Pink Floyd - Spare Bricks: Music from the Film "The Wall" (1982)

"Pink Floyd – The Wall", released in 1982 through MGM Studios, is a feature film based on the album of the same name. Directed by Alan Parker with a screenplay by band member Roger Waters, the film project first started out as a concert film of the band's Earls Court residency, to be interceded by newly filmed footage, such as Gerald Scarfe animations and dramatical scenes starring Roger Waters as Pink. However, at some point, the live footage was deemed unusable (it was apparently "too dark") and so the film became a straight adaptation of the original album, with Bob Geldof taking on the role of Pink and any live music being dropped. From then, the film had a considerably troubled production, with Parker and Waters constantly clashing over the direction of the film, and both describing the experience as extremely unpleasant and miserable by the end of it. However, by its release, The Wall was a success, managing to receive generally positive reviews and to gross 22 million dollars at the box office by early 1983. Said success led to a renewed interest in the record, already three years old by that point, which made Pink Floyd's label EMI become interested in releasing a soundtrack album to the movie. After all, some of the songs were altered or re-recorded to be featured in the movie, and two new tracks were featured in the movie: "When the Tigers Broke Free", newly recorded and split into two parts, and outtake "What Shall We Do Now". However, Waters and the rest of the band decided against the idea, as that wasn't enough to warrant a soundtrack. But they did become interested in a different approach: combining the re-recordings with outtakes and new songs related to the concept to form a new album.

That new project, the adequately titled Spare Bricks, would be able to give a home to the re-recorded soundtrack songs while simultaneously giving a home to songs meant for The Wall but left unreleased, or new songs meant to flesh out the album's narrative, essentially a best of both worlds scenario. The sessions for it began in July 1982, with the band managing to record the basics to some six new tracks, all of them in some way related to the Wall concept. However, Roger Waters was still not fully satisfied with the direction of the album. The Falklands conflict, which started earlier that year, weighed heavily on his mind, as did his dissatisfaction with how the film turned out, which combined spelled disaster for the Spare Bricks concept. It led Waters to write new material inspired by his feelings about the conflict and the state of English politics in the age of Thatcherism, adapting the previously recorded songs and creating the highly personal concept of Requiem for the Post-War Dream, later retitled simply to The Final Cut. This decision was also one that further alienated Floyd member David Gilmour. He also wasn't very enthusiastic about the Spare Bricks concept, but The Final Cut barely even features any contributions by him, be it by songwriting, singing, or even guitar playing. He did ask for some time to write some material of his own to contribute to the album, but was denied by Waters, who felt he was on a roll and could finish the album quickly and to his liking alone. With Gilmour thrown to the side, Richard Wright long gone by this point, and Nick Mason a secondary presence, the band had essentially broken up by the time the album was released. But what if Pink Floyd had released Spare Bricks?

This reconstruction is an upgrade to the very first post on the blog, dating from January 2018. We will be tackling the unreleased Spare Bricks album, again trying to put together the best possible version of this lost Pink Floyd album. Between re-recordings and film exclusives we have "When the Tigers Broke Free", "Mother", "What Shall We Do Now?", "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 3", "In the Flesh", "Bring the Boys Back Home" and "Outside the Wall". Of those, most are pretty safe bets for inclusion, with the exceptions of "In the Flesh" and "Mother", which Waters thought didn't translate well going from the soundtrack to the album, and "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 3" was surplus to requirements. While I disagree when it comes to the gorgeous version of "Mother" used in the film, the other two are pretty fair assessments, especially considering no version of "In the Flesh" without film noise obscuring most of the song exists. The songs recorded before Spare Bricks became The Final Cut were "The Hero's Return", "Paranoid Eyes", "Your Possible Pasts", "The Fletcher Memorial Home", "The Final Cut" and "The Post-War Dream". Again, not all of those would have been included, and songs that go beyond both lists and could have been recorded for the project had world politics gone a different way won't be considered, even those that have a clear and indisputable link with either the album or the movie. Our goal then is to create the closest approximation we possibly can to what an accurate version of Spare Bricks would look like in 1982. With that out of the way, here's what I've managed to come up with:

When the Tigers Broke Free (The Wall Soundtrack)

Mother (The Wall Soundtrack)

The Hero's Return (The Final Cut)

Paranoid Eyes (The Final Cut)

What Shall We Do Now? (The Wall Soundtrack)

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Bring the Boys Back Home (The Wall Soundtrack)

Your Possible Pasts (The Final Cut)

The Fletcher Memorial Home (The Final Cut)

The Final Cut (The Final Cut)

Outside the Wall (The Wall Soundtrack)

Bonus tracks:

Another Brick in the Wall, Part 3 (The Wall Soundtrack)

In the Flesh (The Wall Soundtrack)

The Post-War Dream (The Final Cut)

Download link:

Pink Floyd - Spare Bricks: Music from the Film "The Wall" (1982)

Roger Waters as pictured during the filming of Pink Floyd - The Wall, early 1982.

Starting off with two songs that are practically guaranteed to have been part of the Spare Bricks album, both sides of the "When the Tigers Broke Free" b/w "Bring the Boys Back Home" are featured here, the only official release of any songs from the film. All other movie pieces will be sourced from cleaned-up DVD rips of the soundtrack. Sure, they're not release quality or anything but the work put behind them by fans is admirable and they're quite usable. Most, like "Mother", "In the Flesh" and "Outside the Wall" have new, completely different arrangements, while "What Shall We Do Now?" was cut from the album at the last minute but restored for the movie because of its narrative importance. Spare brick "The Hero's Return" is featured in an extended version, as released on the b-side of the "Not Now John" single, presenting the complete story of the teacher as a WW2 veteran suffering from PTSD.  "The Fletcher Memorial Home" is featured without the spoken word interlude, which tied it down too much with the concept of the Final Cut and 1980s politics. Other than those two, all other spare bricks are featured in their regular album versions. Roger Waters's solo track "The Moment of Clarity" wasn't recorded during these sessions, but was recited by Bob Geldof following "Stop" during the movie, later being featured in Roger's first solo LP. Unfortunately, as the song is a core part of the Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking concept and wasn't recorded by Pink Floyd, it cannot be included on the album. Coming from later on in the Final Cut sessions is "One of the Few", a song that dates back to the original Wall demos as "Teach", with its absence owing to the fact that it wasn't recorded in time for Spare Bricks.

Speaking of songs that won't make the cut, "In the Flesh" isn't included as it was sung by Bob Geldof and features no members of Pink Floyd, which wouldn't make sense in a Pink Floyd album, and Roger didn't consider it one of the main contenders for the Spare Bricks album in the first place. In addition, "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 3" is so similar to its album version that there's no point in including it in this reconstruction, and Roger didn't have many plans for it either. When it comes to the mid-1982 sessions, "The Post-War Dream" is also omitted from the album, even though it hailed from the Spare Bricks era, as its lyrics are way too tied up with the critique of Thatcherism or the general conceptual narrative of the Final Cut album. "Sexual Revolution", which got as far as being demoed by the band in late 1978, wasn't considered for the Spare Bricks project, as Waters was probably already holding it back for use in the Pros and Cons album. As for the tracklist, the album is sequenced within the rough narrative structure of the album and movie, as it's the only way this combination of new songs and re-recorded soundtrack pieces could ever make sense as a cohesive record. This also helps show the narrative function of the newer songs, be it to humanize the Teacher and connect him to the impact of WW2 in young Pink's life ("The Hero's Return"), to portray Pink's fragile psyche and insecurities through a lens of "stiff upper lip" English culture ("Paranoid Eyes"), or to further document Pink's descent into self-destruction and reminiscing ("Your Possible Pasts", "The Fletcher Memorial Home", "The Final Cut"), fleshing out the album's narrative and giving it depth it didn't previously have.

A 40-minute album that's divided evenly into five songs from the film and five newer unheard songs, Spare Bricks is the realization of a very interesting concept, that most certainly would lead to the newer songs being much better received than they ended up being. The Final Cut album is already heavily criticized for consisting of "The Wall leftovers", so admitting to it up front and giving the songs the necessary context certainly eases the criticism, even if some of the highlights of the album aren't featured here. If you wanted to you could shoehorn "The Post-War Dream" into side two, but I find the selections I've made create the strongest possible album. I'm also not sure what would happen to the rest of the Final Cut's material, written after the Falklands conflict began, with them being shoehorned into The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking to turn it into a double album or not written at all. But maybe Waters could have written a new album from scratch about the Falklands War, with more involvement from Gilmour as he'd have time to write some songs, something he complained about quite a bit during the TFC sessions. The second single off this project would probably be "Your Possible Pasts" b/w "The Final Cut", a planned single off The Final Cut that for whatever reason never ended up being released. It obviously wouldn't be a hit single, but I could see it doing ok. The great album cover seen here is taken from the I Design Album Covers Tumblr, which is much more Hipgnosis than Gerald Scarfe but still works great. Given that forty years have passed and the soundtrack to The Wall remains unreleased, this might be the closest we'll ever get to seeing these spare bricks slotted back where they belong.

Sources:

- The Wall Soundtrack - Sequenced and Extended by }{eywood

- Pink Floyd - The Final Cut

- Pink Floyd - When the Tigers Broke Free [7" single]

- Pink Floyd - Not Now John [7" single]

- Pink Floyd - Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd

- The Wall Complete: The Missing Songs from Pink Floyd the Wall