So, you think you can tell Meddle from The Division Bell? Pink Floyd may be the only rock band that can credibly be compared to both the Beatles and Spinal Tap. He obsessively collects worldwide sales data. Not sales claims ; sales data. You can read his 51 pages of Pink Floyd sales data here. The upshot: Pink Floyd has sold more albums worldwide than the Beatles. Floyd recorded over a longer period, of course, but both groups have released about the same number of albums, and had about the same span of decades to sell their work to new generations — and in new configurations. In its massive confusion, this accounting — which, whether we like it or not, hangs above our cultural world, as the band itself might have put it, motionless upon the air, like an albatross — is a testament to the good humor of the gods of rock, which now and again smile upon otherwise unemployable, gangly British nitwits.

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Pink Floyd's The Wall film review – archive, 15 July 1982
Check out our breakdown of the movies and shows we're excited about this month, including " Lovecraft Country. See our picks list. Title: Pink Floyd: The Wall After two friends return home from the Vietnam War one becomes mentally unstable and obsesses with becoming a bird. Live versions of the songs, filmed in an old Pompeii amphitheater.
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Thus, as a growing aversion to the sacrificial rockstar he had become, Waters designed to build a wall between him and his audience. In July the band reached a time of financial crisis due to negligent investments. Thus Roger Waters proposed two projects. Unquestionably at the helm of the ship was Roger Waters. This was the first metaphorical brick in the wall and the problems spiralled from there. Pink later became a drug addict, depressed by the music industry, evolving into a megalomaniac loosely inspired by the mental decline of Floyd progenitor Syd Barrett. At the albums end an increasingly fascist audience watch on as Pink tears down the wall of grief, becoming a normal, caring person once more. Behind the scenes Waters took control of the project creating widening cracks in his already fractured relationships with bandmates.
It is a rock opera that explores Pink, a jaded rockstar whose eventual self-imposed isolation from society is symbolized by a wall. The album was a commercial success, topping the US charts for 15 weeks, and reaching number three in the UK. It initially received mixed reviews from critics, many of whom found it overblown and pretentious, but later came to be considered one of the greatest albums of all time. Recording spanned from December to November Producer Bob Ezrin helped to refine the concept and bridge tensions during recording, as the band were struggling with personal and financial issues at the time. The Wall is the last album to feature Pink Floyd as a quartet ; keyboardist Richard Wright was fired by Waters during production, but stayed on as a salaried musician.