Roger Waters says Pink Floyd at Pompeii show influenced The Wall’s Pink character

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A live album lauded by fans is the influence behind Pink, the character featured in Pink Floyd‘s The Wall.

While Pink may have received their first mention on the Wish You Were Here song, Have a Cigar, the character was expanded by Roger Waters on future projects. Pink is believed to have been a placeholder character, an identity which was the projection of record labels. A lyric which sees Waters ask “which one’s Pink?” is believed to be a jab at record labels who were keen for the name of the band to be the star of the group also. Waters would be “really stoned” when he made the decision to use the character as more than a lyric, but as a launching point for Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

The 1979 album follows the jaded rockstar, Pink, on a trip through the music industry and life in general. But it would be Pink Floyd at Pompeii, a legendary live album which Sony Music reissued on May 2, 2025, which was the origins of Pink.

Waters said: “I kind of doubt it. If you were watching [Pink Floyd at Pompeii], there is a little scene where Adrian Maben, the director, asked me, ‘What is the music about?’ I’m really stoned. I’m just looking at him for a long time. I said, ‘What do you mean about?’ I take a drag from my cigarette. I am refusing to be interviewed.

“It’s sort of weird humour. That’s the guy (Pink) I want people to see in the theatre – sort of a strange Englishness about the character. It’s a sort of particular English humour.” Waters would go on to explain Pink is partly a projection of himself, his own thoughts and feelings on the music industry and wider world condensed into a character.

In a separate interview breaking down each track of The Wall, he said: “Well, yes, I suppose, actually, yes it did happen to me, that was like me. But I would never have said it, you see, I’d never have come out with anything like that, I was much too frightened.

“When I wrote this song Young Lust the words were all quite different, it was about leaving school and wandering around town and hanging around outside porno movies and dirty bookshops and being very interested in sex, but never actually being able to get involved because of being too frightened actually.

“Now it’s completely different, that was a function of us all working together on the record, particularly with Dave Gilmour and Bob Ezrin who, we co-produced the album together, the three of us co-produced it. Young Lust is a pastiche number.

“It reminds me very much of a song we recorded years and years ago called The Nile Song, it’s very similar, Dave sings it in a very similar way. I think he sings Young Lust terrific, I love the vocals. But it’s meant to be a pastiche of any young rock and roll band out on the road.”