Rebuild the Wall

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the release of Pink Floyd's The Wall. Celebrate with a day of angst and alienation! (And cast suspicious glances at any flowers you may have around.)

The resulting tour (which played only in New York, Los Angeles, and London, due to the mammoth scope of the show) was one of the great Spinal Tap-ian events in rock history. Would that I could have seen one of them.

Some highlights of a rare videotape of one of the London shows are embedded below. The entire show is available on YouTube here.

Rock on.

It bears mentoning that the question posed by the title of the opening song "In the Flesh?" is answered by the fact that the band on stage was actually a "surrogate band" wearing masks of the actual Pink Floyd bandmembers and miming along to the band playing offstage. The actual Floyd don't appear until song two, "The Thin Ice." Waka waka. Over the course of the first half of the show, workmen built a giant white wall in front of the band. The entire second half of the show was played by the band from behind the wall, although singers and players would occasionally appear in trap doors that opened in the wall and atop the wall. Unfortunately, the days of this kind of show are alas gone.