Today I spent two hours staring at The Wall.
I watched Alan Parker’s 1985 film of Pink Floyd’s concept album.
Probably it would be more accurate to call it Roger Waters’ concept album since by this time Pink Floyd had ceased to be a band and had become a vehicle for his bloated ego.
It is fitting that another bloated ego, Bob Geldof, was chosen to play the part of Pink in the movie.
He plays a burnt out rock star going slowly nuts in a hotel. Even the carpets outside the room have rectangular brick-like patterns to emphasise his feelings of mental enslavement.
Pink shaves his eyebrows, drives his wife away, mopes about his lonely childhood, trashes his room, becomes a fascist dictator and winds up heavily sedated in a loony bin.
The story is told without dialogue, using music from an album lauded in many quarters as one of rock’s greatest achievements, a point of view I have never subscribed to.
The movie only confirmed my view that there is only one track – Comfortably Numb – that stands up as a decent song in its own right.
The best parts are Gerald Scarfe‘s macabre animation of menacing birds , copulating flowers and a huge mincing machine to grind up schoolchildren.
Roger Waters, aided and abetted by director Alan Parker, flail around to show external images of oppression (police/ TV/ school teachers /political extremists) when the real monsters were in his head all along.
Waters felt alienated from his audience as The Beatles did after Shea Stadium. The key difference is that the Fab Four stopped touring completely. and produced their most inspirational work while the Floyd had by this point already reached a creative dead-end.
Floyd’s stage shows had become so contrived and theatrical that they inevitably forged a barrier between performers and fans.
Waters’ response was not to go back to basics, or abandon touring but to design an even more elaborate stage show where a real wall separates the artists and the audience.
Thank goodness Johnny Rotten and crew came along to show us all a true alternative to this self-serving pomposity.
