(Credits: Far Out / Album Covers)
Sat 20 December 2025 17:15, UK
The mood on the ground at the end of the 1970s was far different to that of the previous decade.
Flower-power and free-love had dominated the discourse in 1969, propelling culture into the exciting new dawn of the 1970s, where anything was musically possible, and come 1979, the gloss of that excitement was beginning to wear off, and the mood was a little less optimistic.
Societal disillusionment was rife on the back of the post-World War II economic boom ending and the oncoming rise of hyper-capitalist politics, and in the cracks of that change, art felt somewhat neglected, and so it did exactly what it does best: respond.
Punk felt like a necessary expression in the wake of this change and gave a voice to the disenfranchised youngsters of the Western world, with The Clash, the Ramones and Sex Pistols all spearheading this cultural movement with a sonic intensity not seen in previous decades and propelled a seismic shift in the mainstream charts.
It left many artists who had dominated the start of the decade scratching their heads, wondering where they stood in this landscape, and no band felt that pinch more tightly than Pink Floyd. They had always flirted with the edge of expectation, creating music that was innovative in spite of their inter-band tension and after changing the musical world in 1973 with Dark Side Of The Moon, felt a self-imposed pressure to lead the way.
Wish You Were Here and Animals valiantly tried to reach similar heights, but it wasn’t until their 1979 epic concept album The Wall that they really came close.
Did The Wall sell the most records in 1979?
While many Floyd fans would openly admit that The Wall doesn’t quite compete with their 1973 epic, it hit commercial figures that almost rivalled it. While Dark Side Of The Moon sold 45million copies in its year of release, The Wall sold 33m, which ultimately made it the biggest-selling classic rock record of the year.
Nevertheless, it wasn’t enough to stop the band from splitting up. The writing was on the proverbial wall, and Waters essentially took the lead on the project, reluctantly dragging the rest of the band with him.
“He gave us all a cassette of the whole thing, and I couldn’t listen to it. It was too depressing and too boring in lots of places,” Gilmour reflected in a past interview with Charlie Kendall. “But I liked the basic idea. We eventually agreed to do it, but we had to chuck out a lot of stuff, rewrite a lot of things and put a lot of new bits in, throw a lot of old bits out.”
The disgruntled creative process served as a major domino in the fall of the group, which split up midday through the decade, with Waters effectively being exiled from the outfit. So it was fitting then that as the greatest musical decade burned to its final embers, so did one of the bands that made it so iconic.
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