hooglsay.blogg.se

It wasn't because we couldn't stand to be in the same place."Įzrin - brought in at the suggestion of Waters' then-girlfriend, Carolyne Christie, who had been the producer's secretary - was charged with coordinating the different locations and, according to Mason, brought with him an exacting attention to detail as well as an inclusive approach that occasionally butted against Waters' vision. "So someone would be writing in one place and David would be playing guitar somewhere else, or we'd be doing tracks in one studio and Roger would be 20, 30 miles away doing vocal overdubs. "We were halfway through the album and there was a decision to get it ready for a Christmas release, we would have to do it that way," the drummer explains. "There was a lot more production than previous albums in terms of thinking through the parts very carefully and then playing them more section by section in the studio than going for the complete song, as we did before." And while the group also fragmented and worked in studios during the seven-month process, mostly in France, Mason says that was primarily to get the work done in time for the planned release date. and prepared more carefully" than the group's other albums. Mason says "The Wall" benefited from being "more prepared. But the majority of that process I remember as being pretty creative and businesslike, really." There was a big blowup, particularly between Roger and Rick towards the end of the process. Things fragmented later on, quite late in the recording. "A lot of the album was pretty civilized in terms of people getting on with it. "The sort of concept people have is that this was a record hewn out of rock by very angry people, and I think that's not really the case," contends Mason, 68, who along with Gilmour joined Waters for the May 12, 2011, performance of "The Wall" at London's O2 Arena. It was, in fact, made with a strong-willed co-producer - Bob Ezrin, who'd worked with Alice Cooper, Kiss, Lou Reed and Peter Gabriel - and resulted in the ouster of keyboardist Rick Wright.īut Mason counters that the album was "actually one of the more creative times we had." "There were all kinds of politics going on in the band that didn't help things," he says. Waters does, however, recall "The Wall" as "difficult to make." "It describes a broader, more universal condition than maybe we imagined in 1980, but I think that's what still connects it to an audience." There is, with all due respect, a wall that we call the media that lies between we citizens and reality of our lives. There's a wall between the rich and the poor. There's a wall between the north and south. "But it's strange how the macro and the micro often mirror each other, so the story of one man and his failed relationships and his shame and his problems can somehow mirror a more macro kind of global-political-religious situation. he builds a wall around himself and keeps the world out.

His defenses are so powerful because of his feelings of inadequacy and so on and so forth that. "It was written about this kind of youngish guy who is so fearful that he inures himself. " 'The Wall' is tremendously symbolic, maybe more so now, even, then when I wrote it," explains Waters, 68, who left Pink Floyd in 1985 and unsuccessfully sued Mason and guitarist David Gilmour when they opted to continue the band. The album's long life does not surprise its creator, however. In 2010 Waters began presenting it in its entirety with a critically lauded show, a $60 million production played to more than 1.6 million people in North America and Europe and is spending 2012 in Oceania, South America and back in North America - including a return to the Detroit area this week.Įarlier this year, as part of the Why Pink Floyd? catalog campaign, the group issued "Immersion" and "Experience" editions of "The Wall," adding Waters' original demos and subsequent unreleased recordings by the band, as well as a documentary, live recordings and other materials. "The Wall" is still standing strong more than 30 years after its release. 87 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. 1 in eight countries, including the United States and Great Britain, and gave Pink Floyd its biggest hit single, the chart-topping "Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)," as well as a Grammy Award for Best Engineered Recording - Non-Classical. Released in November of 1979, "The Wall" has gone on to become one of Pink Floyd's signature albums - arguably as popular as 1973's landmark "The Dark Side of the Moon" - and one of the top-selling albums of all-time at more than 25 million worldwide.