Bibek Acharya
Any music needs to hit someone in the heart first to resonate with them. There’s no point in latching onto a song where the singer sounds like they’d rather be anywhere else, and some of the greatest tunes of all time usually feature an artist leaving a little bit of themselves in between the grooves of the vinyl. While Roger Waters has been known to throw everything he can into his music, he did admit there were a few times when he saw no redeeming factors about Pink Floyd projects.
When the band first started, though, the idea of empathy and humanity in the lyrics wasn’t a priority. There was certainly a fair bit of imagination in the way that Syd Barrett constructed his tunes, but there was also a few lyrics that had to make people wonder what the hell he was talking about, especially when he started writing the kind of fairy tales that wouldn’t have felt out of place in Alice in Wonderland.
Once Barrett started losing his mind, that loss was bound to permeate everything they did afterwards. He was practically the foundation of the band, and while Waters was left to take charge, hitting upon ‘Echoes’ was the first time he truly felt like he was saying something significant. And so began both the best and worst thing that could have ever happened to the group.
Although Waters had a firm belief in what the concept behind their records should be, it wasn’t exactly the most democratic process all the time. Dark Side of the Moon managed to get everyone’s ideas under one roof, but once it got to working on The Wall, the entire band practically did whatever Waters told them to do. And if the band were willing to grin and bear it for the sake of their friendship, it was going to become a whole different story once Waters started bringing his grand concept to the big screen.The idea of making The Wall into a stage performance was already hard enough to envision, but once Alan Parker began getting a script together with Waters, many of the album’s worst tendencies rose to the surface. It’s far from a bad film, and much of the imagery from Gerald Scarfe is profound during the sequences for songs like ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’, but there’s hardly any casual fan who wanted to walk into the theatre and see Pink shave off his eyebrows or reenact many unspeakable things during the sequence where he imagines himself as a fascist dictator.Even Waters had to agree that there weren’t as many pieces of true emotional potency as he would have wanted, saying, “Although I love the record, I was less in love with the movie. I think it lacked humanity and humour, and I think they’re both very important to introduce into the piece.” It’s hard to imagine humour as part of any version of the record, but humanity really is the core word there.
The whole point of the album was about feeling bad for this person losing his way after a lifetime of stardom, and while there are visual hints to his past and even a few references to Barrett, it’s harder to relate to Bob Geldolf’s portrayal when he has so little to work with. Granted, he does play the role of a broken musician incredibly well, but there are a few scenes where the audience would have benefited from seeing him be the rockstar he’s talked about rather than immediately cutting to the fascist sections.
But even if The Wall is more than a bit of tough watch, it is a great companion piece to the album of the same name. The album itself is a masterpiece, either way, but somewhere between this movie and the massive spectacle during the live show is the proper way to experience the show.
