July 1977, Montréal Olympic Stadium. The Pink Floyd are preparing to conclude the triumphal tour In the Flesh and a group of spectators in the front row does everything but pay attention to the show. Roger Waters, having reached the limit of nervous exhaustion, spits on one of them. It is a gesture that is the fruit of the alienation of which the bass player immediately regrets, but also the first brick of the wall that he erects from there shortly.
A year after the Montréal experience, Roger returns to his band mates and manager Steve O’Rourke with the demos of two albums conceived during that long moment of isolation from the world. The temporary titles are Bricks in the Wall and The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hicking. «Listen well, these tapes contain two concept albums. One of these will become the new Pink Floyd album, the other my first solo work. To you the choice". Gilmour, Mason and Wright are not enthusiastic, but choose the first. O’Rourke is the only one to choose The Pros and Cons. "The story is much more solid," he would have said.
The publication of The Wall is not only the fruit of an unstoppable creative urgency. In September 1978, Pink Floyd discovered they were in multimillion-dollar bankruptcy. They entrusted their money to Andrew Oscar Warburg, a young and rampant financier who made misguided investments. Within a year, the group company is declared insolvent.
Although in the following months the most successful song of 26 of the double albums was "Another brick in the wall - Part 2", long distance the song that conquered the most enduring life is "Comfortably numb" also thanks to the many covers that have been made over time. The Album spent 15 weeks a top of the Billboard 200 album chart and became not only one of the most successful releases in Floyd’s catalog (second only to 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon).
All those years ago when I wrote this piece,(Waters recalls),I thought it was about me, and about feelings that I had about my Dad being killed at Anzio [in Italy during World War II], how much I missed him, and the fact that I'd made some really poor choices in relationships with women -- all of that crap. Which it was.
I remember doing the shows - Waters recalls -[back in 1980]. They were a nightmare. Everybody would tell you exactly the same. I remember Earl's Court, we had separate [trailers] as dressing rooms, the four of us, David, Rick, Nick and I were no longer together, so we faced outwards. We did the work, and the work wasn't bad. I still own all the film of those, which I've been editing a bit, and I might even release it at some point.
We'd finished as a group then, there was nothing going on a'tall. What we were doing on that tour was performing this thing that I'd largely written. Dave contributed to it a little bit, and so did Bob Ezrin, to "The Trial.” But mainly it was something I'd written that the four of us were performing because we hadn't quite arrived at the point where we were brave enough to not be together any more. And we eventually arrived there. There's no guilt or shame involved in any of it, it's an organic thing. And we eventually, a few years later, arrived at a place where we realized, “Wow, this is not healthy any more, we shouldn't be doing this."
Related articles on the Wall here
