THE WALL

"The Wall" is the eleventh studio album of Pink Floyd. It's a conceptual album released as a double album in 1979. It was performed live with elaborated effects and adapted to the film "Pink Floyd The Wall". It was also played live in Berlin, Germany, on 21 July 1990, to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall and to raise funds for the World War For The Memorial Fund For Disaster Relief. A live album and a video of this concert were also commercially released.

Hailed by critics and fans as one of the best Pink Floyd albums, along with "The Dark Side Of The Moon", "Wish You Were Here" and "Animals", it's also known as a classic rock album and their songs have inspired many contemporary rock musicians all over the world, even in our days.

As with their previous three studio albums, "The Dark Side Of The Moon", "Wish You Were Here" and "Animals" released in 1973, 1975 and 1977, respectively, "The Wall" is also a conceptual album. This time it deals with personal isolation. The creation of the album was a personal Waters' bet. The inspiration for Waters appeared during the "In The Flesh Tour", also known as the "Animals Tour", the live tour of "Animals" in 1977. Water's frustration with some spectators became so acute that he began to imagine building a wall between the performers and the audience. The story is a rock opera centred on the character of Pink, who is largely based in Waters' life. As the character Pink, Waters also lost his father during World War II. The album is also modelled by the decline of the band's original leader Syd Barrett. For instance, the album includes some references to Barrett, including "Nobody Home", which hints at his condition during the Pink Floyd's abortive US live tour of 1967. The story portrays fictionalized the life of an anti-hero Pink, which is mistreated by the society since the early days of his life. Suffocated by his mother and oppressed at school, he builds a wall in his consciousness to isolate him from the society and takes refuge in a fantasy world created by him. During a hallucination caused by drugs, Pink becomes a fascist dictator only to have his conscience rebel put it in court, where his inner judge ordering him to have his own wall down and he opens to the outside world.

All songs were written and composed by Waters, except "Young Lust", "Comfortably Numb" and "Run Like Hell" which were written and composed by David Gilmour and Waters and "The Trial" which was written and composed by Bob Ezrin and Waters. Due to be a conceptual album, the music flows together harmoniously. All the instrumentation on the album is lovely and the sound changes from track to track gently. Some songs are quite heavy and angry, while others are sad. All of the songs are worth a listen to and they never get boring, too long or repetitive. Despite some morbidity of most of the material on the album, there are some very beautiful and now classic tunes like "Another Brick In The Wall", "Hey You" and most notably "Comfortably Numb" with the Gilmour's searing guitar solo. It has become the single track that most defines Pink Floyd. This album showcases many different musical types. So, the sound of "The Wall" ranges from bluesy to hard, beautiful filled solos by Gilmour and very nice vocals by Waters that goes so well with the main character, Pink. However, for the most part it's a progressive hard rock opera.

During the recordings of the album, Richard Wright left the band but continued to play in the concerts of "The Wall" live tour as a salaried musician. He was forced to resign from Pink Floyd by Waters. He only returned to Pink Floyd after Waters have left the group, first as a session musician but later he returned as a truly band's member. After the legal battle over who had rights to use the name Pink Floyd, the band won the legal rights to use Pink Floyd's name and Waters won the legal rights to "The Wall". So, his name is most associated with this album, now.

Conclusion: "The Wall" is the most ambitious, difficult, challenging, complex and powerful conceptual album released by Pink Floyd and one of the most ambitious projects ever made, by any band. We can make some parallelism with two other studio albums released by two other great bands, Yes and Genesis. I mean "Tales From Topographic Oceans" and especially "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway" which was also mentioned for being produced as a possible film project by filmmaker William Friedkin. Sincerely, I don't consider this album less progressive, too pretentious, too ambitious, too megalomaniac and also too commercial as some consider. Pink Floyd isn't guilty of being a famous progressive band and some songs from the album have passed very often on many radio stations. So, I think this is a great album from the band and is also unfortunately their last masterpiece. Sincerely and in my humble opinion, all of us who are unconditional fans of the progressive rock music should be proud for a progressive band like Pink Floyd and a progressive album like "The Wall" are so well known around the world, even in our days.

Prog is my Ferrari. Jem Godfrey (Frost*)

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