One of my earliest musical memories is of The Wall. My dad had a modest collection of records mostly by Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Thin Lizzy, and they sat very neatly in the unit the hifi lived on, rarely being played. I remember looking through them from a young age - mostly reading the spines but sometimes taking them out and looking at the sleeves. I have a few particular memories: being terrified of the "war pig" on the cover of Sabbath's Paranoid, not understanding why In Through the Out Door came in a brown paper bag and the terrifying cartoons inside the gatefold sleeve of The Wall. As far as the music goes, I distinctly remember Mother and it's slightly haunting lyrics (I think my dad used to sing it to us), as well as the school children on Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2, but little else.
Fast forward some years and I heard Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile for the first time, maybe a year or so after it came. It's probably too much of an over-statement to call that album my generation's The Wall, but double albums weren't really a thing, and I remember the endless comparisons to The Wall. That was a landmark moment in a lot of ways - the realisation that the music my dad listened to could influence the music I was listening to. In hindsight, it's obvious - those were some of the biggest bands of the decade and Black Sabbath basically made metal the awesome thing it is, but to a 16-year-old child, you just assume everything is always new, and not a constant reinvention of things from the past.
In January 2001 I bought a copy of the 1980 live recording of The Wall to add to my small collection of cds. Obviously between hearing The Fragile and then, I'd decided that Pink Floyd were a cool band that it was ok to like, and not some dad-rock band; my friend Matt who I walked to school with was a huge fan, so that maybe helped. That was how I properly got into Pink Floyd, but all the preamble is important; I'd been listening to Pink Floyd long before I even knew it.
Over the years I've seen Roger Waters a handful of times - Glastonbury 2002, Roskilde 2006 (where he played Dark Side of the Moon in full, more on that another time) and at the O2 Arena in 2011. That night deserves a special mention - in a brilliant combination of events, he was touring The Wall and playing a series of shows at the O2 that happened to coincide with my dad's 50th birthday, so I got us tickets to one of the nights. I think he'd seen Pink Floyd play it back in the day, or certainly had seen concert footage of the wall going up. Either way, I think we were both as excited as each other to see the album played out. By complete chance I happened to pick the same night where both Nick Mason happened to be in the crowd, as well as the night where David Gilmour fulfilled a promise to come on stage with Roger for Comfortably Numb; in Outside the Wall, for just a few moments, the three living members of Pink Floyd were reunited on stage to play together for what I think remains the last time and by complete chance we got to witness that. It was very cool.
The stage show was, of course, everything I imagined it would be - the wall gradually being built and the giant flying inflatables and the anti-war rhetoric projected onto the newly built wall. If The Wall teaches us anything, it's that if you're going to have a theme, you might as well to commit to it fully (aside from being over two discs and telling something of a story, the comparisons to The Fragile (or rather The Fragile to The Wall) fall away pretty quickly - Trent had no stage show like this). Being a moody teenager listening to The Wall was a strange experience, and quite grounding - clearly people had been having similar thoughts for a long time and I was in no way unique in emphasising with the idea of building a wall. Again, obvious in hindsight.
Musically, The Wall didn't hugely influence what I was listening to - beyond being guitar-based, it sounded nothing like the other bands I was into, and considerably poppier (or should I say radio-friendly, since the definition of pop has changed a million times since this was released). Very little of my collection pre-dates 1990, so it certainly didn't send me on a journey through 70's rock. But The Wall set new ideals of what I wanted from concept albums, and is probably part of the reason I have such a soft-spot for them. Albums are great, but albums that are tied together with a narrative are a whole step beyond; albums that feel like haphazard collections of songs where not even the music fits together do considerably less for me.
To list the highlights is to list most of the songs on the album - The Thin Ice, Another Brick in the Wall (all parts), Mother, Goodbye Blue Sky, Goodbye Cruel World (what a dangerously bleak lyric), Hey You, Comfortably Numb (not initially a favourite of mine but one I came to love - Roger's vocals in the chorus are perfect. Plus, you know, guitar solos), In the Flesh (with the backing singers providing the haunting "against the wall" lines), Run Like Hell, Waiting for the Worms (what a trio of songs) and The Trial wrapping everything up in a pinnacle of pomp and commitment to the theme. It's a truly remarkable album.
Anyway, this isn't my dad's copy of The Wall - this is one I picked up for a ridiculous 33p in a charity shop near my house in December, in what can only be called remarkable condition for an LP that's 40 years old - the vinyl is cleaner than some new vinyl I have (and sounds crystal clear) and the picture sleeves and gatefold all look incredible. One detail I'd never noticed before is the gradually increasing height of the wall over the four labels - a very nice touch.
I've rambled on for quite long enough (and I still have a side of vinyl left to go). We all know this is a classic, so I'll forgive you if you skimmed most of this.
Format: Double 12", gatefold, picture sleeves
Tracks: 26
Cost: £0.33 second-hand
Bought: Blue Cross charity shop, Kidlington
When: 01/12/18
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: none
