Animals

São 11 os parágrafos de Roger Waters dissertando sobre “The Wall” e a turnê subseqüente, no encarte do souvenir “Is There Anybody In There? – The Wall Live (1980-81)”. Bora citar meia dúzia:

“A good deal of the creative impulse for The Wall derived from my disillusionment with rock shows in vast open-air football stadiums. In the days prior to Dark Side Of the Moon the excitement of a Pink Floyd performance lay in a certain intimacy of connection between the audience and the band. It was magical. By the late Seventies that magic and that opportunity had vanished, crushed, as I saw it, by the dead weight of numbers – the sheer inchoherent scale of those stadium events.

It’s something of an ond chestnut now, but perhaps it bears repeating: there was a moment on stage at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal during the Animals tour when I was forced to confront all the negative aspects of these circumstances and of my connivance in them.

Some crazed teenaged fan, screaming his devotion, began clawing his way up the storm netting that separated the band from the human cattle pen in front of the stage, and the boil of my frustration finally burst: I spat in his face. Immeditatly afterwards I was shocked by my behaviour. I realised that what had once been a worthwhile and manageable exchange between us (the band) and them (the audience) had been utterly perverted by scale, corporate avarice and ego. All that remained was an arragement that was essentially sado-masochistic. I had a very vivid image of an audience being bombed – of bombs being lobbed from the stage – and a sense that those people getting blown to bits would go absolutely wild with glee at being at the centre of all the action.

(…)

The Wall is part of my narrative, my story, but I think the basic themes resonate in other people. The idea that we, as individuals, generally find it necessary to avoid or deny the painful aspects of our experience, and in fact often use them as bricks in a wall behind which we may sometimes find sheltere , but behind which we may just as easily become emotionally immured, is relatively simply stated and easy to grasp. It’s one a lot of people grapple with themselves. They recognise it in their own lives.

(…) (…)

There was a kind of discovery and an exorcism involved in the writing of The Wall. I had to get all that stuff out or spend the rest of my life as tahta man in black off to the side at the party, apparently aloof behind dark glasses and a cigarette, but in reality scared to death of any ordinary human encounter.

As to the actual recording and shows, I think they were the best we did together as Pink Floyd. I’m inordinately proud of the work. It has great musical and narrative shape, good tunes and it’s a well-crafted piece of rock’n’roll theatre. Who knows, I’m only 56, but it may well turn out to be the best thing I ever did.

(…) (…)”