The Wall - Background

Background

Pink Floyd's In the Flesh Tour was their first playing in large stadiums, and in July 1977—on the final date at the Montreal Olympic Stadium—a small group of noisy and excited fans near the stage irritated Waters to such an extent that he spat at one of them. He was not the only band member who felt disaffected at the show, as guitarist David Gilmour refused to perform the band's usual twelve-bar blues encore. Later that night, while returning from hospital to treat an injury sustained to his foot while play-fighting backstage with manager Steve O'Rourke, Waters spoke with music producer Bob Ezrin, and a friend of Ezrin's, a psychiatrist sharing their car, about the feelings of alienation he was experiencing on the tour. He articulated his desire to isolate himself by constructing a wall across the stage between the performers and the audience. He later said, "I loathed playing in stadiums ... I kept saying to people on that tour, 'I'm not really enjoying this ... there is something very wrong with this.'" While Gilmour and Wright were in France recording solo albums, and Nick Mason was busy producing Steve Hillage's Green, Waters began to write new material. The spitting incident became the starting point for a new concept, which explored the protagonist's self-imposed isolation after years of traumatic interactions with authority figures and the loss of his father as a young child. To execute The Wall concept was to attempt to analyse the performer's psychological separation from the audience, using a physical structure as a metaphorical and theatrical device.

In July 1978 the band reconvened at Britannia Row Studios, where Waters presented two new ideas for concept albums. The first was a 90-minute demo with the working title Bricks in the Wall. The second, a project about a man's dreams across one night that dealt with marriage, sex, and the pros and cons of monogamy and family life versus promiscuity. The first option was chosen by the group for the new Pink Floyd project and the second idea eventually became Waters's first solo effort, a concept album titled, The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking.

By September, the band were experiencing financial difficulties. Financial planners Norton Warburg Group (NWG) had invested £1.3–3.3 million (up to £14.1 million in contemporary value) of the group's money in high-risk venture capital to reduce their tax liabilities. The strategy failed as many of the businesses NWG invested in lost money, leaving the band facing tax rates potentially as high as 83 per cent. Pink Floyd terminated their relationship with NWG, demanding the return of uninvested funds. The band thus urgently needed to produce an album to make money. Because the project's 26 tracks presented a challenge greater than the band's previous albums, "Waters decided to bring in an outside producer and collaborator." He later said, "I needed a collaborator who was musically and intellectually in a similar place to where I was."

At the suggestion of Waters's then-girlfriend, Carolyne Christie, who had worked as Ezrin's secretary, the band hired him to co-produce the album. He had worked with Alice Cooper, Lou Reed and Kiss and he produced Peter Gabriel's debut solo album. From the start, Waters left Ezrin in no doubt as to who was in charge: "You can write anything you want. Just don't expect any credit". Ezrin, Waters, and Gilmour read Waters's concept, keeping what they liked, and discarding what they thought was not good enough. Waters and Ezrin worked mostly on the story, improving the concept. His 40-page script was presented to the rest of the band, with positive results: "The next day at the studio, we had a table read, like you would with a play, but with the whole of the band, and their eyes all twinkled, because then they could see the album." He broadened the storyline, distancing it from the autobiographical work Waters had written, and instead basing it on a composite, or gestalt character named Pink. Engineer Nick Griffiths later said of the Canadian producer: "Ezrin was very good in The Wall, because he did manage to pull the whole thing together. He's a very forceful guy. There was a lot of argument about how it should sound between Roger and Dave, and he bridged the gap between them." Waters wrote most of the album's material, with Gilmour sharing credit on "Comfortably Numb", "Run Like Hell", and "Young Lust", and Ezrin co-writing "The Trial".