Happy 45th Anniversary to Pink Floyd’s eleventh studio album The Wall, originally released November 30, 1979.
Walls are potent symbols. They mark boundaries, set borders, bear loads, provide a base for artistic expression, hide, reveal, protect, and imprison. Pink Floyd’s The Wall turns 45 years old this week and captures all of this, sonically, emotionally, and metaphorically.
For me, the substance of the record—loss, self-loathing, alienation, loneliness, war, the comfort of being numb—is overwhelming. But the conflict in the album is what makes it so powerful. It’s one of the best-selling albums of all time and there’s a lot to discuss. Let’s dive in.
The Wall marks the beginning of the end of a run of extremely popular, riveting, and classic Floyd records, preceded by The Dark Side Of The Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), and Animals (1977). Many Pink Floyd albums came before and after this series, but they remain the most accessible and recognizable within the band’s discography. The Wall is also the beginning of the end of what was known as the traditional lineup for the band (that is, post-Syd Barrett). During recording, Richard Wright was fired from the group, and Roger Waters, David Gilmour, and Nick Mason fell apart as men and as a band.
The vast majority of the album was written by Waters who based it on his life and personal experiences. Gilmour shares writing credits with him on five tracks, and wrote three of them alone. But the most basic explanation, if there could be one, is that The Wall is a concept album and rock opera by Roger Waters.
The story follows our main character, Pink, through life: he loses his father in World War II, is raised alone by his overbearing mother, is sent to boarding school, becomes a rock star that no one understands; he becomes famous and thus isolated, and realizes that performing in front of so many fans is a proto-Fascism. He builds a wall to protect himself, every experience and relationship in life proof that others are not to be trusted.
During the band’s ‘In The Flesh’ tour for Animals in 1977, Pink Floyd started performing in large stadiums all over the world. When they played Olympic Stadium in Montreal which sat 76,000 people at the time, Waters was unsettled by the crowd’s behavior, short attention span, and volume, enough to spit on riled up audience members. This is where his writing begins.
Listen to the Album:
Album opener “In the Flesh?” is a raw, stripped down version of a track we’ll hear about an hour later, “In The Flesh.” The first words are “...we came in?” that is, if you strain to hear them. The song is a flashback that winds up and down, starts quiet and overpowers before a plane goes down. Then, Pink is born: “The Thin Ice” opens with a baby’s cry and lyrics foreshadowing what’s to come in life (“Don’t be surprised when a crack in the ice / appears under your feet”).
“Another Brick In The Wall, Part 1” acts as a teaser, almost an interlude, to one of the most famous rock & roll songs and most quintessential Pink Floyd songs. It’s when Pink starts building the wall.
There are 26 songs in all, and many last only a minute or two. The record is full of sound effects: helicopters, planes, birds, children laughing, playing, screaming; there’s smashing glass, maniacal laughing, telephone operators, dial tones, and unidentified humming machinery. There’s also a lot of quiet space and time where we, the listeners, are floating, giving us time to process what we’re hearing. Listen to The Wall all the way through, no shuffle, no skipping tracks. Embrace its weird clutter and storyline. You must let it happen to you.
The Wall is home to two of the most played and loved Pink Floyd songs: “Another Brick In The Wall, Part 2” and “Comfortably Numb.” They’re two singles that have come to define the band on classic rock radio, show up on soundtracks, and long ago declared themselves Here To Stay. And they should stay, because when you do isolate them, they fill you up with all you need to know about The Wall.
“Another Brick In The Wall, Part 2” has the infamous children’s chorus “We don’t need no education / Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone.” It’s the song that’s the most blatant metaphor: anyone and everyone is another brick in the wall. People are in Pink’s way, teachers and their rules are unwelcome obstacles, the children themselves are bricks, born into a system they reject.
The sounds of “Comfortably Numb” mimic the echo of a wall while the pulsing opening bars are a heavy plunger, the layered chorus a crystal clear bliss. Listen to Gilmour’s guitar work enough times and you’ll fly with him.
On “Mother,” Gilmour voices the title character to Waters’ Pink. Mother says she’ll help build the wall. The guitar solo after this declaration is so short, I can’t stand it. It’s a 30-second soundtrack of getting separated from someone in a crowd. It stops time for me, every time.
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Motifs across the record push the narrative down every dark corridor. “Goodbye Blue Sky” is about The Blitz. “Empty Spaces” is the space between Pink and his wife. “Young Lust” is Pink’s run around with groupies while on tour—the grunge on the guitar, pulse of bass, and pounding drum fills are sexual not because of the lyrics “oooooo / I need a dirty woman,” but because this is exactly what sex sounds like. It’s another short riff because, I assume, there’s so much more to get to. The Wall toys with my sonic interests constantly, telling me what it can deliver, handing it over, and immediately taking it back.
Pink returns home to discover his wife’s infidelity (“Don’t Leave Me Now”) and completely breaks down (“Another Brick In The Wall, Part 3”), building the wall higher. He continues to slip into depression (“Goodbye Cruel World”) and decides all he has is himself.
The wall gets higher (“Hey You”). He continues to chronicle his loss brought on by WWII (“Bring The Boys Back Home,” “Vera”) and eventually has to be drugged to go on stage (“Comfortably Numb”). Pink keeps performing for large crowds (“The Show Must Go On”). We return to “In The Flesh” where Pink hallucinates that his large concerts with screaming fans are rallies for the Third Reich. His delusions thicken when he leads the crowd as an unruly mob (“Run Like Hell,” “Waiting For The Worms”). Pink comes to on “Stop” and puts himself on Trial (“The Trial”).
On “Outside The Wall” there’s a distant crumbling of rocks as the wall comes down, Pink is no more, and everything comes around again ending with the words “Isn’t this where…” completing the phrase “...we come in” that opens the album illustrating that life, and the concept album, are circular.
Behind the story of The Wall is immaculate musicianship, production, mixing, and composition. Many of the songs have different time signatures and different tunings on multiple instruments. There are organs, synthesizers, dissonance, and unusual, constantly changing chord progressions. Waters and Gilmour could not agree on how one thing should be performed and recorded. The record expands Pink Floyd’s sound—orchestration, choral arrangements, blues, rock, theatrics—but left too much room for everything to come between the band.
Let me be honest and say The Wall is pretentious, overstuffed, and messy. More than just a meditation on life and all of its problems, it’s an album that is so tyrannical it’s no surprise the metaphorical wall Waters wrote became a real one separating him from the band. Everything became about everything, a meta creative and personal life crushed them all.
Pink Floyd toured the record for 31 dates between 1980 and 1981. There was a giant wall constructed between the audience and the band which only estranged Waters further. It came down by the end of every show, as it should, but the damage was done. Waters left the group a few years later and then sued them for using his music and the name Pink Floyd. It was a big, historic mess. (In 2013, he admitted he was wrong and simply said, “who cares?!”)
The fantastical storytelling of The Wall met reality in 1990 when Waters performed the album in its entirety (with a stunning, bizarre array of supporting musicians from members of The Band to Cyndi Lauper, Joni Mitchell, Tim Curry, and Sinéad O'Connor). It’s funny. He wrote an album about how singing in front of arena crowds made him feel like he was leading a Nazi rally and then performed the same album in front of nearly half a million screaming fans in Berlin to commemorate the fall of The Berlin Wall. Roger Waters is a smart man and I assure you it is not lost on him. Irony is one of life’s greatest gifts.
The story within The Wall is complicated and dark. (By the third Nazi rally in the 1982 movie The Wall, I was gobsmacked and emotionally exhausted.) But that doesn’t mean it’s to be ignored. When I consume a piece of art in any medium, I ask two questions: what does it reflect and what does it reveal? There is so much passion and rage in Pink’s story (and in Waters’). As listeners, we learn the lesson with every spin of the album that it took Waters a lifetime to understand. Purposefully keeping yourself away from others and from the world leads to isolation, misery, and wild loneliness. Blocking out what you don’t want to see leads to toxic tunnel vision and intolerance.
The Wall reflects and reveals the complexity of being human. The fact that we’re still remembering it and learning from it shows its staying power. Even though Pink conquered his demons and the wall came down, The Wall never went away and will always be relevant.
LISTEN:
Editor's note: this anniversary tribute was originally published in 2019 and has since been edited for accuracy and timeliness.