5 December 1979 This is a long, uneven work that veers uneasily between crazy indulgence and nihilistic brilliance
The Pink Floyd are not available for comment on their first recording in nearly three years, a bleak, manic and agonised double album simply called The Wall (Harvest SHSP 4111). They were told that due to an accounting problem they would have to leave the country, very fast, if they didn’t want to pay a gigantic tax bill. So they’ve gone, leaving their record company with no new promotional pictures or biographies, yet alone explanations of this quite extraordinary work, that comes suitably packaged in a forbidding, anonymous design of a wall (with Scarfe cartoons breaking through it inside the gatefold), and without even the title printed on the sleeve. It’s somehow appropriate for an album that will be a smash with analysts, dealing as it does with alienation, madness and death.
Related: Pink Floyd's The Wall film review – archive, 15 July 1982