“Flawless”: The only Pink Floyd album Roger Waters called perfect
Any artist can only dream of having one album where everything comes together. It takes a small army to get any album to sound halfway decent, so to have every instrument dialled in correctly or the concept coming together perfectly is usually the kind of once-in-a-lifetime achievement that’s impossible to replicate. Although many people consider Dark Side of the Moon to be that moment for Pink Floyd, Roger Waters admitted that there was a better album worthy of being considered perfect in his catalogue.
Going back through the band’s history, though, it’s a miracle that they managed to stay together after Syd Barrett. He was their anchor during the best moments of their career, and even if it wasn’t strictly progressive rock, they had a certain identity for being whimsical that set them apart from every other psychedelic rock act.
Once Barrett lost his battle with his own mind, though, that kind of loss never really left Waters. Even though he took the reins and steered the group through a zany period throughout the late 1960s, many of their biggest albums would be defined by losing Barrett, whether that was the themes of madness on Dark Side of the Moon or the touching tribute songs ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’.
If there was any project that bottled up Barrett’s experience into one package, it would have to be The Wall. Even though there are probably a few more autobiographical pieces of the album than even Waters wants to admit, it’s hard to look at a rock opera surrounding a man growing desensitised to fame and building a wall between him and reality and not think of the ‘Mapcap’ who lost his mind at the end of the 1960s.
The story gets even more on the nose when watching the movie adaptation released around the same time. Even if it was never documented properly, watching Bob Geldolf’s Pink rotting away in a hotel room with a cigarette burned down to his fingers is a perfect way of describing both Barrett’s madness and the group’s uncomfortable relationship with being considered glamorous rock stars.
When doing promotion for his solo works like Amused to Death, Water still held his first rock opera as one of the ultimate examples of what he could with an album concept, saying, “We’ll have to see how I live with Amused to Death, but The Wall is really the thing I’m the proudest of. I think it’s pretty well flawless.”
At the same time, Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here are far better exercises because of how open they are as concepts. Though it’s easy to respect The Wall for being one of the most extravagant pieces of music that Pink Floyd ever made together, it will always have a little asterisk next to it for having some interludes that go on a touch too long, including tunes like ‘Vera’ and ‘Don’t Leave Me Now’ which work much better as stage pieces than something you’d want to replay on vinyl.
Still, there’s no real way of arguing around The Wall being one of the most timeless efforts that Pink Floyd ever made. It’s far from the easiest listen from front to back, but the more that people dig into the story, the more they start to realise how airtight every beat is.
