A “silly” intonation could have affected The Wall, but Roger Waters has since shared how Pink Floyd avoided that tone.
Speaking about the making of the album, Waters would say the band were cautious to be as “truthful” and “passionate” as they could be. The Wall would become one of the band’s best-known pieces, with standout songs like Comfortably Numb and In the Flesh? considered to be among the band’s best songs. But making the album proved challenging for the group, not least because Waters and David Gilmour disagreed on the tone of a standout song. There were other problems at play, too, with Waters sharing that there was a trickiness to balancing the tone of the album. Speaking to Rocky Mountain News in 2008, Waters would share how the band managed to avoid sounding “silly” on their recording.
Waters said: “Yeah. It’s because they’re truthful and they spring from a passionate attachment to political and philosophical ideals that are based on the experience of others. If you were to name something that you now consider silly….not that I want to knock other artists, but you’d probably find the subject matter is fey in some way.”
Speaking of their work on the song in an interview with Uncut Magazine, the bassist would suggest he had a vastly different idea in mind for Comfortably Numb. The song has since become an essential part of Gilmour’s live setlist, though he says he never learned the guitar solo. It’s a song which seems to have had a very different version kicking about the studio before Gilmour and Waters finally agreed on what the final version would sound like.
Waters said: “There was an argument. We cut the track, sent it to Michael Kamen in New York, who wrote and recorded the string charts. They sounded fantastic, almost the best thing that Michael ever did. I love it. Dave said he thought the track was sloppy, or something, and he wanted to recut the drums, the bass, this, that and the other.
“At this time I was working in Jacques Loussier’s studio doing vocals because we realised that we had to split the work up. Dave was still in Bear Studios, doing keyboard. He recut the basic rhythm of the piece and stuck it together and went ‘“’There you go’. I listened to it and I hated it.
“It had suddenly become, for me, very wooden; just not moving at all. And that was the big argument. I went: ‘No, the way it was, was great. This is bad’. He was: ‘No, the way it was, was terrible. This is great’. So the song ended up with 4 bars of his and 4 bars of mine… the whole track is like that. It was a weird sort of bargaining thing between he and I.”
The bargain seems to have paid off, though, with Comfortably Numb now recognised as one of the band’s best songs. Despite the iconic instrumental running through the track, Gilmour says he opted not to remember the original solo, instead revising and improvising it from show to show.
