Waters found himself wishing he could build a wall between himself and the fans. Waters based the jaded Pink on himself and former Pink Floyd frontman Syd Barrett, who did not return from his own onstage meltdown. This is still only backstory for the album and tour to come - the making of which you can learn all about in the three-part Vinyl Rewind video series here. “Roger Waters oversaw the inspection, barking orders to the pig’s operators… “‘Halt pig! Revolve pig!'” During a five-night run at London’s Wembley Empire Pool, “officials from the Greater London Council descended on the venue to check that the band’s inflatable pig had been equipped with a safety line” (due to a minor panic caused by an earlier escaped pig). Crowds felt further alienated when Waters started wearing headphones onstage, trying to sync the music and visuals. One night in Frankfurt, “the stage filled with so much dry ice that the band were almost completely obscured,” Mark Blake writes in Comfortably Numb. Stage shows became even more grandiose, leading keyboardist Richard Wright to worry they were “in danger of becoming slaves to our equipment.” Certain moments during the 1977 In the Flesh tour in support of the album seem right out of a Christopher Guest brainstorm. Their fall into fractiousness and bloat began when Roger Waters firmly established himself as captain on 1977’s Animals, his tribute album for George Orwell. The making of Pink Floyd’s 1979 rock opera The Wall is rife with the kind of rock star ironies exploited a few years later by This Is Spinal Tap.
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