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40 Years Of Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'
A closer look at Pink Floyd's groundbreaking partnership with Gerald Scarfe as some of the cartoonist's work inspired by The Wall is offered in Scarfe at Sotheby’s: Sixty Years of Being Rude.
S aturday, 30th of November marks the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s seminal album, The Wall. In the spring of the previous year, Gerald Scarfe met Roger Waters, and began one of the greatest musical and visual syntheses in rock and roll history.
Cartoonist Gerald Scarfe on Pink Floyd, Politics and Pterodactyls
More rock opera than album, the song list follows the protagonist Pink through his relationships with his overprotective Mother, abusive teacher and the ever-present wall of isolation – all present in Scarfe's iconic works offered in Scarfe at Sotheby’s: Sixty Years of Being Rude.
The tour began early the next year under Scarfe’s visual direction. A team of 40 animators were employed to interpret Scarfe’s visions of horror that were eventually projected behind the band throughout the tour. By March 1980, the New York Times had called The Wall “the touchstone against which all future rock spectacles must be measured”.
In 1982, the subsequent film. The Wall, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and instantly achieved cult status. Scarfe was designer and director of animation. Derek Malcom reviewed the artist’s animation for The Guardian as “rip roaring visions of doom and destruction which turn light into darkness at the flick of a pen rather than a switch”.
The imagery and characters continue to delight and disgust the world on tour, most recently with Roger Water’s The Wall Live Tour from 2010 to 2013. It continues to reaffirm its place in rock and roll history, as James Hall declared in The Telegraph, “over 30 years after it’s release, it still sets the bar”.
