IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE?

Despite "The Wall" album is still not one of my favourites from Pink Floyd, I recognize that I stiil had some cuiosity to listen to this official live album recorded during a few shows between 1980 and 1981. And after listening to this live album I have to say that this musical work was played very well by all the musicians who were then involved: the three then members of Pink Floyd (Roger Waters, David Gilmour and Nick Mason), the then recently fired but re-hired as paid musician Rick Wright, the members of the so-called "Surrogate Band", and the backing singers, who particularly sang very well, in my opinion. And while this"The Wall" musical work is predominantly Waters` show, Gilmour`s presence on lead guitar and vocals really helped the live performances sound much better than the studio album versions. Mason still plays very good drums too, but by having another drummer to play the drums parts along with him is not so easy to know by simple listening who is playing what. The same happens with Wright, who also had another keyboard player playing along with him, but both keyboard players did a very good job. Waters and Gilmour also had some help from other musicians, with even Gilmour letting play to the other guitarist a lead guitar solo during the last part of "Another Brick in the Wall Part Two". The highlights of this live recording are, in my opinion: "In the Flesh", "Another Brick in the Wall Part Two" , "Young Lust", "Nobody Home", "Comfortably Numb", "Run Like Hell", "Waiting for the Worms" and "The Trial". I discovered while listening to this live version of "The Wall" that the lyrics and some of Waters` vocals have some humour and sarcasm, something which in the studio recordings is sometimes not very easy to listen to. It also seems that they used some backing tapes to reproduce some of the parts of the studio recordings in concert (particularly the orchestral arrangements).I have to say that even if I agree with some of the ideas shown in the lyrics, this musical work still doesn`t convice me very much to really like it because it is almost the whole work from one person in the band (Waters), and for me this is almost a solo work by him helped a bit by Gilmour. Pink Floyd became by then Waters plus the other musicians as his sidemen, in my opinion. And for me, when a member of a band becomes the dictatorial force above the others, there is not a real band in existence. I still don`t like very much some of Waters` visions of the world and of the human relationships which he shows in "The Wall" lyrics. There is not very much hope in the lyrics, and for all this it is not a very optimistic musical work and one which I would like to listen to frequently (in fact I have not listened to the whole studio album since a lot of years ago). But it should have been a very impressive experience to seesome parts of this "The Wall" show played by Pink Floyd. I don`t know if some of the shows were filmed in its entirety, but if it was the case, it could be very good to see them on DVD or Blu-Ray as official releases. I think that this live version is better than the one Waters recorded and filmed in Berlin in 1990 as soloist. This Pink Floyd`s live album version, which was released in 2000, was also very well assembled and mixed by James Guthrie from different shows recorded during the "The Wall Tour".