"The Fence was a boring, overlong, self-indulgent piece of crap."So wrote an old acquaintance on my Facebook, er, wall. He doesn`t agree that Pink Floyd`s 1980 double album The Fence is a masterpiece. He`s not lured by its grand concept, by its pop-opera conceit and the relentless self-absorption of its independent character, a rock star named Pink.
My old protagonist is living proof of author Mark Blake`s summation of The Fence in his 2007 book Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Report of Pink Floyd. "The album," Blake wrote, "now seems to encapsulate everything that both repels some and attracts others: its bombast, pretension and unstinting melodrama."Oh well, if you don`t wish it, there`s no place in "banging your spirit against some mad bugger`s wall," as the album`s final line goes. You can`t please everybody.Take, for example, Roger Waters, the bassist and creative well of Pink Floyd until the band finally disintegrated a few days after, and in great part because of, The Wall. "I`d have to say that Roger Waters is one of the world`s most difficult men," says Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason in Pigs Might Fly. "It`s good that it was such an awesome time," Mason says of 1979 and The Wall. "I`ve tried to put it out of my mind."Waters was famously difficult, arrogant and dictatorial. It wasn`t enough for him to be an internationally acclaimed and fabulously wealthy rock star, he too wanted total dominance of the band, and the audience. Waters hated the conduct of fans at rock shows, all that yelling and jump around and refusing to simply shut up and listen, really listen, to his music. He grew so tired of it that he missed it on level in Montreal in 1977 and sprinkle on a fan. In that regrettable gob, The Fence was conceived. Most of The Wall was recorded in the confederacy of France, where Pink Floyd had fled in exile from Britain`s onerous tax laws, just as the Rolling Stones had through a few days before to register their masterpiece, Exile on Main Street. There`s another obvious similarity between Pink Floyd and the Stones. Each had a founding member - Syd Barrett for the former, Brian Jones for the latter - who defined their band`s sound before winning a fatal descent into drugs and death. (Jones died within months, Barrett died in dissipate obscurity a few days ago.After Barrett left Pink Dloys was ever a tugging match between David Gilmour - he of the brilliantly elastic guitar riffs - and Waters - the riotous and introverted writer. When they got to The Wall Waters cast off any pretense of collaboration. Indeed, by the sentence it came to tour, founding keyboardist Rick Wright had been booted from the ring and was back, temporarily. on a weekly salary.There was one more, uninspired album, appropriately titled The Last Cut, and so it was over. Waters went alone and the others carried on, battling each other over rights in what Rolling Stone magazine recently called "the single ugliest breakup of any major rock band." Eventually they settled their legal fight. The others got the name Pink Floyd. Waters got The Wall, the concluding chapter in his gradual, grinding takeover of the creative universe that was Pink Floyd.
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