A possible “rewrite” of The Wall was in the works as Pink Floyd founder Roger Waters wanted to comment on “what’s going on in Iraq.”
Though Waters would not, in the end, rewrite The Wall, he did share his thoughts on what the album now represented. The plan had been to adapt The Wall to the stage, but because Waters could not figure out a satisfying ending for the project, it appears to have been quietly scrapped. Speaking on the adaptation in 2007, Waters said he had intended The Wall rewrite to be a commentary on warfare, bringing the modern commentaries into play with the still-relevant sound of the Pink Floyd classic. Waters had been working with Lee Hall, the writer behind Billy Elliot, on the adaptation. He said: “He’s done a lot of radio work in England and he wrote a movie called Billy Elliott then he wrote the musical that developed from that.
“And he and I are working on a stage version of The Wall. It is a project I’ve been leaning towards for a number of years only on this ground that both the record and the movie were entirely devoid of laughs. Say what you like, whether you like the record or like the movie, there’s no laughs in there.”
Though Waters found little to laugh about when it came to The Wall and its film adaptation, he did believe there could be some added humour should it be adapted again. He added: “Well maybe on the record if you dig for them, and parents or children or cousins or uncles in war in general, but particularly in senseless wars like what’s going on in Iraq, which we know has nothing to do with spreading democracy or helping people or freedom or any of those things.
“I’m not quite sure with exactly what it does have to do with. The cynical part of me thinks it’s only about oil and about the bottom line and about Halliburton and about making profit but maybe it’s actually about some kind of misguided religious notions that the neo-cons and the religious right in North America have.”
Waters would draw on his background as an architecture student for The Wall. He said: “Well, maybe. Maybe the architectural training to look at things helped me to visualise my feelings of alienation from rock ‘n’ roll audiences. Which was the starting point for The Wall.
“The fact that it then embodied an autobiographical narrative was kind of secondary to the main thing which was a theatrical statement in which I was saying, ‘Isn’t this fucking awful? Here I am up onstage and there you all are down there, and isn’t it horrible! What the fuck are we all doing here?’”
