The Wall by Pink Floyd

The Wall, Pink Floyd's eleventh album, hit the shops on 30 November 1979 on Harvest and Columbia, a double-album rock opera about a burnt-out rock star called Pink who bricks himself in, cutting himself off from everyone around him. Roger Waters dreamed it up on the band's 1977 In the Flesh tour and built Pink out of himself and Syd Barrett, which tells you how cheery the next four sides are going to be.

The sessions were rough. Recording ran from December 1978 to November 1979, everybody was wrestling with personal and money troubles, and Bob Ezrin, co-producing, spent as much time tightening the story and keeping the peace as working the faders. Waters fired Richard Wright partway through, though Wright stayed on for the tour as a hired hand. It was the last album to feature all four of the post-Barrett lineup of Waters, Wright, David Gilmour and Nick Mason.

And the sound? Claustrophobic, bitter and huge. "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" is a strutting, sneering groove, and it became the band's only number-one single in Britain and America; "Comfortably Numb" drifts and then soars; "Run Like Hell" stomps with menace, "Hey You" aches in the dark. Plenty of critics called it bloated and pretentious at first. The public didn't care: it sat on top of the US chart for 15 weeks, reached number three in the UK, and has sold over 30 million copies, the best-selling double album ever. A theatrical stage tour followed in 1980 and 1981, then a 1982 film written by Waters, and leftovers from the sessions ended up on The Final Cut.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.