The mics available at the two French studios were mainly Neumann U87s and U47s with a few Neumann KM84s and 86s thrown in for good measure. However, all the voices on the album were recorded using Neumann U67s.
After France, work continued in August in New York City, specifically at CBS Studios, the former Columbia 30th Street Studios (located at 207 East Thirtieth Street), nicknamed “The Church.” This is where Michael Kamen recorded his orchestral parts with the New York Philharmonic and Symphony orchestras, and also the New York City Opera. It was also here that Bleu Ocean directed his thirty-five snare drummers. The main studio, which boasted gigantic proportions (including a ceiling height of a hundred feet!), was thought to possess some of the best acoustics in the world. Having witnessed the birth of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, and a host of other masterpieces, these historic studios sadly closed for good in 1981. Production of The Wall then moved to Cherokee Studios, located at 751 North Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles, between September 6 and 8. Opened by the Robb brothers in 1972, Cherokee would see artists of the caliber of Steely Dan, Aerosmith, Devo, Lenny Kravitz, Al Green, and Michael Jackson pass through its doors.
The project was finalized at the Producers Workshop at 6035 Hollywood Boulevard, where the Floyd held a total of fifty-two sessions in the virtually two-month period from September 12 to November 1. The mixing desk there was a Quantum Custom. A quirky detail is that the studio’s two two-track tape machines were nicknamed Mork and Mindy! In the meantime, David Gilmour made a brief appearance at yet another Los Angeles studio, the Village Recorder, on September 21, but only to transfer tapes.
It is worth emphasizing the extraordinary editing task (on both two-inch and quarter-inch tape) facing James Guthrie. Between cross-fades and insertions of one kind and another, the master tapes ended up as a patchwork of edits, according to the engineer. The finished results betray nothing of this, however, only craftsmanship of the highest order.
Among the sound engineers who worked alongside Guthrie were Patrice Quef at Studio Miraval, Nick Griffiths at Britannia Row—where he too would accomplish a remarkable task, not least in his recording of multiple sound effects and also the children’s choir—and Brian Christian, who would work both with John McClure at CBS Studios and Rick Hart at the Producers Workshop. The list would certainly have been longer than this, but the credits on the album are sadly incomplete.
The Instruments
There is some debate over which tracks Rick Wright actually plays on. Most people seem to think that these are few in number, Ezrin and Waters calling upon other musicians to make up for his absence. As already mentioned, James Guthrie contradicts this version of events, rehabilitating Wright by suggesting that he recorded far more keyboard parts than rumor would have us believe. His presence can definitely be felt on the album, and in addition to his earlier equipment, the new instruments played by Wright on The Wall are an SCI Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, the first truly polyphonic synthesizer, and an ARP Quadra.
Roger Waters seems to have gone back to his Fender Precision Sunburst, which he had last recorded with on The Dark Side of the Moon. His black Precision was adopted by Gilmour. In addition to his usual Hiwatt DR-103 amplifier, Waters would use a Fender Bassman 50 amp (with 2x15 speakers) for the Britannia Row sessions and an Ampeg B-18N Portaflex for the Los Angeles ones.
On the drum platform, Nick Mason remained faithful to his usual Ludwig kit with 12x8, 13x9, 14x14, and 16x16 toms, a Ludwig Black Beauty snare drum, Paiste cymbals, mainly Remo Ambassador drumheads, and a Japanese stool.
Finally, David Gilmour continued with his guitar experimentation and added further to his collection. He swapped the neck of his “Black Strat” for a Charvel Custom and in turn fitted the rosewood neck of his “Black Strat” to his Stratocaster Sunburst. Gilmour also used various Fenders for recording, supplementing his 1955 Fender Esquire and 1959 Telecaster with a Fender Baritone VI. He also plays a superb 1955 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop for the first time as well as (in all probability) a ZB (Zane Beck) Custom pedal steel guitar. (The precise model has not been identified.) In terms of acoustic guitars, his Ovation Legend was still on the scene, as were his Martin D-35 and twelve-string Martin D12-28. For the more classical passages on acoustic guitar, Gilmour opted for an Ovation 1613-4 with nylon strings. As far as effects are concerned, the Binson Echorec has been replaced once and for all with an MXR Digital Delay, while additions to his Pete Cornish pedal board, alongside other effects manufactured by Cornish himself, are an Electric Mistress and an MXR Dyna Comp. As for amplifiers, Gilmour remained faithful to his Hiwatt DR-103s, his rotating Yamaha RA-200s, and his WEM Super Starfinder 200s, but innovated with a 60 W Mesa Boogie Mark I amp and an Alembic F-2B tube preamp. It is also interesting to note that he recorded certain guitar parts straight into the console.
The movie The Wall was directed by Alan Parker and featured Bob Geldof in the role of Pink. It was screened “out of competition” at the Cannes Film Festival on May 22, 1982, and was released in France and the United Kingdom on July 14 and in the United States on August 6. Some of the songs from the album were specially rerecorded for the movie.
The forty-page script rewritten by Bob Ezrin at the outset of his collaboration with Waters is now housed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
For Pink Floyd Addicts
Because of the elaborate staging involved, the live show of The Wall could only be put on in a limited number of cities in 1980 and 1981. The most famous—and most symbolic—production is that which took place on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin on July 21, 1990, a few months after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Among the guest stars were the German group Scorpions, Cyndi Lauper, and Bryan Adams. The purpose of the concert was to raise money for the Memorial Fund for Disaster Relief.
The total cost of production of The Wall amounted to some $700,000.
On the original sleeve of The Wall, the name of Jacques Loussier’s studio is misspelled—Miravel instead of Miraval.
For Pink Floyd Addicts
Inside the gatefold of The Wall is the image of a gigantic stadium: this is a caricature of the Olympic Stadium in Montreal, which was the starting point for Roger Waters’s concept…
IRONY OF FATE
Rick Wright took part in The Wall tour despite the difficulties, but only as a salaried musician. Ironically, he was the only one of the four to make any money out of it, as the other three were obliged to absorb debts arising from their earlier financial difficulties.
For Pink Floyd Addicts
The hero of The Wall was originally going to be called Punch (and his wife Judy) in an allusion to the traditional British puppet show. Pink was then settled on as being more universal and above all… “Floydian.”
For Pink Floyd Addicts
The “weird” mixing desk used by Roger Waters to record the demos for The Wall in his personal studio (actually an office at Britannia Row) was none other than the MCI desk from Criteria Studios in Miami, Florida. The very same console appears in one of the photos inside the gatefold of Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (1970) by Derek And The Dominos, the band having recorded its masterpiece there.
Pink Floyd The Wall, the Movie
The promotional tour that followed the release of the album The Wall in the United Kingdom on November 30, 1979, began with a series of seven concerts at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena between February 7 and 13, 1980. Wanting to transfer his conceptual work to the big screen in order to complete the multimedia trilogy he had had in mind from the very outset (album, show, movie), Roger Waters made contact after contact. Several possible collaborations were envisaged, and the project went into preproduction at the beginning of 1981. Roger Waters and the renowned British satirical cartoonist Gerald Scarfe developed and then honed the storyboard together. A few months later, having abandoned the idea of calling upon the authorial talent of Roald Dahl, Waters and Scarfe worked together for some time at the cartoonist’s house in Chey
ne Walk, London, explains Scarfe in The Making of Pink Floyd The Wall. “I made notes as we talked and I thought it would be a good idea to write it into some semblance of a script and had my secretary transcribe my notes, titling it ‘The Wall—Screenplay by Roger Waters and Gerald Scarfe.’”80
The Choice of Parker and Geldof
The next decision that needed to be made was who to get to direct the movie. Roger Waters and producer Alan Marshall initially thought of Ridley Scott, who had been surrounded by an aura of great prestige since the success of Alien (1979), but in the end they went with another renowned filmmaker, Alan Parker (Bugsy Malone, 1976; Midnight Express, 1978). Parker, British and a Pink Floyd fan into the bargain, accepted the challenge after managing to get in to see one of The Wall shows given by Pink Floyd in February 1980 and being won over by the theatrical side of the concept. In April 1981, the director began reworking the initial script in close collaboration with Waters and Scarfe (albeit punctuated by notorious clashes) with the aim of adapting it into a style of narration suited to the cinema. After convincing MGM to finance the project, he managed to secure Roger Waters’s agreement not to include live concert scenes in the movie and, most importantly, not to play the role of Pink himself—mainly due to his age, but also because of his lack of experience as an actor. To play the part of the rock star, Parker had in mind Bob Geldof, the singer with the Irish punk band the Boomtown Rats, one of whose music videos, “I Don’t Like Mondays,” the director had recently seen. Convinced that Geldof would make a perfect Pink, the filmmaker found a way of getting the initially reluctant musician to agree. The supporting roles went to Christine Hargreaves (the mother), James Laurenson (the father), Bob Hoskins (the manager), and Jenny Wright (the young groupie)…
The Making Of
The filming of The Wall began in early September 1981 at a manor house that had once belonged to an admiral and at Pinewood Studios in Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire. The outdoor scenes were shot in Somerset and Devon (the Battle of Anzio), and Pink’s neo-Nazi rally, which occurs in the second half of the movie and for which a gang of skinheads was hired, at the Royal Horticultural Halls in Westminster… At the same time, Gerald Scarfe and his team had set to work on some ten thousand color illustrations for the total of fifteen minutes of animation in the movie. Sixty-one days of shooting, sixty hours of rushes, and eight months of editing later, the movie Pink Floyd The Wall, in which filmed scenes without dialogue alternated with animated sequences, was finished. It was shown out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival on May 23, 1982, and opened in the United Kingdom and France on July 14 and in the United States on August 8.
The soundtrack differs from the double studio album in several ways. “Is There Anybody Out There?” “Bring the Boys Back Home,” “Mother,” “In the Flesh?” and “In the Flesh” were rerecorded (the last two with Bob Geldof singing the lead vocal), “Run Like Hell” and “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” were remixed, two songs (“Hey You” and “The Show Must Go On”) were cut, and two others were added (“What Shall We Do Now?” and “When the Tigers Broke Free,” released as a single ten days or so after the opening of the movie). Another addition is Vera Lynn’s “It’s the Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot” (instead of “We’ll Meet Again”).
With its kaleidoscope of extreme and even violent images, Alan Parker’s movie instantly plunges the viewer into the labyrinthine nightmare of Pink’s world. The filmmaker succeeds so well in fusing image and sound without either ever dominating the other that it is difficult to listen to the album today without his visual transcriptions of the music coming immediately to mind. However, Roger Waters would judge the movie to be very different to what he had originally imagined, finding it excessively violent and lacking in subtlety. He even went so far as to claim that he felt little empathy for the character of Pink that the director had molded. As a result, Alan Parker fell into disgrace with the Floyd bassist and would never work with him again.
To start with, Bob Geldof rejected the idea of playing Pink on screen—for the simple reason that he did not like the music of Pink Floyd. His agent insisted that he read the script, however. This exchange reportedly took place in a taxi driven by none other than Roger Waters’s brother!
In The Flesh
Roger Waters / 3:20
Musicians
David Gilmour: electric lead guitar
Rick Wright: keyboards
Roger Waters: vocals, bass, VCS3
Nick Mason: drums
Fred Mandel: Hammond organ
Bruce Johnston, Toni Tennille, Joe Chemay, Stan Farber, Jim Haas, Jon Joyce: backing vocals
Recorded
Britannia Row, Islington, London: September 1978–March 1979
Super Bear Studios, Berre-les-Alpes, Alpes-Maritimes (France): April–July 1979
Studio Miraval, Domaine de Miraval, Le Val, Var (France): April–July 1979
Producers Workshop, Hollywood: September 12–November 1, 1979
Technical Team
Producers: Bob Ezrin, David Gilmour, Roger Waters
Co-producer: James Guthrie
Sound Engineers: James Guthrie, Nick Griffiths, Patrice Quef, Brian Christian, Rick Hart
Genesis
It was by no means mere chance that the opening song of The Wall shares its title with the name of Pink Floyd’s previous tour (“In the Flesh”). After all, it was an incident that occurred at the closing concert in Montreal on July 6, 1977, that gave Roger Waters the idea of a wall separating the musicians from their audience, and by extension the extraordinary story of Pink, whose life The Wall tells. The question mark is there to remind us that nothing can ever be absolutely certain, and that appearances are not to be trusted… In a sense it is the perfect symbol of a key phrase in the song: If you’d like to find out what’s behind these cold eyes? You’ll just have to clear your way through the disguise. Waters would later reveal that this song was originally destined for the second project he was developing in 1978, The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, and that he had remodeled it to fit into the theatrical context he wanted for the intro to The Wall.
It is in this song, then, that we first encounter the main character of The Wall: Pink, a rock star traumatized since childhood by the death of his father, a performer who has descended into decadence and depression as a result of his success. Paradoxically, we begin Pink’s story at the end, for this song evokes an incident that occurs in the closing stages of the rock star’s narrative. Preparing to go onstage, Pink accuses his audience of having come to the show not to listen to his music but to take part in a kind of pagan high mass. And as the curtain rises and the spotlights catch him in their beam, he remembers the death of his father in the Second World War.
Production
“In the Flesh?” whose working title was “The Show,” begins enigmatically with some soft music strangely reminiscent of Berlin in the war years and Lili Marlene… Roger Waters’s voice emerges from nowhere to deliver a sort of coded message: … we came in? In reality—and this reveals Waters’s brilliance as the originator of the concept—this opening atmosphere of the first track on The Wall is nothing other than the continuation of “Outside the Wall,” the very last song on the album. During the final few seconds of the closing track, Waters can be heard saying, Isn’t this where… Joining the two part-phrases together yields the question: Isn’t this where we came in? Waters is clearly indicating that “In The Flesh?” is an invitation to go back in time. “So it’s a flashback,” Waters would explain to Tommy Vance in 1979, “we start telling the story…”126
After twenty or so seconds of relatively tranquility, the group brutally makes its presence felt in all-out rock mode, launching into an ideal concert opener. Nick Mason’s drums, recorded on the top floor of Britannia Row, explode with live sound. “I think the playing on the record is far tighter and better, and sounds better, than anything before,”9 Mason would claim.
And David Gilmour’s “Black Strat” is up there with him.
Gilmour’s guitar, distorted through the Big Muff, has an aggressive edge thanks to highly effective reverb and short delay, and is harmonized in places by Gilmour on a second guitar, albeit recessed in the mix. His guitar phrases are answered by a Hammond organ played by Fred Mandel, a session musician who makes prolific use of the Leslie speaker in making his B-3 roar. Waters’s Fender Precision supports the group powerfully and insistently. Pink Floyd sounds like a garage band! In this it is possible to detect the influence of Bob Ezrin, the distinguished producer who had brilliantly overseen LPs from Alice Cooper, Aerosmith, and Lou Reed. The sound is American and far removed from progressive English pop.
Pink Floyd All the Songs Page 52
