A “fear” still held by veteran songwriter Roger Waters is what he used as the base for Pink Floyd‘s seminal album, The Wall.
The bassist confirmed he had tapped into one overarching fear when writing the 1979 album, which would prove to be one of the band’s most highly regarded works. Waters would finally share what this fear was in a piece he wrote for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, decades after the band released The Wall. Waters would go on to tour the album as a solo musician, at one point enlisting the help of The Band, Van Morrison, and Cyndi Lauper for a performance in Berlin.
Waters wrote: “There’s something in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame museum that I’ve started to put in my programmes: that writing The Wall was part of a process to make sense of the feelings of alienation that I had.
“We never completely lose the fear of the dark that we experienced as babies, so the anguish that is a natural part of the process of being human is something that is always there with all of us. But if we work on things we can make interesting and productive relationships with other living things that we experience as joy.”
Despite the success of the album and subsequent tour, Waters says his experience with writing and performing the album was nothing short of nightmarish. The stress of the tour is no surprise given the ambition of the album and Waters’ writing. He told Q Magazine the tour was a mighty task which very nearly fell to pieces. He said: “I put it together with Gerry Scarfe, who designed all the puppets and made the animation with me, and of course with Mark Fisher and Jonathan Park, who did all the detailed design work of the set.
“They designed the brick; they built the wall; they designed the man lifts that went up and down at the back so that people could actually build the thing. Mark designed the way it fell over, and Jonathan did all the engineering. Gerry’s puppets and animation were half of the show.
“We were all working furiously up until the first night. And the first time we had the wall up across the arena with some film on it was four days before the first show. I went and walked all the way around the top row of seats at the back of the arena.
“And my heart was beating furiously and I was getting shivers right up and down my spine. And I thought it was so fantastic that people could actually see and hear something from everywhere they were seated.”
Thankfully, Waters and the group pulled it off in time for the first show of the tour. The first show of the tour, performed on February 7, 1980, took place at the Los Angeles Sports Centre. A total of twenty-eight songs were performed across two sets which featured only songs from The Wall.
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