The Wall becoming “a huge hit” for Pink Floyd was no surprise to Roger Waters.
The bassist and songwriter behind the hit double album says it has now outsold The Dark Side of the Moon in the United States, and that The Wall has cracked the top three best-selling albums. When recording the album concluded, Waters says he knew the album would resonate with people, though he said in a separate interview that the ongoing success of Pink Floyd in new generations was a real surprise. He told Word Magazine in May 2008: “Funnily enough, The Wall has sold a lot more than The Dark Side of the Moon in America now. I think it goes Thriller, The Eagles, The Wall, then The Dark Side of the Moon. But it always sounded like a very popular record.
“I remember when we finished it off, thinking it would be a huge hit. I honestly don’t know why. I just did. It had a lot of class, but it was also deeply appealing. And of course, Money was seriously embraced by the AM radio; the cash register thing struck a chord.
“And radio was a big factor then. Which is why they were always bribing them with cocaine and cash! But I like to think there’s a political dimension of honesty about the whole record that gives it a flavour of truth. That’s also a contributing factor to its longevity. People understand immediately when they hear it that there’s nothing contrived about it.”
Waters also believes managing to avoid sounding “silly” helped the album and Pink Floyd in the time after The Wall‘s release. 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.”
