I listened to the Floyd all during my teens. DSotM came out the year I turned 12 and I got it new. Started buying the older albums and then got WYWH new. Animals came along and IIRC The Wall was a much anticiptaed release, due out Nov 30th 1979. I had connections at a record store and went there as they were closing the 29th and begged to buy the album they were about to unpack. They let me take it home that night and I spent all that night up to dawn listening over and over, trying to explain away my disapppointment. The Floyd does disco. The horror. The sell out.
*Another Brick In The Wall * might not have been the type of disco Bee Gees were doing, but it had the beat, the hi-hat, the snare.
A little more than 26 years later I have perspective on the whole thing. The 70’s ended with a wimper. The Village People recorded a song called Ready for the eighties, I was gonna leave high school and get my own apartment. The decade of protest marches was gone, the last trails of the Summer Of Love had evaporated. The next decade was gonna be chrome plated and we were all gonna get rich. One of the final signs that the 70’s ended was the Floyd doing disco. They even played it at clubs and people who’d never heard of them danced (it’d get worse when Bowie released Let’s Dance, but I digress). I was extremely upset, but now, the whole feeling is more of a “meh”.
I got the Pulse DVD last year and it certainly confirmed an opinion I’ve formed over the years - the more influence Waters got, the worse the band was. I never got The Final Cut and never considered getting any of Waters’ solo projects. To say that the man is pretentious and self absorbed is understating things several magnitudes. The Wall deals with his upbringing, the longing for a father he has no own memories of, his distrust of the English class system, school system (yet he endorses fox hunting) and I think it was a really smart trick to make his audience pay for his psycho analyzis, instead of him paying a shrink.
You might thik this is thread shitting, and I realize that I’m extremely critical about an album that is so clearly loved by so many, but bear in mind that the Floyd provided the soundtrack for my life during high school. I had all their albums (2 copies of each, one to play, the other for archive purposes), Japanese deluxe pressings and got a Thorens turntable to fully appreciate the sound. I still have DSotM and WYWH in mint condition, complete with posters, stickers and postcards, with the shrink wrap intact. Like **AHunter3 ** says, I can actually play back DSotM and WYWH in my head, I don’t even need to start the disc anymore.
I’m sorry, but back then, The Wall was a betrayal.
Now, it’s a bloated intellectual masturbation by Waters and I never listen to it. I don’t even have a copy anymore.