Roger Waters spat on a fan at the Montreal Olympic Stadium on 6 July 1977, and Pink Floyd's The Wall is what he did with the shame. Over the next two years that one ugly moment became a 26-track rock opera, written largely by Waters, shaped by a Canadian producer the band mocked with badges, recorded in tax exile in the south of France, and finished without the keyboard player, who was fired mid-sessions and then hired back on a wage for the tour.
It went on to sell more than 30 million copies, top the US chart for 15 weeks and give Pink Floyd their only number-one single on both sides of the Atlantic. It was also the last album made by the four-man line-up of Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright, and you can hear the band coming apart in the grooves.
Album Facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Pink Floyd |
| Album | The Wall |
| Release Date | 30 November 1979 |
| Label | Harvest/EMI (UK), Columbia/CBS (US) |
| Producer(s) | Bob Ezrin, David Gilmour, James Guthrie, Roger Waters |
| Studio(s) | Britannia Row (London), Super Bear (near Nice), Miraval (Correns), CBS 30th Street (New York), Cherokee, Producers Workshop and The Village Recorder (Los Angeles) |
| Genre / Subgenre | Progressive rock, art rock, rock opera |
| Track Count | 26 |
| Total Runtime | 80:42 |
| Billboard 200 Peak | 1 (15 weeks) |
| UK Albums Chart Peak | 3 |
| Other Notable Chart Peaks | Number one in Canada (13 weeks), Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and Austria |
| Certifications | RIAA 23x Platinum (1999), Music Canada 2x Diamond, France Diamond |
| Estimated Sales | Over 30 million worldwide |
| Key Singles | Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2; Run Like Hell; Comfortably Numb |
Pink Floyd Before The Wall
Pink Floyd lost their first frontman, Syd Barrett, in 1968, and with Gilmour in his place Waters became the band's lyricist and conceptual engine. He devised the ideas behind The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975) and Animals (1977), and Dark Side alone stayed on the Billboard chart for more than fourteen years.
By Animals the balance of power had tipped. It was the first Pink Floyd album with no writing credit for Wright, and it was recorded at Britannia Row, the three-storey set of church halls in Islington the band had bought in 1975 and turned into their own studio. The tour that followed, In the Flesh, was their first run of stadiums, and the scale of it unsettled the whole band. Waters arrived and left venues alone. At the final show in Montreal, a group of noisy fans near the stage got under his skin so badly that he leaned over and spat on one of them. Gilmour refused to play the encore that night. Waters, as he later told it, "suddenly had a visual image of an arena with a wall built across it and a band performing behind this wall."
Then came the money. The financial planners Norton Warburg Group had put somewhere between 1.3 and 3.3 million pounds of the band's cash into high-risk ventures that collapsed, leaving them facing tax rates as high as 83 per cent. "Eighty-three per cent was a lot of money in those days and we didn't have it," Waters said. Wright was blunter in Guitar World's 2009 oral history: "At that time we were, in theory, bankrupt."
Pre-production and Demos
Waters wrote while Gilmour and Wright made solo records in France and Mason produced Steve Hillage's Green. The new songs followed a man who walls himself off after losing his father in the war and a lifetime of bruising run-ins with authority. It was close to the bone: Waters' own father was killed at Anzio in 1944. "In its essence The Wall was an autobiographical work," he told the BBC.
In July 1978 he brought two ideas to Britannia Row. One was a 90-minute demo called Bricks in the Wall. The other was a song cycle about one man's dreams over a single night, which became his 1984 solo album The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking. The band chose the wall. Mason remembered the tapes as "very poor quality" but plainly an interesting idea. Wright was less keen: "Every song was written in the same tempo, same key, same everything."
Waters wanted a collaborator who was, as he put it, "musically and intellectually in a similar place to where I was". His then-wife Carolyne Christie, who had once been Bob Ezrin's secretary, suggested the Canadian producer behind Alice Cooper, Lou Reed, Kiss and Peter Gabriel. Waters set the terms on day one: "You can write anything you want. Just don't expect any credit."
Ezrin heard the demo as one long piece and remembered that "We don't need no education" stayed with him for months, while "Mother" simply floored him. In an all-night session he wrote a script for an imaginary Wall film, a 40-page document that moved the story out of the first person and into a composite character called Pink, drawn from Waters and Barrett. The next day the band held a table read. "From that point on we were no longer fishing but building to a plan," Ezrin said. Some songs barely moved from the demos: Waters named "Don't Leave Me Now", "Is There Anybody Out There?" and "Mother" as almost exactly as first written.
"This was not a co-operative; it was in no sense a democratic process... But there was really only one chief, and that was me."
Roger Waters, Guitar World, 2009
Creating The Wall
Engineer James Guthrie, recommended by Alan Parsons, replaced Brian Humphries and was hired as co-producer without anyone mentioning Ezrin. "I saw myself as a hot young producer," Guthrie said. "When we arrived, I think we felt we'd been booked to do the same job." A second set of demos was done by March 1979, but the taxman set the calendar: to escape the bill the band had to be out of the UK by 6 April for at least a year. Waters went to Switzerland, Mason to France, Gilmour and Wright to the Greek islands.
Work moved to Super Bear Studios in the hills above Nice, used from January to July 1979, with some of Britannia Row's gear shipped in. Gilmour described three stages: demos in London, the bulk of the record in France, finishing and mixing in Los Angeles. Super Bear sat so high in the mountains that singing in tune was a struggle, so Waters cut his vocals with Ezrin at nearby Studio Miraval.
"We worked gentleman's hours, wore gentleman's clothes, ate gentleman's food, even had tea and biscuits brought in every day at the appropriate time."
Bob Ezrin, Guitar World, 2009
The civility was skin deep. Waters fixed the day at 10 to 6, and Ezrin, staying down in Nice and going through what Mason called an "unreliable" phase, kept turning up late. He was on a smaller royalty than the band, and after one break he found everyone wearing badges that read NOPE: No Points for Ezrin.
Mason's early drums were cut on 16-track at Britannia Row and copied to a 24-track master as guides, then synced back so the duplicates could be wiped, a trick the band called "witchcraft". Ezrin and Guthrie also spliced Mason's takes together, since the band were rarely in the studio at once. In September Michael Kamen, who had worked with David Bowie, oversaw orchestral parts at CBS Studios in New York with players from the New York Philharmonic and New York Symphony and a New York City Opera choir. No member of Pink Floyd was present, and Kamen only met them once the album was finished.
Waters hung a microphone out of a studio window over Hollywood Boulevard. A television set was destroyed for "One of My Turns", and engineer Nick Griffiths smashed crockery at Britannia Row for the same song. One actor recognised his voice in the television snippets and took a settlement rather than sue. A plan to bring in the Beach Boys was dropped in favour of Bruce Johnston and Toni Tennille.
The firing of Richard Wright
Wright wanted a producer's credit, as Floyd albums had credited "Pink Floyd" as producer since 1969. Waters agreed to a trial, then he and Ezrin soured on Wright's methods. Wright was going through a divorce and sinking into depression. When Columbia offered a better deal for a Christmas release, Waters added sessions at Miraval and asked to start keyboard overdubs in Los Angeles ten days early, with a second keyboardist on hand. Wright would not cut short his family holiday in Rhodes.
In Waters' telling, manager Steve O'Rourke came back with Wright's answer: "Tell Roger to fuck off." Wright denied saying it. Either way, Waters insisted Wright go or he would not release The Wall. Gilmour took Wright to dinner to offer support, while telling him he had contributed little. Mason said Waters "Made Stalin look like an old muddle-head", and added: "I felt guilty. Still do really." Wright took the deal on offer, finishing the album and keeping his full share of it in exchange for leaving quietly, and the news was kept from the press.
"I think it was nasty. This is my band as much as it's his."
Richard Wright, Guitar World, 2009
Wright finished his parts at Cherokee Studios with session players Peter Wood and Fred Mandel. Jeff Porcaro drummed on "Mother", whose shifting time signatures Mason struggled to learn on a tight schedule. Mason then left the final mix to Waters, Gilmour, Ezrin and Guthrie and went to New York to make his own solo record. Late changes swapped "What Shall We Do Now?" for the shorter "Empty Spaces" and moved "Hey You" from the end of side three to the start. With the deadline looming, the inner sleeves were left unchanged.
Personnel and Credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Core band | ||
| Vocals, bass, VCS3, guitars | Roger Waters | Also co-producer and sleeve design |
| Vocals, guitars, bass, synths | David Gilmour | Co-producer; bass on eleven tracks |
| Drums, percussion | Nick Mason | Absent from several tracks |
| Keyboards | Richard Wright | Hammond, Prophet-5, piano, Rhodes |
| Guest and session musicians | ||
| Drums | Jeff Porcaro | Mother |
| Guitars | Lee Ritenour | One of My Turns, Comfortably Numb |
| Hammond organ | Fred Mandel | In the Flesh? and In the Flesh |
| Classical guitar | Joe (Ron) di Blasi | Is There Anybody Out There? |
| Backing vocals | Bruce Johnston, Toni Tennille, Joe Chemay, Jon Joyce, Stan Farber, Jim Haas | Four side-one and side-four tracks |
| Backing vocals | Vicki Brown, Clare Torry | The Trial, credited as "Vicki and Clare" |
| Children's choir | Islington Green School pupils | Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2 |
| Voices | Harry Waters, Trudy Young, Chris Fitzmorris | Child, groupie, telephone voice |
| Orchestral arrangement | Michael Kamen | Is There Anybody Out There?, Comfortably Numb |
| Orchestra and choir | New York orchestra, New York City Opera | Recorded at CBS, New York |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Co-producer, keys | Bob Ezrin | Piano, organ; co-wrote The Trial |
| Co-producer, engineer | James Guthrie | Grammy for Best Engineered Recording |
| Engineers | Nick Griffiths, Patrice Quef, Brian Christian, Rick Hart, John McClure | |
| Sound effects, equipment | Phil Taylor | Tyre screeches on Run Like Hell |
| Mastering | Doug Sax | The Mastering Lab |
| Artwork | ||
| Sleeve design | Gerald Scarfe, Roger Waters | Scarfe drew lettering, inner sleeve, labels |
A record by a four-piece ended up using a Beach Boy, session drummer Jeff Porcaro, guitarist Lee Ritenour and a classroom of north London schoolchildren, with Clare Torry credited as half of "Vicki and Clare".
The Songs on The Wall
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | In the Flesh? | Waters | 3:19 | ||
| 2 | The Thin Ice | Waters | 2:29 | ||
| 3 | Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1 | Waters | 3:09 | ||
| 4 | The Happiest Days of Our Lives | Waters | 1:51 | Waters voices the schoolmaster | |
| 5 | Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2 | Waters | 3:59 | Yes | UK and US number one |
| 6 | Mother | Waters | 5:37 | Jeff Porcaro on drums | |
| 7 | Goodbye Blue Sky | Waters | 2:47 | Harry Waters as the child | |
| 8 | Empty Spaces | Waters | 2:08 | Replaced the longer What Shall We Do Now? | |
| 9 | Young Lust | Gilmour, Waters | 3:29 | ||
| 10 | One of My Turns | Waters | 3:37 | B-side | Trudy Young voices the groupie |
| 11 | Don't Leave Me Now | Waters | 4:16 | B-side | Barely changed from Waters' demo |
| 12 | Another Brick in the Wall, Part 3 | Waters | 1:14 | ||
| 13 | Goodbye Cruel World | Waters | 1:13 | ||
| 14 | Hey You | Waters | 4:41 | B-side | Moved from end of side three late on |
| 15 | Is There Anybody Out There? | Waters | 2:39 | ||
| 16 | Nobody Home | Waters | 3:24 | Echoes Barrett's unreleased Vegetable Man | |
| 17 | Vera | Waters | 1:33 | ||
| 18 | Bring the Boys Back Home | Waters | 1:27 | New York City Opera choir | |
| 19 | Comfortably Numb | Gilmour, Waters | 6:23 | Yes | Working title The Doctor |
| 20 | The Show Must Go On | Waters | 1:36 | ||
| 21 | In the Flesh | Waters | 4:16 | ||
| 22 | Run Like Hell | Gilmour, Waters | 4:23 | Yes | Wright's only keyboard solo on the album |
| 23 | Waiting for the Worms | Waters | 3:57 | ||
| 24 | Stop | Waters | 0:30 | ||
| 25 | The Trial | Ezrin, Waters | 5:19 | Ezrin arranged the orchestra | |
| 26 | Outside the Wall | Waters | 1:43 |
Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2
As Waters wrote it, the song was one verse and one chorus, about a minute and 20 seconds long. Ezrin heard a hit and wanted a disco beat. The guitarist was unconvinced.
"He said to me, 'Go to a couple of clubs and listen to what's happening with disco music,' so I forced myself out and listened to loud, four-to-the-bar bass drums and stuff and thought, Gawd, awful!"
David Gilmour, Guitar World, 2009
When Ezrin asked for two verses and two choruses, the band told him "We don't do singles", and Waters added: "Go ahead and waste your time doing silly stuff." So Ezrin did, copying the first verse and chorus and stitching in a drum fill while they were out. For the repeated verse, the man who had put kids on Alice Cooper's "School's Out" sent Nick Griffiths to Islington Green School, near Britannia Row, with the instruction: "I want Cockney, I want posh, fill 'em up." Head of music Alun Renshaw rehearsed 23 pupils for a week and hid the lyrics from the headteacher, and the school gave the session 40 minutes. Griffiths tracked the voices about a dozen times. When Ezrin played it to Waters, "there was a total softening of his face." Gilmour's solo was played on a 1955 Gibson Les Paul Gold Top with P-90 pickups.
Comfortably Numb
The album's emotional peak began as a wordless Gilmour demo left over from his 1978 solo album. Ezrin fought for it, and when Waters refused to take it home, Ezrin needled him: "You don't think you're man enough?" Waters threw him a sheet of lyrics the next morning. They drew on Waters being injected with tranquillisers for stomach cramps before a 1977 show at the Philadelphia Spectrum: "That was the longest two hours of my life." Waters moved the verses from E minor to B minor and asked Gilmour for extra bars so he could sing "I have become comfortably numb". The working title was "The Doctor".
Then came the row. Gilmour wanted a harder, stripped-down take; Waters and Ezrin wanted Kamen's orchestra. After a blazing argument in a North Hollywood restaurant they split the difference, orchestra in the body of the song, Gilmour's lean mix for the closing solo. Gilmour recorded five or six solos through a Big Muff and delay, and Guthrie stitched together the best passages. Watching Gilmour play the first solo, Ezrin got tears in his eyes.
"Things like 'Comfortably Numb' are really the last embers of Roger and my ability to work collaboratively together."
David Gilmour, Guitar World, 2009
Run Like Hell, Hey You and Mother
"Run Like Hell" was first set to Waters' own music before Gilmour's tune replaced it. It is the last song the pair wrote together and the last recorded by all four of the 1970s line-up, and Gilmour said he was copying the chopping cellos on the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations". "Hey You" uses the same high-strung acoustic trick as "Comfortably Numb", and the worms eating into Pink's brain are Guthrie with a power drill. "Mother" shifts through bars of 5/8 and 9/8, which is why Jeff Porcaro plays it.
B-sides, Outtakes and Lost Songs
The Wall's singles drew their B-sides from the album itself, so there are no stand-alone flips to hunt down. The real lost material sits around the edges:
- What Shall We Do Now? was cut for technical reasons and replaced by "Empty Spaces", but returned on the 1980 to 1981 tour.
- The Last Few Bricks, an instrumental medley, was written for the live show so the crew could finish the wall.
- Teacher, Teacher and Sexual Revolution exist as full-band recordings on the Immersion box set's demo discs.
- Outtakes from the sessions were reused on the next album, The Final Cut (1983).
Album Artwork and Packaging
The sleeve is one of Pink Floyd's most minimal: white bricks and nothing else. Waters had fallen out with Hipgnosis designer Storm Thorgerson after Thorgerson put the Animals cover in his own book, so The Wall became the first Pink Floyd cover since The Piper at the Gates of Dawn not made by Hipgnosis. Gerald Scarfe, who had made animations for the In the Flesh tour, said Waters wanted it "completely white with bricks on it". Scarfe's scrawled lettering of the band name and title appeared on a sticker on the shrink-wrap of original vinyl, or printed onto the sleeve, in black or red. Later cassette and digital editions, like the one at the top of this page, superimpose it over the bricks.
Inside, Scarfe drew the inner sleeves and both record labels, showing the wall at different stages of construction alongside characters from the story. Pink was "this embryonic little prawn-like figure who was completely vulnerable", he said, and he drew the wife "like a serpent that would strike and sting". Those drawings became the tour's inflatables and animations, and later the film's.
Release and Reception
Columbia's executives were not convinced. One, Mason recalled, went back to the company and called it "terrible rubbish". At the official playback, Guthrie said, the Stuka dive bombers blew the right-hand speaker. Columbia also offered Waters smaller publishing rights because it was a double album, and one executive suggested a coin toss. Waters asked why he should gamble on something he owned, and won. Ezrin, meanwhile, took the master tapes home every night for a week so Columbia could not collect them.
The album came out on 30 November 1979, and Tommy Vance played the whole thing on BBC Radio 1 alongside an interview with Waters. Reviews were mixed. Kurt Loder in Rolling Stone called it "the most startling rhetorical achievement in the group's singular, thirteen-year career", though he felt the music was "stretched a bit thin". Robert Christgau dismissed it as "a dumb tribulations-of-a-rock-star epic". Melody Maker got closest to the general mood: "I'm not sure whether it's brilliant or terrible, but I find it utterly compelling."
Buyers had no such doubts. The Wall went platinum in the UK in December 1979, sold over a million in the US within two months and hit number one across Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, stalling at number three at home. Guthrie won the Grammy for Best Engineered Recording (non-classical), and the album was nominated for Album of the Year.
Singles
| Single | Released | B-side | Chart peaks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2 | 23 November 1979 | One of My Turns | UK 1 (five weeks), US 1 |
| Run Like Hell | April 1980 (US) | Don't Leave Me Now | US 53, Canada 15, Sweden 18 |
| Comfortably Numb | 23 June 1980 | Hey You |
"Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" was Pink Floyd's first UK single since "Point Me at the Sky" in 1968. It entered the chart at 26, reached number one a fortnight later and stayed there for five weeks, making it the 1979 Christmas number one, the last UK number one of the 1970s and the first of the 1980s. It topped the charts in 14 countries and sold over four million copies. The Inner London Education Authority called it "scandalous", and in 1980 South Africa banned the single and the album after the song was adopted by supporters of a nationwide school boycott against apartheid education. The school got 1,000 pounds and the children no royalties; in 2004 the former pupils, traced via Friends Reunited, lodged a claim for broadcast royalties. The song later won Waters a BAFTA for Best Original Song through the 1982 film.
Touring and Live
Scarfe said Waters told him from the start he wanted an album, then a show, then a film, and the tour was mapped on a model stage with tiny figures before the record was even out. The production used 450 foldable cardboard bricks to build a wall 33 feet high and 260 feet wide, plus projections, inflatables and a replica Stuka bomber. A "surrogate band" of Andy Bown, Snowy White, Peter Wood and Willie Wilson opened each night in masks of the band members' faces.
| Venue | Opening night | Shows |
|---|---|---|
| Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena | 7 February 1980 | Seven |
| Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, New York | 24 February 1980 | Five |
| Earls Court, London | 4 August 1980 | Six |
| Westfalenhalle, Dortmund | 13 February 1981 | Eight |
| Earls Court, London | 13 June 1981 | Six, staged for filming |
On the opening night a stage curtain caught fire during the first song. Gilmour sang and soloed "Comfortably Numb" from the top of the finished wall. Backstage, Waters remembered, "We had separate trailers as dressing rooms, the four of us, and all the doors faced outward." The New York Times called the show "the touchstone against which all future rock spectacles must be measured". It still lost about 400,000 pounds, and the only member who made money was Wright, on his wage. Ezrin, banned from backstage after leaking tour details to a Billboard journalist, bought a ticket in New York and wept during the solo.
Film, Covers and Afterlife
Alan Parker's film Pink Floyd – The Wall, written by Waters, starring Bob Geldof and built around Scarfe's animation, was released by MGM in July 1982 and won two BAFTAs. On 21 July 1990 Waters staged The Wall – Live in Berlin on the site of the fallen Berlin Wall, with guests including Cyndi Lauper, Sinead O'Connor, Van Morrison and Bryan Adams. Its version of "Comfortably Numb", with Van Morrison singing Gilmour's part, turned up in Martin Scorsese's The Departed in 2006.
- Scissor Sisters took a disco "Comfortably Numb" to number 10 in the UK in 2004.
- Korn covered all three parts of "Another Brick in the Wall" in 2004.
- Class of '99, with Layne Staley, covered it for The Faculty in 1998.
- Eric Prydz remixed it as "Proper Education" in 2007.
- Pearl Jam played "Mother" on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon in 2011.
- The 2018 tribute The Wall [Redux] featured Melvins, Pallbearer and Mark Lanegan.
- Body Count's 2024 "Comfortably Numb" features Gilmour on guitar.
Reissues and Live Releases
Doug Sax and Guthrie remastered the album in 1994. In 2000 came Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live 1980–81, drawn mainly from Earls Court. The 2011 to 2012 Why Pink Floyd...? campaign brought Guthrie remasters in three versions: Discovery (2011), Experience with a bonus disc of unreleased material, and the seven-disc Immersion box (2012), which included more than two hours of demos. Waters went on to stage The Wall Live from 2010 to 2013, grossing a reported 294 million pounds over 219 shows, and on 12 May 2011 Gilmour and Mason joined him at the O2 in London. In 2017 it became an opera, premiered in Montreal.
The Legacy of Pink Floyd's The Wall
The band did not survive it. Wright was gone by 1981, and Waters left in 1985. The Wall stands as Pink Floyd's second-biggest album after Dark Side, with more than 30 million sold, the RIAA's 23x platinum certification from 1999, and the title of best-selling double album of all time. It entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008 and sat at number 87 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums in 2003, and Planet Rock listeners voted the "Comfortably Numb" solo the greatest of all time.
Its makers still argue over it. Waters called it "stupefyingly good" in 1992 and named it his favourite Floyd album in 2011. Gilmour said in 2009 he found it a bit whiny with hindsight. Billy Corgan, inducting the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, called it "one of the bravest records I've ever heard". And in 2025 Ezrin told the CBC that parts of it now strike him as "almost neo-fascistic", though he once believed the fascist imagery was satire.
"In the final analysis it produced what is arguably the best work of that decade. Maybe one of the most important rock albums ever."
Bob Ezrin, Guitar World, 2009
Things You Might Not Know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Mason hung up on Young Lust | Waters recorded a call to Mason for the demo without warning him; Mason assumed it was a prank and hung up. The operator was genuine too. |
| Nobody Home's sulk | Gilmour said Waters wrote "Nobody Home" overnight after going off in a sulk, and came back with "something fantastic". |
| The loop | The album's last words, "Isn't this where...", complete themselves with the first words of side one, "...we came in?" |
| Mason's days off | Nick Mason plays drums on only 15 of the 26 tracks; he is absent from the kit on "Mother", "Goodbye Blue Sky" and "Vera", among others. |
Listen to the Riffology Podcast
The Riffology podcast has a full episode on The Wall, from Montreal to Earls Court, and you can find it alongside the rest of our album deep dives on all major podcast platforms.
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