Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

There seems to be a never ending way to experience The Wall and yet each time the fan or the casual amateur psychologist reaches in, placing their trust and their heart to the album’s creator, Roger Waters, it never seems to do anything but drain with beautiful emotion, to dig deep down into the very core of human experience, just exactly what the album, the songs and the essence of what life is.

So many different ways to experience it and yet live remains the ultimate adventure and only a certain percentage have ever had that privilege to allow Pink Floyd or Roger Waters the time and energy to build the wall around them, to make them feel regretful solitude and disturbing, overwhelming isolation despite being surrounded by thousands of like minded individuals.

To take the energy of the live performance and turn it into a film, to have the contrast of black and white passion stirred into the colourful abyss of the terrifying notion of just how easily a person can turn to the disease of Fascism is a huge undertaking but it is one that Roger Water’s vision and along with the immense talent of musicianship provided by the likes of Snowy White, Dave Kilminster and Kip Lennon that simmered and flowed with creative ambition throughout.

Incorporating the journey of discovery and personal revelation that Mr. Waters filmed as he drove from the fields that claimed millions of lives at the Western Front of World War One to the final post of the trumpet he played in the solitude of graves on the Italian hillside where he lost his father as a young baby during the final end days of World War Two, the insight and intimacy of these moments played out as songs such as Mother, Run Like Hell, the psychologically gripping Comfortably Numb and the terror horror like terror that comes with The Trial, this is collective cinema at its rawest, it is not a film that will easily transfer to the small screen and being watched by only a couple of pairs of misty eyes, this is The Wall, the crux and the beauty of arguably the finest album ever created.

In cinemas for one night only, Roger Water’s The Wall played out to less than three thousand cinema screen world-wide further enhancing the mood of selective collectivism and it is a film that for those that were fortunate enough to see it, would remember the night they saw an old man, a genius, cry.

Outstandingly filmed, a true classic of its genre, The Wall keeps on giving, even after 36 years.

Ian D. Hall