The Pink Floyd song inspired by a track that was eventually cut from The Wall

A song which features on Pink Floyd‘s The Wall was inspired by a track that was eventually cut from the double album.

Bassist and songwriter Roger Waters confirmed the song had been a major part of the album’s creative process but was cut, along with several other songs, due to concerns over length. A song which forms the core of the story told on The Wall was removed in favour of a song which takes the story forward “a lot of years,” according to Waters. Fellow Pink Floyd members Nick Mason and David Gilmour have spoken about lost material from The Wall, though it appears the decision to cut What Shall We Do Now was to make space for a “show” which supported the overarching narrative told by Waters’ double album.

Speaking shortly after the release of the album, Waters said One of My Turns was featured instead of What Shall We Do Now as a way of indicating the time transition. He said: “Yes, so then the idea is that we’ve leapt somehow a lot of years, from Goodbye Blue Sky through What Shall We Do Now which doesn’t exist on the record anymore, and Empty Spaces into Young Lust that’s like a show; we’ve leapt into a rock and roll show, somewhere on into our hero’s career.

“And One of My Turns is supposed to be his response to a lot of aggro [aggression] in his life and not having ever got anything together, although he’s married, well, no he has got things together, but he’s been married, and he’s just had a… he’s just splitting up with his wife, and in response he takes another girl up to his hotel room.

“He’s had it now, he’s definitely a bit yippee now, and One of My Turns is just, you know, him coming in and he can’t relate to this girl either, that’s why he just turns on the TV, they come into the room and she starts going on about all the things he’s got and all that he does is just turn on the TV and sit there, and he won’t talk to her.”

Songs cut from The Wall are, according to sound engineer James Guthrie, enough to form “three albums” worth of material. He said: “Roger, David, Nick, Rick and I had been living with Roger’s original demo recording of The Wall during the summer of 1978.

“We began work in the studio that October and, as Roger had written about three albums’ worth of material. The first order of the day was to determine how best to tell his story in a more manageable, double-album format.”

Gilmour has also confirmed there were several songs cut from the album, some of which seem to have never been released. He said: “The idea of The Wall was so big and there was such a lot of stuff that Roger wanted to get across lyrically that there was no other way to do it, really. As it was, we had to struggle to get it on a double album.

“The only problem we had was reducing it down from a triple-album to a double-album – the length of songs and all that. Toward the end, we were actually cutting chunks out of songs to fit the time. It’s a long double-album.”