The Story of “Pink Floyd The Wall Complete”
“How can I complete The Wall…?”
The Missing Pieces of The Wall
Pink Floyd The Wall is more than just a classic album. It is a true rock opera — a musical, visual, and cinematic spectacle on a grand scale. It is perhaps the finest example of rock and roll theatre ever produced. It is a complex, intricate work worthy of the recognition and study we often reserve for traditional classical works. It is huge in scope and full of big themes yet at its core it’s still a deeply personal album about isolation and the damage we can inflict upon ourselves. The sound of the album is timeless. Throughout the years, its messages and themes have adapted to changing times. Decades after its release, The Wall is still a relevant and important work.
There are many other excellent books, websites and commentary about the history and analysis of Pink Floyd The Wall. This website explores all of the missing songs and parts of songs which were cut from the original album for running time or other reasons. The missing pieces. The “Wall leftovers.” What might be called the “spare bricks.”
Many of these songs and snippets were released in one form or another elsewhere. With a bit of digging and a ton of time and cash, it’s possible to create a version of Pink Floyd The Wall which restores missing songs and various bits which were cut from the original The Wall album for running time or other reasons. Even if rebuilding your own Wall is not in your plans, this site can help you find the lost pieces of music and where to hear them so you can get a better overall picture of an expanded, complete Wall. All in all, I’ve restored over 20 minutes of music in my own personal copy.
Building The Wall
The story of the creation of The Wall is Pink Floyd lore. Here’s a very brief recap. After the band’s first stadium tour which ended with the infamous spitting incident in Montreal in July 1977, the band were feeling frustrated and even more distant from the fans. After a break, the band reconvened at Britannia Row Studios in July, 1978 where Roger Waters presented two concepts he’d been working on. One was was the foundation of what would become Waters’ first solo record The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking. The other was Waters’ original 90-minute demo titled Bricks in the Wall.
“The idea for the album came concurrently with the idea for The Wall — the basis of the idea. I wrote both pieces at roughly the same time. And, in fact, I made demo tapes of them both — and, in fact, presented both demo tapes to the rest of the Floyd, and said, ‘Look, I’m going to do one of these as a solo project and we’ll do one as a band album, and you can choose.'”
In a 2013 interview, The Wall engineer and co-producer James Guthrie recalled,
“Roger’s original demo was rough, but you could hear the brilliance and the importance of the story. He had written what could have been nearly three albums worth of material that had to be whittled down to two. Some of that material was used on later projects, but our initial challenge was to make things more concise, to more effectively tell the story. Songs like ‘Comfortably Numb’ came later as a collaboration, but there were a number of tunes that remained relatively unchanged, such as ‘Mother’, ‘Is There Anybody Out There’, ‘Vera’, ‘Bring The Boys’, ‘Don’t Leave Me Now’ and many of the musical themes that recur throughout the album.”
David Gilmour also talked about the original demo,
“Roger had done a demo, at home, of the entire piece and then we got it into the studio with Bob Ezrin (producer of The Wall album with Waters and Gilmour) and the rest of us. We went through it and started with the tracks we liked best, discussed a lot of what was not so good, and kicked out a lot of stuff. Roger and Bob spent a lot of time trying to get the story line straighter, more linear conceptually. Ezrin is the sort of guy who’s thinking about all the angles all the time, about how to make a shorter story line that’s told properly, constantly worried about moving rhythms up and down, all that stuff which we’ve never really thought about.”
The Limits of the LP
When The Wall was originally released, the 12″ vinyl LP was the predominant consumer music format. As the running time of an LP increased, the grooves in the vinyl had to be cut shallower and narrower. This would reduce the volume, loudness and sound quality of the records, especially in recordings with a wide dynamic range. An 18-20 minute runtime per side was considered the “sweet spot” for an LP — a good balance between running time and sound quality.
On 30 November, 1979, the album was released on vinyl, cassette, and 8-track tape formats. This was years before compact discs and digital downloads with their longer running times would be available.
Releasing The Wall as a three-record set was considered throughout production. Instead, the album was trimmed and edited to fit as close as possible to that 18-20 minute constraint for each side of an LP. Entire songs were deleted and many of the remaining tracks were edited to cut the running time.
So what happened to all of the extra stuff?
I was working a string of FM radio stations around the time The Wall was released. The lyrics for the deleted “What Shall We Do Now?” and the missing verse of “The Show Must Go On” were still there in the album’s liner notes–as if to tease us (they were actually left there because the inner sleeves had already been sent to print and any changes would have delayed the release of the album). Around the station, we’d heard rumors about other unused songs intended for The Wall. Occasionally, we would find snippets from trade magazines that provided tiny but intriguing clues.
Some of those deleted tracks and edited bits of songs eventually appeared elsewhere in The Wall canon, including singles, the live shows, the film, and other albums. Over the years, I’ve found many of the bits, beats, and tracks needed to complete and restore the “chunks of songs” which were trimmed for running time from the final cut.
Here’s my track list:
The Wall Complete
Programme 1:
1 In The Flesh? 03:38
2 The Thin Ice 03:05
3 Another Brick In The Wall Pt. 1 03:25
4 The Happiest Days Of Our Lives 01:52
5 Another Brick In The Wall Pt. 2 03:59
6 Teacher, Teacher (or The Hero’s Return) 03:27
7 Mother 06:07
8 When The Tigers Broke Free 03:39
9 Goodbye Blue Sky 03:07
10 What Shall We Do Now? 03:51
11 Young Lust 03:46
12 One Of My Turns 03:36
13 Don’t Leave Me Now 04:23
14 Another Brick In The Wall Pt. 3 01:09
15 Goodbye Cruel World 01:16
Programme 2:
1 Hey You 04:42
2 Is There Anybody Out There? 02:41
3 Nobody Home 03:28
4 Your Possible Pasts 04:27
5 Vera 01:37
6 Bring The Boys Back Home 01:40
7 The Fletcher Memorial Home 04:44
8 Comfortably Numb 06:22
9 The Show Must Go On 02:07
10 In The Flesh 04:34
11 Run Like Hell 05:27
12 Waiting For The Worms 04:03
13 Stop 00:32
14 The Trial 06:08
15 Outside The Wall 01:43
Spare Bricks – “Leftovers” from The Wall
Empty Spaces
Sexual Revolution
The Last Few Bricks
Death Disco
Is There Anybody Out There? (a reprise)
Overture for Comfortably Numb
It’s Never Too Late
The Final Cut
Teach (later released as “One Of The Few”)
Next: The Wall Immersion: Sorting Out The Work In Progress Demos
Original works © 1979, 1982, 1983, 1994, 1999 by Pink Floyd Music, Ltd.
THIS RELEASE IS NOT AVAILABLE FOR SALE. THIS IS NOT AN OFFICIAL RELEASE.
Because of copyrights, there are no links to download this mix anywhere on this site. I don’t know where you can find it. You can’t get it here. Please don’t ask.
Wonderful, thank you!
Thanks, Brian!
I note you didn’t use ‘The Final Cut’ even though it’s one of the songs prepared for the ‘Spare Bricks’ set. Pity cos it fits in perfectly between ‘Nobody home’ and ‘Your possible pasts’ in your track list. In ‘Goodbye cruel world’ Pink completes his situation and completes his isolation, while the song title is a clichéd suicide note. After the lonely desperation of ‘Nobody home’, where his (former) wife disses Pink, his loneliness and isolation is at rock bottom and with ‘Goodbye cruel world’ fresh in mind suicide again comes up. Lyrically the song refers directly back to his wife and ‘nobody home’ (would you sell your story to rolling stone, would you take the children away and leave me alone), as well as being particularly relevant to the following song ‘your possible pasts’, where Pink contemplates the decisions made. Musically it fits in perfectly after ‘nobody home’, both are slow tempo, the former song is heavily dependent on Rick Wrights sombre piano playing, the latter starts with the same sombre piano. If you cross-fade in the sound effects between the two songs, it sounds like two halves of the same song.
Hi, Paul. Thank you for your comments. You make excellent points. There were a couple of reasons that I didn’t use “The Final Cut” even though it’s an outstanding track and you’re right… musically it fits right in. It’s been a while, but I remember reading that TFC was sketched in to track later in a completed Wall. Adding “The Final Cut” at the end of Side 4 would have been a slog to listen to. There are some fan edits that have *all* of the final songs edited back in. They fit together well, but the conclusion of the album goes on forever — kind of like the ending(s) of the last Lord of the Rings film. I never thought to track it on Side 3. And you’re right… it would sound great between “Nobody Home” and “Your Possible Pasts”. The next chapter that I write for this site will be about “The Final Cut”. I’ll have more there (and references). Thank you for lighting that fire….
Honestly if there was only one song from The Final Cut that I could put in The Wall, it would be the title track. The more I listen to it the more it fits in, specifically after ‘Nobody Home’. When I first heard ‘The Wall’, I wondered for a few years if Pink’s Wall was somehow a metaphor for suicide because of the song ‘Goodbye Cruel World’ which as I said before, is a clichéd suicide note. Obviously it’s not, or the album would end there as a single album. So the suicide issue remained unresolved. Including ‘The Final Cut’ resolves it. The songs ‘Nobody Home’ and ‘The Final Cut’ fit together like hand in glove; both songs ooze with paranoia, the evidence of Pink’s deteriorated psychological state once his isolation is total. In ‘Nobody Home’ Pink doesn’t dare to call his wife on the phone because he knows ‘…there’ll be nobody home’. ‘The Final Cut’ tells us directly what he would have said to his wife if he had called her. Symbolically they share the telephone (a repeating symbol of communication breakdown throughout the album), In fact ‘The Final Cut’ provides a delicious irony here in that it was the telephone that stopped Pink from taking his own life. Also following ‘The Final Cut’ with ‘Your Possible Pasts’ gives you the very poignant couplet ‘Just then the phone rang, I didn’t have the nerve to make the final cut. They flutter behind you, your possible pasts…’. And the final test, from a purely musical point of view, the segue from ‘Nobody Home’ to ‘The Final Cut’ on my album sounds absolutely gorgeous. Sorry for the long response but there was soooo much more to say.
Oh, I forgot this one: symbolically both songs also utilise flying (symbolising freedom, the opposite of isolation). From ‘Nobody Home’: ‘I’ve got a strong urge to fly, but I’ve got nowhere to fly to…’. From ‘The Final Cut’: ‘Far from flying high in clear blue skies, I’m spiraling down to a hole in the ground where I hide’…
I have the wall “complete ” 24bit/44.1 can’t remember where ingot it, but I’ve backed it up on everything! the version of “Mother ” is outstanding
Cool! Thank you!
Wish I’d been able to get it while it was up
Wish I could hear your mix but I get the whole copyright issue. I might try and rebuild your mix based on the info on this great site