The Wall

The Wall grew out of Roger Waters' alienation on Pink Floyd's 1977 In The Flesh tour, when he spat at a fan pressing against the stage barrier and afterwards imagined literally walling himself off from the audience. Written almost entirely by Waters as a semi-autobiographical rock opera about Pink, a rock star whose dead wartime father, smothering mother, brutal schoolmasters and failed marriage become the bricks of a psychological wall, it drew directly on Waters' own loss of his father at Anzio and his English postwar boyhood. Recorded through 1979 in France and Los Angeles amid the band's tax exile and near-terminal internal warfare, the sessions saw Richard Wright dismissed and co-producer Bob Ezrin brought in to shape the sprawl into a narrative, pushing the disco-inflected arrangement and children's choir that turned "Another Brick In The Wall Part 2" into an unlikely worldwide number one. David Gilmour's contributions - above all the two solos on "Comfortably Numb," written to a Waters lyric about being medicated before a show - supplied the album's emotional release against Waters' bleakness. It stands as the last Pink Floyd album made by the classic four-piece and the peak of Waters' authorial control, the point where the band's post-Dark Side ambitions became fully theatrical, later realized in the wall-building stadium shows and Alan Parker's film. Contemporary critics were split between admiration for its scale and unease at its self-pity, but the album's stature only grew: it remains one of the best-selling records ever made and the touchstone concept album of its era. Its themes of isolation, authoritarianism and the corrosion of celebrity gave rock a template for the album-length personal epic that artists still work from.