when did pink floyd the wall album come out

Novices were here because of the Great Floyd Mystique, the tales of concert wonder passed down by elder brothers and old hippie uncles. Veteran Floyd freaks had waited for this a long time, a whole decade since the full quartet’s last major tour. And when the silvery chime of David Gilmour’s guitar skated over Rick Wright’s burbling Hammond organ and Nick Mason’s heartbeat drumming in “Echoes,” with Gilmour’s and Wright’s voices gliding together in feathery harmony, it definitely sounded like Pink Floyd. Hell, they’d just seen the humongous inflatable pig from the ‘ 77 Animals tour and the crashing airplane from the old Dark Side of the Moon shows.

That this wasn’t quite the same Pink Floyd – Roger Waters, the band’s bassist, singer and dominant songwriter, was absent – that had transfixed potheads in the early, spacey Seventies did not faze this audience, or the other two Sro crowds during the group’s three-night stand in Montreal. For nearly twenty minutes, they stood at their seats, screaming themselves hoarse, determined not to move an inch until Pink Floyd came back onstage. But even after three full hours of lasers in the face, trippy sound-in-the-round, brain-frying special effects and all those Fm-radio classics – “One of These Days,” “Time,” “Us and Them,” “Welcome to the Machine,” “Comfortably Numb”–the 15,000 kids in the Montreal Forum would not budge. The houselights were up, and the ushers were counting the minutes before they could knock off for the night.

When did pink floyd the wall album come out