Pink Floyd - The Wall
Pink Floyd are one of the great bands. That's undoubted. They have had several classic albums which I love and play often, as complete albums. For Pink Floyd it almost seems to have to be that way. You can play individual, songs, but they come together so well on each album.
But then there's The Wall. It’s been an enormous success. Written in the main by Roger Waters, he is still touring regularly with songs from it. And who can blame him. “Comfortably Numb” is an amazing song and a live highlight. “Another Brick In The Wall” parts one and two, are well known and yielded a Christmas number one as a rarity for the band.
The album and concept is pretty dark and bleak though. Deliberately of course. That's what Waters intended from the outset and underpinned his many and ongoing disagreements with David Gilmour about the band’s musical direction.
Released in November 1979, The Wall was perhaps more of an eighties impact with the elaborate staged concerts and the film with Bob Geldof in the lead role Pink to follow. The impact was huge in many ways. Waters went on to hold one of the biggest concerts ever when he played The Wall - Live in Berlin to over 450,000 people in 1990. Just eight months after the fall of that city’s famous wall.
All that history and commercial success isn't enough for me. It's a double album of largely bleakness and despair. There are some great tracks, though “Another Brick In The Wall” feels like one brick too many these days, it’s tiresome and overplayed and isn't one of their best anyway.
Unlike the others, this isn’t a Pink Floyd album I play in its entirety. The Wall isn't even one I select many tracks from at all if I just want a simple Floyd playlist fix. I can't see what all the fuss is about for the album as a whole.