Pink Floyd In The Studio For 'The Wall' Anniversary

12-02-2024

The 45th anniversary of Pink Floyd's epic "The Wall" album is being celebrated by the syndicated radio show In The Studio With Redbeard: The Stories Behind History's Greatest Rock Bands with a two part special.

Redbeard shared this synopsis for part 1: Upon the album's release in late 1979, one of the more ironic trivia "bricks" in the original limited staging of The Wall by Pink Floyd is that, unbeknownst to hardly anyone then outside the band's tight inner circle, the internal power struggle, dissatisfaction with the contributions of two members, and the thinly-veiled attitude of a third had finally resulted in original Pink Floyd keyboard player Richard Wright being forced out. Ultimately, Wright was hired to play on The Wall tour as a sideman, but The Wall concept creator Roger Waters insisted that Rick's severance include a clause forbidding Wright from ever officially rejoining Pink Floyd again, a barely submerged shoal of contention that would emerge far into the "endless river" of Pink Floyd's future.

The original performances of The Wall were so elaborate, so expensive, tickets so limited (Roger Waters refused to do it in stadiums originally), and the dates so few (about thirty) that Waters, David Gilmour, and Nick Mason all lost money touring it, whereas as a salaried employee with expenses paid by Pink Floyd, keyboardist Rick Wright was the only one who actually made money!

"Time has a way of making you behave," David Gilmour reminded me when recounting performing as a guest with Roger Waters in 2011 at London's O2 Arena, but it could just as easily have been said by the surviving Pink Floyd alumni Nick Mason or even Waters himself, all of whom rejoined me for the first of our two-part peek behind The Wall. For instance, Roger Waters admitted to me that, in 1980, Pink Floyd had been guaranteed one million dollars per night to perform The Wall on a stadium tour. "And I refused to do it outdoors," Waters tells me in this classic rock interview. "But how can you do a show that's about the alienation you feel about doing stadium shows, in a stadium?"

Apparently Waters reconciled that personal dilemma, as evidenced by his multi-year globetrotting tour recently. Stream the part 1 here

Redbeard said of part 2: Whether architectural student-turned-musician/composer Roger Waters would have designed an actual structure more acclaimed or lucrative than The Wall, his musical concept for the Pink Floyd November 1979 double album, is pure conjecture, but the numbers that it has generated are starting to rival the Great Wall of China: #129 ranking on Rolling Stone magazine's 2020 Top 500 Albums of All Time; worldwide sales of an estimated 30,000,000; a historic performance, broadcast and film at the actual Berlin Wall in 1990 by Waters and guest stars; a multi-year multi-continent extended live concert production of The Wall by Roger Waters, and most recently his politically-charged Us + Them tour. Waters talks about the original Pink Floyd album, the limited initial live performances in late 1979 and early 1980, and The Wall film which followed three years after the album, with pre-Live Aid organizer and Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof as the disillusioned, increasingly isolated "Pink". David Gilmour and Nick Mason also disassemble The Wall pt2 on its forty-fifth anniversary in my classic rock interview here. and Stream part 2 here