Release date:
November 30th, 1979
Recorded at: Super Bear Studios, Miravel,
France; CBS Studios, New York City and Producers Workshop, Los
Angeles (April-November 1979)
"The Wall" is hugely impressive as a construction job,
and there are some excellent songs lurking in the morass (notably
"Comfortably Numb" and the sparkling cock-rock parody
"Young Lust"). The band went tho the south of France in
1978, after the loss of 2 millions of pounds in investments, to
record a double concept album which proved to be their Rogerest
project yet. While there, the Pink Floyd Mark two partnership
finally started to dissolve.
David Gilmour: "I still think some of the music is incredibly naff, but The Wall is conceptually brilliant. At the time I thought it was Roger listing all the things that can turn a person into an isolated human being. I came to see it as as one of the luckiest people in the world issuing a catalogue of abuse and bile against people who'd never done anything to him. Roger was taking more and more of the credits. In the songbook for this album against Comfortably Numb it says Music by Gilmour and Waters. It shouldn't. He did the lyrics. I did the music. I kept finding hundreds of little things like that. Shouldn't bitch, but one does feel unjustly done."
Nick Mason: "The recording was very tense, mainly because Roger was starting to go a bit mad. This was the record when he fell out badly with Rick. Rick has a natural style, a very specific piano style, but he doesn't come up with pieces easily, or to order. Which is a problem when other people are worrying about who did what and who should get the credit. There was even talk of Roger and Dave elbowing me out and carrying on as a duo. There were points during The Wall when Roger and Dave were really carrying the thing. Rick was useless, and I wasn't very much help to anyone either."
David Gilmour: "Generally Nick worked hard and played well on The Wall. He even worked out a way of reading music for the drums. But there was one track called Mother which he really didn't get. So I hired Jeff Porcaro to do it. And Roger latched on to this idea, the way he always did with my ideas, and began to think, is Nick really necessary?"
During the sessions for The Wall, Richard Wright was basically forced out of Pink Floyd.
Rick Wright: "Roger came up with the whole album on a demo, which everyone felt was potentially very good but musically very weak. Very weak indeed. Bob [Ezrin], Dave and myself worked on it to make it more interesting. But Roger was going through a big ego thing at the time, saying that I wasn't putting enough in, although he was making it impossible for me to do anything. The crunch came when we all went off on holiday towards the end of the recording. A week before the holiday was up I got a call from Roger in America, saying come over immediately. Then there was this band meeting in which Roger told me he wanted me to leave the band. At first I refused. So Roger stood up and said that if I didn't agree to leave after the album was finished, he would walk out then and there and take the tapes with him. There would be no album, and no money to pay off our huge debts. So I agreed to go. I had two young kids to support. I was terrified. Now I think I made a mistake. It was Roger's bluff. But I really didn't want to work with this guy anymore."
David Gilmour: "We had a studio in the south of France where Rick was staying. There rest of us had rented houses 20 miles away. We'd all go home at night, and we'd say to Rick, Do what you like, here all these tracks, write something, play a solo, put some stuff down. You've got all evening every evening to do it. All the time we were there, which was several months, he did nothing. He just wasn't capable of playing anything."
It is rumoured to be the biggest-selling double CD set of all time (over 750,000 in the U.K. alone).
The live shows for The Wall were from
07/02/1980 to 06/17/1981. The movie was released on 07/14/1982,
and Roger Waters' Berlin Show was on 06/21/1990.
Tracks:
Total Playing Time: 80'01
Musicians Featured: