but those words would set the stage for one of the most replayable and cyclical albums of all time. As dramatic, bombastic, and emotionally raw as rock music had ever gotten, The Wall is the ultimate endpoint for the epic journey of Pink Floyd.
Bringing in elements of their entire story up to that point – including Roger Waters’ traumatic loss of his father during childhood, the hard-nosed upbringing that most English youth experienced at the time, and the psychotic tailspin that befell the band’s first leader, Syd Barrett – The Wall is the ambitious peak of everything that Pink Floyd aspired to do. It is also their undoing.
Helmed from the start by Waters, The Wall blasts off with the fraught ‘In The Flesh?’. The song’s title references the tour that pushed Waters to his breaking point, eventually spitting on a fan and causing him to begin the planning of The Wall. Immediately tearing down the fourth wall, chants of the band’s name and Waters calling out stage directions like a frantic fascist director set up what is to be the Floyd’s most theatrical work yet.
Pink Floyd were no strangers to weighty conceptual pieces. Since Barrett’s departure, the band had taken on the pressure of modern life (The Dark Side of the Moon), the absence of their leader (Wish You Were Here), and the cutthroat social customs of mid-1970s Britain (Animals). Each subsequent work had been more elaborate and darker than the previous one, with the trend continuing on The Wall. Rogers’ concept called for full orchestrations, while the album’s tight deadline called for exacting performances. Largely organised by producers Bob Ezrin and James Guthrie, along with Waters and guitarist David Gilmour, The Wall would be unbeatable in terms of scale.
The sheer amount of plot and musical material that the band stuff inside of The Wall can make it seem daunting. But rest assured – all 80 minutes of the album are essential. The basic structure is as follows: ‘The Thin Ice’ to ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’ deals with the trauma of losing a father to war, the overprotective effect it has on the mother, and the belittling nature of public education. ‘Empty Spaces’ to ‘Goodbye Cruel World’ finds a rockstar seeing his marriage fall apart, spiralling into depressive isolation, and fully cutting off the outside world. ‘Hey You’ to ‘Bring the Boys Back Home’ is one long fever dream, while ‘Comfortably Numb’ begins the full mental breakdown that continues until ‘Waiting for the Worms’, and finally ‘Stop’ to ‘Outside the Wall’ brings the titular wall down in grand fashion.
Waters’ control over the album is clear, even without the proper context. He provides most of the album’s vocals, a first for Pink Floyd, and is credited as the sole writer for most of the songs. Gilmour’s contributions come on three of the more commercial tracks – ‘Young Lust’, ‘Comfortably Numb’ and ‘Run Like Hell’. Since Waters took the first-person POV for most of the album, Gilmour is a succession of side characters with his vocals – the overbearing maternal figure in ‘Mother’, a disembodied voice in ‘Hey You’, and an omniscient narrator in ‘Comfortably Numb’, to name a few.
The stress that was involved in making the LP added to its palpable tension. Keyboardist Richard Wright was fired by Waters toward the conclusion of the album when conflicts reached their peak, and it was determined that he wasn’t pulling his weight. Drummer Nick Mason willingly bowed out of performing on ‘Mother’, giving the sticks to Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro in order to ensure that the song was recorded in a timely manner. Pink Floyd were coming apart at the seams, bringing some of the nastier rockstar storylines from the album into their real-life interactions.
Despite every song being a key mile marker in the album’s overall story, The Wall paradoxically also gave Pink Floyd some of their most enduring singles and concert staples that survived outside the confines of the LP. ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. II’, an explicit allusion to disco music, wound up becoming the Floyd’s only number one hit in America when it topped the charts in the early months of 1980. ‘Comfortably Numb’ would become even more famous outside the context of The Wall, with Gilmour performing perhaps the most acclaimed and beloved guitar solos of his career.
Listening to The Wall is as engrossing as it is exhausting. You have to endure death, war, pain, nightmares, hallucinations, and, most infamously, Nazi imagery. There’s nothing particularly “fun” about The Wall – it could very well be the most pessimistic album in the history of rock. And yet, when the final bricks come tumbling down at the end, a strange sort of peace comes over you. The skies open, the darkness lifts, and a sense of radiant satisfaction becomes impossible to ignore.
At least until the album’s final words come in: “Isn’t this where…”. It’s at that moment that the demented genius of The Wall becomes clear. Everything that occurred throughout those brutal 80 minutes is bound to happen again, over and over, in an endless loop. While the sentiment might be horrendously grim, the immediate effect on the listener is obvious: you simply have to go back to the beginning and experience it again.
That’s what remains the most astounding part of The Wall: for such a sadistic story, you can’t help but want to return to it. Pink Floyd were masters at work, bringing in enthralling melodies, riveting musical passages, razor-sharp lyrical observations, and a massive theatrical flair to an album that would be their masterpiece had it not been for the spectre Dark Side. It’s nowhere near an “easy listen”, but few musical experiences are as potent and mesmerising as The Wall.
