For me to talk about what The Wall is is an exercise in futility. If you're on this page, you're probably already well aware of what The Wall is, and you might know about other mixes like this one. If you haven't heard of anything of the sort before, The Wall by Pink Floyd has a large amount of excess material that got cut from the final album. A lot of this material has found its way into the hands of fans one way or another, be it through the 1982 movie, the live performances, the 1983 album The Final Cut, among others. There are multiple fan-made mixes of the album that try to restore a number of this material, distributed online and through physical media alike. The most influential of these for me were The Wall Complete and The Final Immersion of The Wall, which drove me to work on my own personal mix over the course of several years on-and-off. These mixes have had a couple names and covers over the years, but the one that stuck was one that is as over-the-top and grandiose (and admittedly pretentious) as the mix itself: The Requiem of Pinkerton Floyd.
My objective with this mix was to go as excessive as I possibly could, including (almost) every single unique lyric that I could, while (primarily) focusing on material recorded from 1978 to 1984. I also spent a lot of time thinking about the tracklisting, trying to assemble my own personal interpretation of the story's narrative and choosing songs that built onto that. I have also expanded some tracks with live solos and cut studio material as if it wasn't long enough alraedy. All of this ultimately led to a sprawling project that goes on for over 3 hours. If you're interested in just looking at the tracklisting and finding out how you can listen to this project, click here to skip straight to that section of the page. For those interested in knowing my thought process, what tracks I chose, why I chose them, and what I did to them, keep on reading. Either way, I hope you enjoy the years of effort that went into this endeavor.
With the Frankensteinian nature of this project, it should come as no surprise that there’s a large number of sources I compiled this project from. Other than the 1979 album, there’s bits and pieces from the movie, the live album, and 1983’s The Final Cut, but if you’ve been in the Floyd fandom for long enough you’re well aware of these. One source that I took a surprising amount from is the 2011 Immersion Box Set, which included two CDs worth of demos from Roger and the band. Beyond that, I also took from a bunch of other more obscure releases here and there, but we’ll get to those as I go over the album, disc by disc.
I divided the album into four acts, one per disc, each one mirroring a side of the original vinyl record. Instead of directly opening with the quiet melody of "Outside the Wall" that opens the original, I instead opted to use a radio sound collage that opened one of the band demos, sampling a series of songs performed by wartime singer Vera Lynn (which the song Vera is about, hey hey!), particularly the song “We’ll Meet Again”. This goes directly into the first proper song, an early version of “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)”, with alternative lyrics that serve as something as a prelude to the album and its origins, seeming to address the band’s own fans.
After that song, a familiar tune starts to play quietly in the background, as I opted to include an instrumental demo version of “Outside the Wall” in order to segue to “In the Flesh?”, here with a restored intro, taken from the movie. The outro is also taken from the movie, as sound effects of a bomb being dropped segue into birdsong, before the cut piano intro to The Thin Ice plays, also taken from the movie. The intro to the proper version of "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)" is partially restored, taken from a 19-minute film titled The Simple Facts – A Conversation with Nick Mason and Roger Waters, in which Roger and his band recreated the cut intro in studio, presumably nearly 1:1 with the original recording. This fades into a bit of ambience taken from the 1990 version of “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)”, recorded by Roger Waters for a promotional EP for his 1990 concert of The Wall in Berlin, segueing into “One of the Few” off The Final Cut. The track introduces the teacher character prominently featured in “Another Brick in The Wall (Part 2)”, from his perspective as shown in The Final Cut. This goes into “Teacher, Teacher”, a demo version of the Final Cut track “The Hero’s Return” recorded for The Wall, with nearly completely different lyrics, showing a dialogue between the teacher and Pink himself, as the seeds of Pink’s discontempt with the educational system are sown.
The song ends. A helicopter noise fades in, as the Teacher’s shouts his iconic line announcing the beginning of the next track, “The Happiest Days of Our Lives”. No alterations were made to the track, although I did place the iconic scream at the beginning of “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” at the end of this track, just to give that track a clean start. Speaking of which, “Brick 2” features the first live extension of the album, the guitar solo at the end of the children’s verse being replaced with the longer live version which itself goes into a great keyboard solo by Rick Wright. I transitioned that as cleanly as I could into the proper studio outro from the album, with the teacher’s voice echoing over the child’s screams and a phone tone beeps. Unlike the original album however, this segues into the next track from the teacher’s perspective on The Final Cut, “The Hero’s Return”. The whole idea of its placement here (along with the other teacher tracks) is to give more depth to one of the characters of the album that play a central role in Pink’s trauma that leads to the building of the titular wall. “The Gunner’s Dream” follows, as is on The Final Cut, which for the record is a great song and definitely a highlight of that album.
Next is a song that I struggled with a LOT with the placement of, “Your Possible Pasts”. It briefly features in The Wall movie, as Pink sings some of the lines from it in the bathroom during the scene for “Stop”, however putting it there just didn’t feel right. It interrupted the flow of the story as “Stop” served as a climatic crash before “The Trial”. I’ve seen a couple mixes put it between “In the Flesh?” and “The Thin Ice”, but that didn’t feel right either. After much deliberation, I opted to put it with the Teacher songs, as it seemed to fit with the narrative of “The Hero’s Return”, with the teacher presumably talking to his wife in the later half of the song. It could also be said it’s about Pink talking to his wife later on, as the movie suggests, but in my opinion The Final Cut’s songs are open to interpretation on who they’re about, with a lot of them being carryovers from The Wall, and I just decided to have some of these tracks here in order to foreshadow and show how the teacher’s trauma from war somewhat mirrors Pink’s own, but that’s a discussion for Act III. Anyways, as the track ends and the final word, “closer” echoes out, it fades into The Hero’s Return (Part 2), which was and still is only officially available as the B-side to the “Not Now John” single. In original demos of “The Final Cut”, it came after “The Gunner’s Dream”, so I originally placed it there (until “Your Possible Pasts” was included that is, but I think the spacing between the two parts of The Hero’s Return works better in the long run).
What follows is a demo of “Young Lust”, which I labeled as part 1. Narratively it talks about Pink during his teenage years, coming of age. According to Roger himself, “It was about leaving school, wandering about town, hanging around outside porno movies and dirty bookshops and things like that — being very interested in sex but too frightened to get involved". I opted to place the song in its original position in the demo, before “Mother”, which is present in its original form. I never cared for the orchestral version in the movie and the live version is also quite different from the album version and hard to really incorporate, so I left the song as-is. In hindsight I probably could’ve flown in the live solo or something but I decided to leave it as is.
Similar to Act I, my take of Act II starts much differently than the original, opening with “When the Tigers Broke Free”, which is featured in the movie as a new inclusion to the album’s story for the big screen, although it had been demoed for the album even in its earliest stages. While it appeared in the first act of the movie, with the first half opening the album and the second half between “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)” and “Goodbye Blue Sky”, which itself was moved to the first act, I decided to include the track in its entirety as the opening to Act II, as it (in my opinion) fits with the chronology of the story and shows the catalyst to Pink’s loss of innocence, serving as a nice bridge between Mother and the rest of Act II. “Goodbye Blue Sky” follows the song as it did in the movie, the main change here being the inclusion of a keyboard solo by Rick taken from a demo of the song. This fades into what I believe will be one of my most controversial choices, and this is one of the source I was failing to mention in the introduction, – the inclusion of “Welcome to the Machine” and “Have a Cigar” on the album.
The reason I think these two songs, despite being released a whole four years and two albums before The Wall, belong on this mix is for the narrative they build. One of my biggest gripes with The Wall in its original form narrative-wise is how we go from Pink being raised by his overbearing mother, to almost immediately being this super successful rockstar with no real lead-up to it. As such, I think the inclusion of these two songs, both present in their original form, is warranted for the sake of further elaborating on the album’s story and timeline. This also inadvertently has the effect of making the question “Which one’s Pink?” asked by the manager in “Have a Cigar” be a more literal one, rather than the ironic statement it was in its original context. The way “Have a Cigar” ends, sounding like its coming from a radio, also has the effect of helping transition into the song “What Shall We Do Now?”, taken from the movie with the phone call intro. It was originally supposed to lead up to “Young Lust”, instead being replaced with the musically similar yet lyrically distinct “Empty Spaces”. On the topic of “Young Lust”, I included the clean drum intro taken from a promotional radio EP sampler of the album called Off The Wall (not to be confused with the Michael Jackson album, of course) using it over sound effects from the movie that ended “What Shall We Do Now?”. I then transition that into a live performance of the song, which is faster, raunchier, and most importantly for this project, longer than the studio version.
As soon as “Young Lust” ends, “Sexual Revolution” begins, taken from a band demo. This song would eventually end up on Roger Waters’ solo album The Pros and Cons of Hitchhicking, but I opted not to include that version as it doesn’t really fit lyrically or musically with the album. As much as you might enjoy the guitar work of COVID-19 conspiracy theorist, anti-immigrant and ACTUAL FUCKING RAPIST Eric Clapton, ultimately this is a Pink Floyd album and I wanted to minimize the use of solo content. Honestly, I’m not a big fan of this demo, the lyrics are clearly incomplete and there’s an entire open verse which was presumably meant for a guitar solo overdub. I decided to cut out that open verse, the album is more than long enough without it and nothing is lost narratively. I'd recommend just… imagining the song is Pink drunkenly courting a groupie, or something.
With that out of the way, the album goes into “One of My Turns”, again presented here in its original form, same with “Don’t Leave Me Now”. The song fades into the album version of “Empty Spaces” (which ironically is pretty much absent of pretty much every iteration of The Wall save for the album proper), in its original position as per the album's liner notes. Don’t let the live tracklists fool you, they’re all just the first half of “What Shall We Do Now?”, every last one of em. That said, in order to transition it to “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 3)”, I did have to use a tiiiny bit of AI stem separation to remove the drum from the little bit of the end of the song that’s at the beginning of “Young Lust” in the original album. “Brick 3” for the most part is included in its original form, as much as some might prefer the faster version from the movie, I just think it fits better solely within the context of, well, the movie. However, it does segue into the instrumental jam “The Last Few Bricks”, which was played live to give the wall builders more time to finish it before the end of the album’s first half. I did, however, use the extended version from the ROIO Another Brick in the Wall – The Complete Suite by TheLazenby. It is taken from a performance on February 7th, 1980, when the wall builders were especially behind schedule, so the band jammed for even longer than they usually did, leading to the 11 minute behemoth present on my mix. It could be argued the audience noise is distracting from the otherwise mostly-studio album, but it was just too good to not include. The song fades into the closing track of Act II and hence the first half of the album, “Goodbye Cruel World”.
The third act starts much like it does in the album version, with the three-song string of “Hey You”, “Is There Anybody Out There?” and “Nobody Home”. The first two aren’t edited, but for “Nobody Home” I did include the guitar solo from Roger’s 1990 Berlin concert, the edit taken from Zolcaro’s The Final Cut in The Wall. Rumor is there is a studio recording of the guitar solo that was cut, but ultimately no recordings ever came to prove this, so it's the next best thing. The album then continues as usual with “Vera”, as there’s not really much of a song to extend in the first place, it’s left here as is on the original album. In the demo of the song there is a brief reprisal of “Is There Anybody Out There?”, but that’s included later in the album. The song instead transitions into the opening track of The Final Cut, “The Post War Dream”. The album’s third act, from my understanding, involves Pink’s reminiscing on his childhood, before descending into a wartime fantasy as depicted in “Bring the Boys Back Home”, a fantasy which becomes twisted in the album’s final act. I wanted to expand upon this with my extension of the album’s third act, so a bulk of The Final Cut’s songs are here. For “Bring the Boys Back Home”, I did use some more AI separation to isolate Roger’s vocals from the album version, incorporating it along the longer movie version, as he sings off-time and hardly in-key, depicting Pink’s desperation and yearning for his absent father that serves as the narrative device for the album’s anti-war message. I also just like those vocals too much to give them up.
Five The Final Cut songs then follow, all following the sequence they did in the original album. These are “Paranoid Eyes”, “Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert”, “The Fletcher Memorial Home”, which omits the spoken word naming tyrant and politicians the 70s and 80s from the bridge, “Southampton Dock”, and “The Final Cut”. I left the running order as is because I believe this run of songs in this sequence help strengthen the album’s anti-war message. It could be said “Paranoid Eyes” specifically is especially about the teacher (or some other veteran) returning from war, much like “The Hero’s Return”, but the way I justified it in me head is that it’s an expansion of Pink’s wartime fantasy, imagining what it would be like if his dad did come back home, or something along those lines. The others can definitely be interpreted as being about Pink, particularly the song “The Final Cut”, which in the demo version reveals that the line interrupted by the gunshot is “what’s behind the wall”, directly tying it to the narrative of The Wall. In my opinion, it also fits nicely into the narrative of “Comfortably Numb”, suggesting that Pink’s manager and the doctor were reviving him from a near-suicide attempt, that Pink can’t bring himself to fully go through with.
Between "The Final Cut" and “Comfortably Numb”, however, are two, hazy and raw demos, parts 2 and 3 of “Is There Anybody Out There?” taken from a ROIO of a production demo tape of the album, known as Under Construction. In that tape the songs placed between “Bring the Boys Back Home” and “Comfortably Numb”. The less-than-desirable sound quality, in my opinion, helps propel the narrative, Pink at his lowest point, pleading for help one final time as he sinks more and more into the depths of his own mind. That little reprise of “Is There Anybody Out There?” at the end of the “Vera” demo that I mentioned earlier is placed at the end of Part 3, the rough electric guitar solo and synth string drone serving as a segue into “Comfortably Numb”, which is augmented by a live, slightly longer guitar solo. I considered using the especially long one from the 1995 live album Pulse, but ultimately I decided to stick to the one from the actual live album from the tour, Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live 1980-81. And with that, the third act of the album closes, leading to the fourth and final act of The Wall.
The fourth act is a bit interesting in the sense that it’s kind of two smaller acts stitched together – the concert, and the self-examination that leads to the climatic destruction of the wall. In order to set the stage for the first of these parts, I used the live version of “The Show Must Go On”, which includes a longer intro and a verse absent on the album version. The crowd cheers then lead into the track “Master of Ceremonies”, taken directly from the live album. Gary Yudman welcomes the audience to Earl’s Court and whatnot, before being interrupted by “Not Now John”. Sung primarily by David Gilmour instead of Roger, it serves as a further prelude to Pink’s fascist stage performance, the song has simulated live ambience, so there admittedly wasn’t really anywhere else to include it. The song, however, does lead into “In the Flesh”, again with the cut intro taken from the movie. The performance of the intro on “In the Flesh” from Act IV is near identical to “In the Flesh?” from Act I, so I’d say I managed to get away with that. Otherwise, the song is the same as the album version, down to the ever infamous second verse.
Much like the original album, the song is followed with the funky Death Disco hit “Run Like Hell”. Now, the thing about “Run Like Hell” is that it had so much cut from it in the album version in order to fit onto vinyl that I just decided to cut to the live version about three and a half-minutes in, complete with Roger squeals from hell and an extra long outro with extra soloing and the likes. This then goes into “Waiting for the Worms”, which for the most part is left intact, save for adding an extra two bars to the crescendoing outro, taken from the movie, which ironically otherwises considerably cuts down the song. Either way, the song is cut inconclusively with a cry to “Stop”, which is left intact as it leads into “The Trial”, the narrative climax of the album. I used the longer outro from the movie, which slowly fades out to wind noise before…
A choir sings out. “Who’s Sorry Now” is a demo of “The Show Must Go On” that was placed between “The Trial” and “Outside the Wall” in one of the band production demos. In the Under Construction demo bootleg, the track is suddenly interrupted by an acoustic demo by Roger with a different verse, which TheLazenby similarly did on his mix, before cutting to David’s “it was just a mistake” verse. With this track I had two options – either sacrifice this cut lyric for the sake of not having that sudden cut, or have the jarring cut for the sake of the new lyrics. Instead, I opted for the eccentric third option – isolate the vocals with AI and try my damn best to line them up with the instrumental. For the “it’s okay now” verse in particular I was struggling to line things up so I got help from Yedits member chicken strips for that, so huge props to him.
The song ends seemingly peacefully, the closing line seeming to reassure Pink and the audience that “it’s never too late”… until, of course, the wall crashes down. This is taken from the movie, with Roger’s scream and the cold wind following it. For “Outside the Wall”, I used a demo version featuring a harmonica and the female chorus more prominent. The lyrics are slightly different, but the gist of it is the same. The reason I used the demo over the album version, the film version, or even the live version, is because it transitions well into the cut track “It’s Never Too Late”, which follows the demo in Programme 3 of the second batch of Wall demos featured in the Immersion boxset. It features one last keyboard solo by Rick and serves as a more conclusive ending to the album…
So of course I had to include another track after that.
“The Thin Ice?” is an instrumental reprise of "The Thin Ice", featured after a different demo of "Outside the Wall", with one last guitar solo by David, serving as a more dramatic but conclusive ending to the album.
So of course I had to include yet another track after that.
“Two Suns in the Sunset” is the closing track from The Final Cut, which talks about the end of the world to a nuclear holocaust, serving as a conclusion to the album’s anti-war sentiments, a short fable about how if we don’t get along, we will inevitably cause irreperable damage to ourselves and the world we live in. It takes the story of The Wall and pulls a pleading message of solidarity out of it, in the face of a nuclear threat, and ultimately serving as a credits roll to the album as a whole.
So of course I had to include one more track after that.
“The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot” is a song written by Michael Carr, Tommie Connor, and Jimmy Leach, most notably performed by Vera Lynn. It was used as the opening to The Wall movie, adding a bookend to the album, which opened with “We’ll Meet Again”, also sung by Vera Lynn, bringing all the threads of the album to a, and I mean it this time, final close.
The Wall is an album by Pink Floyd released in 1979, primarily composed by the band’s bassist Roger Waters in the wake of his disillusionment with stardom and playing for large stadium audiences. It is a rock opera about a depressed rock star who in the face of trauma throughout his life starts building a metaphorical wall around himself, ultimately isolating himself from the world entirely and dealing with the internal and external consequences from that. It is not only that, but also an elaborate live show in which Roger played out this fantasy in front of an audience, complete with a fake surrogate band, giant inflatables, and a 40-foot wall of bricks being built in real time between the band and the audience in the first half of the show that would collapse at the end of it. It is not only that, but a movie ripe with surrealist and at times outright unsettling visuals scored by the band’s music, playing out the album’s narrative on the silver screen. It is not only that, but a glorious, pretentious, over-indulgent and bloated mess that led to financial and personal ruin for the band, being praised by some as an all-time classic, but hated by others as a rockstar’s self-centered ego and victim complex on full display, dragging along his cohorts through the dirt for the sake of art instead of just getting therapy like a normal person.
I first heard The Wall when I was 14, and to say I was amazed by the sheer grandeur of it would be an understatement. It started my fascination with concept albums and the ability for artists to tell narratives not just through a single song, but through an entire record. It wouldn’t be long until I got seriously into Pink Floyd, familiarizing myself with much over their catalog over the course of that year. At some point, I ended up on a now offline forum called BootlegZone, which I had become familiar with in search for Beatles deep cuts. On it, while looking for stuff by Pink Floyd, I came across a post about a bootleg called The Final Immersion of The Wall, made and posted by TheLazenby. It was a 4CD extended version of The Wall. On the post he detailed the tracklisting and where he got each track from, along with a link to download it… which had expired Really wanting to see how an extended version of The Wall would sound like, I spent all night trying to recreate the tracklist in Audacity, finally exporting it before going to bed. When I woke up the next morning, I listen to it… and it was horrible. No transitions, sudden cuts, basically unlistenable. But that caused a spark in me. I would spend a lot of time stressing over my family life and escaping it by listening to music and talking in Discord servers, particularly spending a lot of time working on an alternate timeline story and making several extended mixes of the album with different attempts at transitions, different tracklistings, different sources for tracks, etc. etc. In order to do these mixes, I would also spend a good amount of time doing research about the album’s history, its cut content, its “sister albums”, and trying to figure out how it all fit together in a larger narrative. Doing this would result in a deeper understanding of the album, being able to relate to some of its themes of isolation, alienation from others, and, at least to some extent, generational trauma. I remember the first proper literary essay I wrote for school in the United States, during freshman year, was about The Wall. Eventually, my output of these mixes slowed down considerably, being a more on-and-off project that I would sometimes think about if I felt like it. I also remember going through several names for each mix, but one name that I used stuck out to me in particular – The Requiem of Pinkerton Floyd. It was pretentious, dramatic, and if anything was an embrace of the overindulgence of the album itself. When I revisited the project in late 2020, I decided to re-use that name. Over a year has passed since then, and almost half a decade since I started this project in the first place. My music taste shifted, morphed, changed, I even got into making my own music, but yet The Wall remained. Funny thing is, it’s far from my favorite album, hell, it’s not even my favorite Pink Floyd album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn takes that medal home. I’ll admit that The Wall is indeed overdramatic and self-indulgent as all hell, and it’s far from the band’s most musically interesting work. But there’s just something about it and the world that Roger Waters created with it, that I can’t help but love it. It’s not an often listen for me, hell, Pink Floyd themselves haven’t been in a good while. Despite that, I felt the need to get this project right, one final time before moving on from it for good.
Unfortunately, for the sake of avoiding pissing off greedy people who care more about pennies on the dollar than actual art, I cannot put up a download link here. However, feel free to contact me on Discord @auran_ for a link. Or perhaps you could seek into your Soul for the location of the album. Either way, I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I did making it. Thanks for checking it out!
