Pink Floyd: The Wall

The Wall

Best song: Comfortably Numb

Worst song: Stop

Overall grade: 6

To some people, The Wall is one of the greatest rock operas ever written, able to connect with millions of people on every level. To others, it’s pseudo-intellectual teenage angst that can’t be taken seriously. However, to me, it’s just the album with the second most minimalistic cover art ever, after the Beatles’ ‘White Album’.

I’m not really going to claim that the cover art is the best thing about this album (although I do weirdly like it a lot) because this album and I have a lot of history together. It all started on the bus into school one Thursday a rather long time ago now. I had been instructed that I should ‘try listening to Pink Floyd’ and, upon asking where I should begin, was directed towards side three of The Wall. Because my journey didn’t have time for the full album. So I listened to the first five songs of that section, quite enjoying them but also thinking ‘Won’t it be nice when this has finished and I can listen to Mayday Parade?’ And then Comfortably Numb came on.

I truly believe that song changed my life the first time I heard it – as far as music goes, at the very least. See, there’s a whole debate that goes on about whether or not Pink Floyd classify as prog rock (if you’re not involved, I advise staying well away) and a point that doesn’t get mentioned enough is that they are very much a gateway drug. That song opened my eyes to a lot of new ideas, particularly the fact that an instrumental section can be just as important, if not more so, than a vocal section.

After the song was over, I played it again. Then I went home and I played the whole thing, over and over. Then I picked up ‘Wish You Were Here’ and ‘Dark Side’. Then I started on the hard drugs and began listening to Genesis.

So that’s my story; onto the album itself. Its creation has become legend – the tale of Roger Waters spitting on a fan during a concert has been told time and time again, and the alienation he felt from his audience and his desire to be separate led him to concoct the idea of a literal wall between himself and them. So he wrote this album, telling of a rock star named Pink Floyd (of all things) who turns all his problems into bricks in his wall to isolate himself from the world. I can see what people are saying when they call it ‘teenage angst’, but isn’t that kind of the point? That this Pink guy never really grew up because he just refused to face the world but stayed trapped inside himself… someone like that can’t be expected to think in a mature way.

This album is split across two LPs, the first about Pink building up his wall through childhood and his early career, and the second, his descent into madness behind the wall, and each contain a mixture of ‘focus’ tracks that are full songs with a proper structure, and ‘linking’ tracks which serve mostly to move on the story but are still a good listen for the most part. (Not filler – where would this album be without them?) I could probably find something to say about all of them, but I’ll try to keep it to essentials.

The first side opens with ‘In the Flesh’, which shows the direction Waters is taking the music on this album – in that there’s not always too much of it, since this is more lyrical – and introduces a guitar riff that gets repeated throughout the record. Waters’ idiosyncratic vocals are probably my favourite thing about this darkly overblown opener. In this section we also have the band’s only number one single (Christmas number one, in fact) ‘Another Brick in the Wall, pt. 2’ and while I think it’s a raucous, danceable classic, and one of the few examples of disco having some kind of substance, I actually prefer its ‘Part 1’ counterpart, the quietly introspective moment where Pink thinks about his father. Still, that’s not even the side highlight: that would be ‘Mother’, which is hauntingly real and very depressing as we are told ‘Mother’s gonna make all of your nightmares come true… ooh, mother’s gonna help you build the wall.’

Opening the next side is the incredibly poignant Blitz-themed song ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’ and though it’s short, it’s probably the most memorable part of the side. Then the pace is picked up for the next trio of songs, of which ‘Young Lust’ is notable as the only song other than the huge hits to be co-written by Gilmour, and ‘One Of My Turns’ is notable just for being great – Waters is really convincing in his performance as the madman Pink. It segues right into ‘Don’t Leave Me Now’ after he’s come back to his senses and is trying to apologise to his wife, begging her to stay, and the juxtaposition of these songs highlights the schizophrenia of the album.

Although most of it didn’t grab me as much straight away, I’ve come to love the whole of side three. It basically all takes place in Pink’s hotel room after he’s finished the wall, and as such it has a very claustrophobic feel, ever present except for the release during the magical choruses of ‘Comfortably Numb’. ‘Hey You’ is a great builder and something of an anthem, ‘Is There Anybody Out There’ is a cool, scared, atmospheric piece which comes right before ‘Nobody Home’, which basically describes Pink’s incredibly mundane life alone inside his wall, and has absolutely amazing lyrics to convey the hopelessness of his situation and how listless he feels. I won’t try to actually describe ‘Comfortably Numb’: it never fails to give me that involuntary shiver that a really good song elicits, and I’m not arrogant enough to think I know the words to describe that.

Side four is probably the weakest side overall, as it’s where the tunes start to get less memorable as the most important thing is tying up the plot. Also, quite a few of the songs are reprises of some sort - 'The Show Must Go On' sounds very similar to 'Mother'. But we do get a much more self-assured reprise of ‘In the Flesh’ (no question mark) and the best hard rocker the Floyd ever did, the epic ‘Run Like Hell’ with the awesome guitar riff which became their concert encore for many years. Second last song ‘The Trial’ gets a lot of hate for its Broadway style composition owing to the caricatures of the characters as each speaks their thoughts on Pink, but I personally think it’s a great ending to the saga, really showing how ridiculous Pink’s whole outlook on life is and how disturbed he’s become. It’s over the top grandiosity also presents a neat contrast to the stripped down acoustic closer ‘Outside the Wall’, where the wall is torn down, Pink is reunited with the outside world and the themes of the album are expanded to relate to a more general situation.

(By the way, is anyone getting a serious sense of déjà vu in that this is yet another Floyd review? I know I am. It feels like I haven’t covered Yes for ages. Must get to that soon.)