‘The Wall’: The Pink Floyd album Roger Waters said never ended properly
Every great album should feel like reading a finely crafted novel. Even if not every song makes sense on its own, hearing every piece of music bounce off each other before coming to a firm conclusion is all anyone can ask for once they walk out of the studio for the last time. Although Roger Waters did have the final say in most of Pink Floyd’s conceptual releases, he felt that he would have loved to spend more time on this album before it wound up with such a lacklustre ending.
Ever since hitting the song ‘Echoes,’ Waters had a vision for what Pink Floyd was supposed to be. He had been listening to how his influences used empathy to relate to the audience, so when working on projects like Dark Side of the Moon, it was about trying to make peace with every aspect of life and taking everything day by day without moving too close to the dark side of life.
Then again, it’s almost ironic that half of Floyd’s next releases had to do with everything ugly that the business side of their lives had to offer. Outside of the tribute to Syd Barrett, a lot of Wish You Were Here deals with the pressures of being a major player in the music business, and by the time they reached Animals, hearing Waters sing about the horrors of business tycoons trying to satisfy their massive egos had become a bit much for some people to take in.
While most of the tour had gone poorly from Waters’s perspective, The Wall was his chance to make the most inventive album he had ever made. Despite everyone else being treated as side players, hearing Waters sing about someone sinking so low that they close themselves off from reality is one of the most frightening realities that come with being a rock and roll star and being transported from one room to the next for most of your life.
Although the album does have a story arc in which the character Pink eventually breaks free from his metaphorical wall, the penultimate song leaves things on a slightly ominous note when everyone screams for the wall to be torn down, and we hear bits of falling rubble. Right when we are supposed to see the falling action in a movie, the album comes to an abrupt end on ‘Outside the Wall’, which is over before it really gets started.
Despite freeing Pink from his imprisonment, Waters felt that it deserved a far better ending than it got, saying, “I’m still looking for an ending to The Wall. It seems strange to say 20 years later. On and off I’ve been picking it up and rewriting it as a Broadway show, but what has stopped me is I’ve never been too sure how it finished. I really had no idea when I wrote it how it finished.”
A Broadway adaptation may certainly help give more context to the piece, but the sound design at the end of the album is truly the perfect ending for it. While there has been an ongoing in-joke regarding the album where the phrase “isn’t this” is heard at the end and “where we came in” is at the beginning to loop the record, that makes the tale all the more tragic, almost as if Pink is condemned to repeat his mistakes for the rest of his life.
It’s not exactly a pleasant ending, but it’s a lot more fitting for Pink’s character from a storytelling perspective. This was a broken man trying his best to make something better for himself, but the fact that he is doomed to follow down the same dark path and cause himself pain is the same kind of dark fate that makes someone like Smeagol so interesting when watching Lord of the Rings.
