(Credits: Far Out / digboston)
Tue 24 March 2026 15:30, UK
It doesn’t seem like Roger Waters was really looking to make the cheeriest of music every time he went into the studio.
He was always a lot more cutthroat than the rest of his bandmates whenever he worked on a Pink Floyd record, and while he did have a bit more time to stretch in his solo career, it’s not like Amused to Death is talking about the most optimistic view of the modern world with its constant warnings about the dangers of television can have on the human race. But even if those records aren’t sunshine and roses all the way through, that didn’t stop Waters from singling projects that were bad right out of the gate.
Then again, there’s always a distinction between which albums were bad by his standards and ones that the rest of the group didn’t want to work out. While Waters and David Gilmour could agree that Atom Heart Mother was miles below what they were capable of, it started to get a lot more dicey when they had started working on The Final Cut. None of the dramatic flair from The Wall was there anymore, and since a lot of the songs had been B-sides for their rock opera, Gilmour was a bit leery of working on songs that seemed like they were only made to flesh out a story they already told.
But the truth is that The Final Cut didn’t break up the band; The Wall did. Say what you will about it being one of their best albums, but there are more than a few times where Waters’s dictating of the songs got way too out of hand. He was way out of order for even considering firing Richard Wright, but when the keyboardist ultimately stepped down, you could hear everything sounding a lot less cheery on the next album.
If you’re talking about The Wall, you’re talking about more than just an album. This was a mammoth concept that Waters wanted to keep expanding upon however he could, which probably explains why he left with the rights to use the album’s story in any way that he wanted to. And while Pink Floyd are a band of many talents, they weren’t exactly the best group to put together a film of their work.
Producing a movie wasn’t all that strange in rock and roll circles, but the movie adaptation of The Wall, done by Alan Parker, is almost allergic to having fun. The whole album was always about someone isolating themselves from reality, but seeing Bob Geldof getting more and more dour until he’s commanding a fascist rally isn’t exactly the most comfortable thing to watch, especially in the modern age.
And for as much of a hand that Waters had in the production of the movie, he felt that working with Parker was one of the biggest mistakes he made, saying, “I could not work in that way again, it was absolute misery. Alan Parker and I got along like a house that was never going to catch fire. The story works if you don’t have the images rammed down your throat at the same time. The record seemed much more three-dimensional.
While I tend to agree that the best way to experience the record is the album version, it’s not like the movie is lacking in great ideas. The animation sequences are absolutely fantastic for ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’, and while ‘Comfortably Numb’ is completely recontextualised to a certain degree, it’s hard not to feel something when you first hear Gilmour’s guitar solo coming in for the first time.
It’s not like the movie is an outright dud by any means, but it is missing the one thing that Waters had talked about wanting from the very beginning: empathy. There were a million ways to reshape The Wall for the big screen, but since Waters kept expanding upon what he wanted to do, it’s safe to say that he’s still trying to figure out what he really wants his magnum opus to look like.
