Financial Setbacks and Tax Exile
In 1976, Pink Floyd had placed their financial future in the hands of the investment company Norton Warburg. When James Callaghan’s Labour party raised the top rate of income tax to over 80 percent, Norton Warburg persuaded the four musicians to invest in a range of ventures which proved disastrous. As a result, despite the commercial success of their recent albums and sold-out concerts, Pink Floyd was effectively ruined. More than two million pounds had gone up in smoke, and Andrew Warburg, the founder of the investment company, had absconded to Spain! Pink Floyd was by no means his only victim, and Warburg would serve three years in prison after returning to England in 1982.
For the time being, however, not only did the Floyd discover that they had nothing left (having lost, they reckoned, the equivalent of their entire royalties from sales of The Dark Side of the Moon), they also learned that the state was entitled to a further 83 percent of the vanished sums in tax—money they clearly did not have! A double solution presented itself to the band: releasing a new album and going into tax exile. Like the Rolling Stones, the Floyd had no other choice but to quit perfidious Albion for a period of one year, from April 6, 1979, to April 5, 1980. Their chosen destination was the South of France, where the recording sessions for The Wall would begin in earnest at Berre-les-Alpes and Correns before continuing in the United States.
Waters’s New Concept
In July 1978, once the band members had finished working on their various personal projects (solo albums from Gilmour [David Gilmour, 1978] and Wright [Wet Dream, 1978]; Nick Mason’s collaboration with Steve Hillage on Green [1978]), Roger Waters unveiled a new concept to Gilmour, Wright, Mason, and Steve O’Rourke. More accurately, he presented them with a choice of two projects that he had recorded at his home in the South of England. “I’d bought this weird [MCI] mixing console from a famous studio in Florida, Criteria,” explains Waters. “I wrote The Wall using that board, playing acoustic guitar, electric guitar, electric piano and synthesizers.”37 The other project was called The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, a concept based on the dreams experienced by one man during the course of a single night. This idea would later give rise to Waters’s second solo album.
While Steve O’Rourke’s ears pricked up at The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, David Gilmour, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason declared themselves in favor of The Wall, at that time called Bricks in the Wall. To call their reaction enthusiastic would be going too far. Wright was wary of once more having to work on an obsession of Waters’s, while Gilmour, after listening to the music for the first time, judged it to be too weak. “It was too depressing, and too boring in lots of places. But I liked the basic idea.”64 Nick Griffiths, the sound engineer at Britannia Row, also had reservations: “I heard the Wall demos. They were seriously rough, but the songs were there.”53 Rick Wright has freely admitted that had their financial situation been different, they would probably have replied that they did not like the songs: “But Roger had this material, Dave and I didn’t have any, so [we figured] we’ll do it.”116
Montreal: The Foundations of The Wall
The origins of The Wall go back to the extended tour that followed the release of Animals, and more specifically to a succession of concerts the group gave to crowds who were becoming more unruly, for example in Montreal, which was the closing concert of the tour and clearly a gig too far. On that July 6, more than 80,000 people had started to gather in the city’s brand-new Olympic Stadium in the late afternoon even though the performance was not due to start until 8:30 p.m. By the time the show kicked off, some fans were drunk, high, and unruly. The music was being drowned out by yelling and exploding firecrackers—to such an extent that the four members of Pink Floyd were finding it difficult to play. Waters asked the crowd to calm down, but to no avail. Before long, the bassist-singer’s astonishment gave way to rage, causing him to react in a manner as inappropriate as it was unexpected: “I was on stage in Montreal in 1977 on the final night of a tour,” relates Waters, “and there was one guy in the front row who was shouting and screaming all the way through everything. In the end, I called him over and, when he got close enough, I spat in his face. I shocked myself with that incident, enough to think, ‘Hold on a minute. This is all wrong. I’m hating all this.’ Then I began to think what it was all about.”9 The other members of the group had not grasped the extent of the nervous exhaustion from which their bassist was suffering: “None of us were aware of it at the time,” explains David Gilmour, “I just thought it was a great shame to end up a six-month tour with a rotten show.”9
As inglorious as the incident was, it effectively laid the foundations for The Wall, as Nick Mason confirms: “This incident just indicated that establishing any kind of bond with the audience was becoming increasingly difficult.”9 He explains: “Although the spitting incident was unnerving at the time, it did serve to set Roger’s creative wheels spinning, and he developed the outline for a show based around the concept of an audience both physically and mentally separated from their idols.”5 Hence the idea of erecting a wall along the front of the stage while the group was performing.
In Roger Waters’s fertile mind, the Wall concept was to be far more than just another recording in the career of Pink Floyd. He wanted to present the public with a multimedia project, in other words not only a double album, but also a movie and a full-blown show. Having obtained a £4 million advance from EMI and CBS, the four members of the Floyd and their team (including James Guthrie) started working on a number of songs at Britannia Row Studios in autumn 1978.
Bob Ezrin in the Structuring Role
Waters was aware that the goal he had set himself was too ambitious for one individual: “I could see it was going to be a complex process, and I needed a collaborator who I could talk to.”116 No longer able to count on his band mates, Waters decided to call upon the services of an outside producer, the Canadian Bob Ezrin. In addition to having worked with Roger Waters’s wife Carolyne, Ezrin was able to pride himself on having produced Alice Cooper’s albums starting with Love It to Death (1971) as well as Lou Reed’s Berlin (1973), Aerosmith’s Get Your Wings (1974) and Peter Gabriel (1977) by the former lead singer of Genesis. Bob Ezrin remembers an almost premonitory conversation with the bassist-singer-songwriter during the 1977 tour. “I met Roger through his then wife Carolyne, who once worked for me. On the Animals tour, they stopped in Toronto where I was living, and on the limousine ride out to the gig Roger told me about his feeling of alienation from the audience and his desire sometimes to put a wall between him and them. I recall saying flippantly, ‘Well why don’t you?’ A year, 18 months later I got a call asking me to come to his home to talk to him about the possibility of working together on this project called The Wall.”117
Bob Ezrin duly visited Waters at his house in the South of England: “He proceeded to play me a tape of music all strung together, almost like one song 90 minutes long, called The Wall, then some bits and bobs of other ideas that he hoped to incorporate in some way, which never made it to the album but resurfaced later on some of his solo work.”117 Ezrin was interested, intrigued even, by Waters’s music, but was aware that a long, hard road lay ahead. After visiting Britannia Row, where he met Gilmour, Wright, and Mason for the first time, and listened once more to the compositions (which could have filled a triple album), he got down to work. He ruled out certain songs and retained others with the initial aim of respecting the timing of a double vinyl album—twenty minutes per side. In order to ensure that the story obeyed a coherent scenario, he then set down on paper as precise a storyline as possible. “In an all-night session, I rewrote the record. I used all of Roger’s elements, but I rearranged their order and put them in a different form. I wrote The Wall out in forty pages, like a book.”118 However, Ezrin’s role would not be confined to helping Waters manage his material. He would also serve as a safety valve and referee in the numerous conflicts that would not be long in breaking out between all those involved.
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A Rock Opera Starring Pink
Pink Floyd had already recorded some long suites that take up a whole side of an album (“Atom Heart Mother” and “Echoes”) as well as three concept albums (The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and Animals), but with The Wall, the group threw itself into a concept album of a different kind: a narrative rock-opera-style work with multiple characters along the lines of Tommy (1969) by the Who and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974) by Genesis.
The main character in the Wall scenario, imagined by Roger Waters and structured by Bob Ezrin, is a rock star called Pink. Shut away in his hotel room watching a war film, Pink remembers the death of his father in the Second World War, his upbringing by a protective (if not suffocating) mother, being shamed by a teacher (who was in turn humiliated by his despicable wife)… By the time he has become a teenager and then made a name for himself fame, Pink is pathologically agoraphobic and has constructed a wall with which to shut himself off from the world. Although he has married, he neglects and even despises his wife, who eventually gets gets her revenge by taking a lover. While in the company of a groupie, Pink suffers a new mental crisis. Under the panic-stricken gaze of the young woman, he trashes his room, starting with his guitars. He then shaves his face, eyebrows, and body. His manager, the director of the hotel, and a physician, surrounded by a pack of photographers, try to get him back on his feet despite (or thanks to) the drugs he has been given, and manage somehow to get him onto the stage. Transformed into a neo-Nazi leader, he is hailed by the crowd. Subsequently arrested and thrown in prison, he is then judged at a court hearing in which his mother, his wife, and his former teacher are called as witnesses. The verdict is eventually handed down: Pink has to demolish the wall behind which he had mistakenly thought he was safe.
A Personal Work
In many respects this is an autobiographical story, not least in its examination of the trauma caused by the death of a father in the Second World War (the first brick in the wall) and the iron discipline that prevailed in British schools in the fifties. It also, once again, alludes to Syd Barrett in the figure of the brilliant but fragile artist who falls victim to the star system and drugs. Finally, the dramatic development of the work involves several themes that are perennial obsessions of Roger Waters’s: the inability to communicate, insanity, and the almost esoteric power exercised by a totalitarian leader over his people.
In terms of form, The Wall has more in common with The Dark Side of the Moon than with Atom Heart Mother, Meddle, Wish You Were Here, or Animals, Roger Waters having favored a series of short tracks over the suite format. This enables the listener (and, of course, viewer) to accompany Pink on his chaotic progress, or more accurately to experience it alongside him.
The Wall is effectively a double album comprising twenty-six songs. Of these, twenty-two are credited to Roger Waters, three to Roger Waters and David Gilmour (“Young Lust,” “Comfortably Numb,” and “Run Like Hell”), and one to Roger Waters and Bob Ezrin (“The Trial”). Musically, the album presents a cross-section of the musical sensibilities that had helped Pink Floyd to make its name (leaving out the space rock of A Saucerful of Secrets and the mellow, floating moods on Meddle): the tuneful acoustic ballad (“Mother,” “Goodbye Blue Sky”), the somber, anguished outpouring (“Don’t Leave Me Now,” “Is There Anybody Out There?”), and the rock number with more than a little in common with heavy metal (“Young Lust”). Added to these are a completely unexpected incursion into disco or funk (“Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)”) and Broadway-style musical comedy (“The Trial”). Moreover, a number of the songs are enhanced by sound effects, some of which had admittedly been a part of the group’s musical world since its earliest days, for example birdsong, while others relate directly to the unfolding story, such as dive-bombing Stukas, a war movie being shown on television, the trashing of a hotel room, the voice of a telephone operator, and so on…
The Ogre Waters
All in all, the album demonstrates the multifaceted compositional talent of Roger Waters, who in addition to doing his own thing, has ventured into the terrain of songwriters as important and yet dissimilar as Bob Dylan, Hoagy Carmichael, and Kurt Weill. Alongside him—and, it has to be admitted, in stark contrast to Rick Wright and Nick Mason—David Gilmour is far from merely playing second fiddle. Moreover, Bob Ezrin got along with Gilmour from their very first meeting, and would try to assert the guitarist’s position more vis-à-vis the ogre Waters, who, right from the outset, Ezrin claims, had had no intention of involving him in the songwriting. After all, having reformulated the script in some forty pages, Ezrin was in a good position to identify the weaknesses that had to be overcome and the gaps that needed to be filled. Taken as a whole, the songs—all, at that early stage, composed by Waters—were guilty of uniformity, of a lack of variety. “We were really missing the Gilmour influence and his heart,” explains Ezrin. “We had a lot of Roger’s angst and intellect, but we were missing the visceral Gilmour heart and swing. So then we started filling in the holes with Gilmour’s stuff. When there were certain holes left in the script, it would say, ‘To be written.’”119 In addition to composing the music for three major songs, David Gilmour also came up with a number of radiant solos, on “Comfortably Numb,” on “Mother,” and on the three parts of “Another Brick in the Wall.” He also gives a brilliant demonstration of the diversity of his style—as a musician, but also as an alchemist of sounds, the sonority of his guitar on “Run Like Hell,” for example, having influenced many guitarists, not least U2’s The Edge, since the album came out.
The double album The Wall was released in the United Kingdom on November 30, 1979, and in North America on December 10. Although only getting as high as third place in Pink Floyd’s native country, it reached the number one spot in many other countries including the United States (where it would eventually be certified 23x Platinum, with more than 11.5 million copies sold), France (1.7 million), Australia, Canada, West Germany, the Scandinavian countries, and the Netherlands. To date, some 30 million copies have been sold, making The Wall the biggest-selling double album in the history of the recording industry.
Most critics were as one in praising not only the talent and creativity of Waters and the other members of Pink Floyd, but also of everyone else who had supported them in this enormous adventure, not least Bob Ezrin and James Guthrie. Chris Brazier wrote in Melody Maker: “Quite obviously, The Wall is an extraordinary record. I’m not sure whether it’s brilliant or terrible, but I find it utterly compelling.”125 Kurt Loder, in Rolling Stone, called the album the Floyd’s “most startling rhetorical achievement” and underlined the work of Roger Waters in projecting “a dark, multilayered vision of post-World War II Western (and especially British) society so unremittingly dismal and acidulous that it makes contemporary gloom-mongers such as Randy Newman or, say, Nico seem like Peter Pan and Tinker Bell.”121 Finally, in France, Xavier Chatagnon has noted that the album The Wall “would profoundly affect an entire generation, even to the extent of provoking many cases of suicide.”122
Recording the “Wall of Sound”
Unlike Animals, The Wall was hardly a group album, not a single track having been recorded with all four members of Pink Floyd present at the same time. With each band member recording his parts independently of the others, overdubbing was the preferred technique. In spite of this, the album possesses an astonishing homogeneity that betrays nothing of the way it was made. On the contrary, the album is dense and rich and possesses a remarkable energy.
The initial sessions, at Britannia Row, Islington, ran from September to December 1978. The group was in preproduction mode during this phase, only recorded demos.
Roger Waters had already asked Gerald Scarfe to do the illustrations for his conceptual project. “He came round to my place in Chelsea, and played me the demos,” recalls Scarfe. “It was all very rough, but he told me The Wall was going to be a record, a show and a movie. He obviously had the whole thing mapped out
in his head.”1
While Gerald Scarfe was working on the illustrations, the studio team organized itself around the four members of the group. Brian Humphries, with whom relations had deteriorated, and who was probably worn out after five years of working with the quartet, was not on board for the new project. Logically, Nick Griffiths, the assistant engineer at Britannia Row, who had already worked on Animals, should have been the one to replace him, but although Griffiths would work on the album, the job went to James Guthrie at the instigation of Alan Parsons. Aged only twenty-five, Guthrie had already recorded and produced the Bay City Rollers, Heatwave, and Runner. He was also proposed by Steve O’Rourke for the role of co-producer. “James’s track record […] suggested that he could add a fresh, brighter feel to our work,”5 explains Nick Mason. Part of the idea was also to have a counterbalance to Bob Ezrin, who had arrived in London in the meantime (December 1978)… “There was confusion when we first began,” concedes Ezrin. “As you can imagine, there were three of us—myself, James and Roger—all with these very strong ideas about how this album should be made.”117
The preproduction work continued throughout the first three months of 1979. Some of the drum and bass parts laid down during this period would be conserved in a pristine state for the final mix. For some takes, Nick Mason set himself up on the top floor in search of a live sound. In reality this was a large glass-roofed room with a parquet floor that housed the snooker table reserved for Roger Waters’s use. “For the first time the drum sound on The Wall was kept intact throughout the recording process,” explains Mason. “The drums and bass were initially recorded on an analogue 16-track machine, and mixed down to two tracks on a 24-track machine for the overdubs, retaining the original recording for the final mix.”5 This idea came from Bob Ezrin. From the very start of the project, Ezrin had planned to record some of the musical elements (notably the drums, which require maximum dynamics) on a sixteen-track, which he would synchronize with the twenty-four-track when it came to doing the final mix. The advantage of this way of doing things was that it preserved the freshness of the sixteen-track takes, by contrast with the twenty-four-track master tape, which would be used repeatedly for overdubs throughout the months of recording. The system clearly involved a certain risk, however, and the closer it came to synchronizing the two machines, the more nervous the team became. Ezrin testifies to this: “I remember as we were finishing up one song it was necessary to erase the copy-drums from the 24-track, which meant that if the two tapes didn’t sync up there would be no drums at all. James (Guthrie) blanched when I made him press the erase button […] When it worked, you’ve never seen such a look of relief on the faces of so many people. That process has a tremendous amount to do with why that album has got that incredible presence and such a density of sound.”117
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