BRICK BY BRICK

Pink Floyd’s best-selling album The Wall embodies the sense of anxiety and alienation of a generation in the 1980s, exploring the uneasy relationship between the individual and society. Now, band leader Roger Waters has sanctioned his work’s transformation into an opera, soon to be premiered as part of the 375th anniversary celebrations of Montreal, the city where the idea for the album first took hold

There is no escaping the symbolism of ‘the wall’ these days. For a generation brought up in the aftermath of the Second World War, the geopolitical landscape has been shaped by the Berlin Wall, Israel’s West Bank wall, and most recently Donald Trump’s notorious plan to build a wall between the US and Mexico.

At the end of the 1970s, the progressive rock band Pink Floyd tapped into the metaphor of the wall to represent the isolation and alienation of the individual in society. Band leader Roger Waters wove a narrative from 11 songs, inspired by events in his own life and that of Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd’s original front man. The resulting concept album, The Wall, tells the dysfunctional story of Pink, beginning with his desperately unhappy childhood and culminating as an adult in a failed marriage and a slow, self-imposed retreat from the world behind a wall.