You may recall we recently established that punk bands actually loathed the habit of crowd spitting and certainly didn’t spit on their own audiences. But that wasn’t to say a rock musician has never done such a thing.
In July 1977, at the height of the UK punk movement, the bass player in a very popular act was playing the last show of a tour in Montreal, Canada. At the gig’s climax, he marched to the lip of the stage and gobbed at fans on the front row.
This was Roger Waters of Pink Floyd.
The antipathy between the young, angry new wave outfits and the older, pompous stadium bands was never more pronounced than in their disdain for Pink Floyd. Indeed, as legend has it, the shy and hunched Johnny Rotten was recruited to Sex Pistols having been spotted wearing a Floyd t-shirt defaced with a scrawled ‘I HATE’. And yet, the psychology of Waters and Lydon were not quite as removed from each other as they may have thought.
The Floyd leader immediately regretted his sputum flinging action, but did recognise it as a symptom of
the alienation he felt; the distance his art had put between himself and his audience. Not so different from the isolation and cynicism described by the Pistols and The Clash.
Much like those bands, Waters also took his distress as inspiration, writing about his skewed mental equilibrium. The result was the Floyd’s eleventh album, The Wall.
Although Dark Side of the Moon was no laughing party and Wish You Were Here continued its description of their former colleague, Syd Barrett, sinking into psychosis, The Wall referred to and acknowledged Waters’ personal fragility and depression. Compared with the mellow psychedelia of a vintage Floyd piece like ‘Echoes’, The Wall was a snarling, mocking, sarcastic work – every bit as angry as Anarchy In The UK.
If anything, Waters’ work (and it was largely composed by the bassist, with only the most slender of contributions from the rest of the band) was more self-loathing than any of the key punk albums. While Strummer and Lydon were asserting their independence and strength, Waters was displaying the doubt and fear that his life as a musician was a waste, serving only to dehumanise and trap him.
The Wall is a riot of Freudian analysis. The imaginary character ‘Pink’ (read: Waters) is a rock star tumbling into insanity. On the surface, it appears his swollen ego, drug use and mistreatment of friends and family is eating him alive, but as the story unfolds we are transported back to his school days, his infant relationship with an overbearing mother and the death of his father in WW2. These are shown to be extra contributory factors, conspiring to build an impenetrable barrier between Pink and the regular, healthy world.
This is the titular Wall.
As total delusion sets in, Pink fantasises he is a head of a fascist regime, running the world ‘his’ way. And as neurosis conquers normality and mental pain shatters peace of mind, he is completely adrift and ‘Comfortably Numb’ (as David Gilmore’s sole track has it).
Perhaps surprisingly, The Wall spawned a number one single ‘Another Brick In The Wall (pt.2)’. With its nagging refrain ‘We don’t need no education’ it proved almost as controversial as the Pistol’s ‘God Save The Queen’, from two years before.
The Pistols and The Clash both had a stab at motion pictures (‘The Great Rock and Roll Swindle’ and ‘Rude Boy’) with negligible results. The Floyd, with an admittedly more substantial budget, transferred The Wall to the screen, rather more successfully. In another link to the new wave, Bob Geldof starred as Pink. It’s quite an overblown affair, combining Gerald Scarfe cartoons with live action fantasy sequences, all backed by the album in its entirety but without the band appearing. Allowing for the bombast and more than a little pretention, it’s hard to see how an album of such raw, soul-bearing emotion could have been translated any better.
Unfortunately, after The Wall, the Roger Waters’ line up of Pink Floyd were trapped themselves. Almost all the tracks subsequently released by this version of the band were focused on the same subject matters, particularly Waters’ loss of his soldier father, and suffered badly from the law of diminishing returns. Before long, Pink Floyd parted company with their leader and principal songwriter.
However, for a couple of years in the late seventies, the very group the punks loved to hate was producing material very much aligned with their own. In truth The Wall is one of the best punk albums you’ll ever hear.
