The story of the last great Pink Floyd song in 1979: “Gave me goosebumps”
The longtime progressive giants were hurtling toward their embittered nadir as a unit when the 1970s ended, but Pink Floyd were still able to wrestle one final classic from the bad blood.
Ever since original frontman Syd Barrett’s departure a decade earlier, bassist Roger Waters had slowly been accruing creative control as Pink Floyd’s conceptual captain, moving the band away from their earlier cosmic jams to a tighter art-rock spectacle devoted to attacking the political class and the music industry over skits indulging in ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’. By 1979, Waters was practically pulling all musical levels, dreaming up the quasi-autobiographical The Wall and firmly charting a course toward rock opera theatre.
Few fans would disagree that 1979’s double LP marks the last time the Pink Floyd camp was firing on all cylinders, including Waters’ solo ventures. An ambitious confluence of Waters’ obsessions with the dark side of fame and his perennial processing of his wartime father’s death as an infant, The Wall would eagerly jump into a grander, more ostentatious package than the band had mustered yet, veering between orchestral bluster and disco-tinged swagger, boasting a mega multimedia live show, and ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2’ topping the charts on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Wall’s ultimate jewel in the crown is its third and final single. Tensions among Pink Floyd were reaching a boiling point, keyboardist Richard Wright was even fired from the sessions due to supposedly not meeting Waters’ recording demands. It was their principal songwriter and guitarist, David Gilmour, whose rapport had broken down the most, however. What was once a shared artistic relationship had swiftly ebbed to existing as a means to realise Waters’ vision, rendering much in the way of collaboration a dead end in The Wall’s tumultuous gestation.
Through feuds and fighting, Waters and Gilmour would at least see through one of their finest works before completely falling out indefinitely. Lyrical seeds were planted two years earlier. Crippling stomach cramps before a show at the Philadelphia Spectrum during the In the Flesh tour resulted in Waters having to take a tranquilliser shot to see out the night, playing the set encumbered with the heavy, leaden fug of anaesthesia, making even picking up the guitar a chore.
It just so happened that Waters was tinkering with a sketch provisionally dubbed ‘The Doctor’ when co-producer Bob Ezrin twisted his arm to take a look at a Gilmour sketch as a potential musical spark. It was a wordless demo cut during the sessions of his 1978 eponymous debut on just an acoustic guitar, but possessed a raw and contemplative stir even in its base form. The two set aside their differences as best as they could to shape the piece, taking the medicinal themes and crafting a vignette of the jaded rock star protagonist’s emotional detachment amid the numbing effects of muscle relaxants.
Everybody knew they were on to something special, no less than Ezrin, who claimed the completed lyrics “just gave me goosebumps”. A major snag was hit on ‘Comfortably Numb’s direction once recording was underway in earnest. Waters and Ezrin pushed for a big, orchestral grandiosity to match its dramatic crescendo, while Gilmour favoured a leaner, harder rock approach. Such loggerheads dragged out until an exhausted compromise was reached, the strings featured throughout the piece until Gilmour’s second guitar solo that concludes their fraught single.
It’s the last solo that generates the most praise. While the first shred elevates ‘Comfortably Numb’ several notches, it’s the thunderous finale that immortalises itself into rock lore, bottling all the surging drama of The Wall character’s unmooring from reality via Gilmour’s scorchingly electric solo that touches the song’s apex of power. Coupled with the pair’s alternating vocals, Waters, the cynical doctor, while Gilmour, the spiritually released apparition, ‘Comfortably Numb’ was not only Pink Floyd’s last hurrah, but the final ignition of the duo’s creative fires.
They’d never reach such artistic heights again. Pink Floyd would limp on with 1983’s The Final Cut before Waters officially called it quits two years later, triggering a four-decade mutual mud-slinging from then on. But it was clear all involved knew how powerful their 1979 cut was. When briefly letting bygones be bygones for their 2005 Live 8 concert, the reformed Pink Floyd ensured their ‘Comfortably Numb’ behemoth served as their final, jaw-dropping closer.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Classic Rock Newsletter
All the latest Classic Rock content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.