The Wall Tracklist
Pink Floyd’s The Wall is one of the most intriguing and imaginative albums in the history of rock music. Since the studio album’s release in 1979, the tour of 1980-81, and the subsequent movie of 1982, The Wall has become synonymous with, if not the very definition of, the term concept album.
Aurally explosive on record, astoundingly complex on stage, and visually explosive on the screen, The Wall traces the life of the fictional protagonist, Pink Floyd, from his boyhood days in post-World-War-II England to his self-imposed isolation as a world-renowned rock star, leading to a climax that is as cathartic as it is destructive. The character’s name comes from a joke about the early days of the band when at performances, the club management would ask, “Okay, which one of you is Pink, then?”
Funnily enough, this only became a Pink Floyd album rather than a Waters solo project because the band lost millions of dollars in an accounting scam in the fall of 1978. Attaching the Floyd name to the project brought a much-needed advance of four-and-a-half million pounds.
“The Wall” Q&A
-
Translations
-
How was the character "Pink Floyd" created?
Pink’s name comes from a joke about the early days of the band when at performances, the club management would ask, “Okay, which one of you is Pink, then?”
-
Where did the band get the idea for the album?
In an interview with Tommy Vance, Roger Waters comments:
Well, the idea for “The Wall’ came from ten years of touring, rock shows, I think, particularly the last few years in ’75 and in ’77 we were playing to very large audiences, some of whom were our old audience who’d come to see us play, but most of whom were only there for the beer, in big stadiums, and, er, consequently it became rather an alienating experience doing the shows. I became very conscious of a wall between us and our audience and so this record started out as being an expression of those feelings. The story has been developed considerably since then, this was two years ago [1977], I started to write it, and now it’s partly about a live show situation–in fact, the album starts off in a live show, and then it flashes back and traces a story of a character, if you like of Pink himself, whoever he may be. But initially, it just stemmed from shows being horrible.
-
How long did the album take to make?
In an interview with Tommy Vance, Roger Waters reveals:
Right, well we toured, we did a tour which ended I think in July or August ’77 and when we finished that tour in the Autumn of that year, that’s when I started writing it. It took me a year, no, until the next July, working on myu own, then I had a demo, sort of 90 minutes of stuff, which I played to the rest of the guys and then we all started working on it together, in the October or November of that… October ’78, we started working on it.
Later, Waters commented that the album was completed in November of 1979
