Pink Floyd was about as big as big can get by the late 1970s and it was becoming clear to all involved that with such success came a distinct lack of the expected satisfaction. 

The band itself was growing increasingly fractious, while frontman and bassist Roger Waters -- after memorably spitting on a group of fans who were irritating him with their behaviour during a 1977 gig at Montreal's Olympic Stadium on the In The Flesh tour -- had started fantasizing about building an actual wall between himself and the audiences to whom he no longer felt any real connection.

"Immediately afterwards I was shocked by my behaviour," he would later admit. "I realized that what had once been a worthwhile and manageable exchange between us (the band) and them (the audience) had been utterly perverted by scale, corporate avarice and ego. All that remained was an arrangement that was essentially sado-masochistic."

Enter The Wall, a sprawling, misanthropic double-album masterpiece released in November of 1979 that deals with exactly those themes, plus a whole lot more psychological baggage that Waters and Co. clearly needed to offload at the time, all at once. If you're unfamiliar with the work, perhaps you've been living in a cave because it's gone on to sell more than 30 million copies worldwide, making it one of the most successful albums of all time and the second most successful Pink Floyd album of all time, just behind Dark Side Of The Moon. It's a goodie, and despite its bloat, deserves a place in any serious student of rock music's record collection, if only because "Another Brick In The Wall, Part 2" and "Comfortably Numb" are two of the finest anti-pop pop singles ever. 

TRACKLISTING:

1. In The Flesh?
2. The Thin Ice
3. Another Brick In The Wall, Part 1
4. The Happiest Days Of Our Lives
5. Another Brick In The Wall, Part 2
6. Goodbye Blue Sky
7. Empty Spaces
8. Young Lust
9. One of My Turns
10. Don't Leave Now
11. Another Brick In The Wall, Part 3
12. Goodbye Cruel World
13. Hey You
14. Is There Anybody Out There?
15. Nobody Home
16. Vera
17. Bring The Boys Back Home
18. Comfortably Numb
19. The Show Must Go On
20. In The Flesh
21. Run Like Hell
22. Waiting For The Worms
23. Stop
24. The Trial
25. Outside The Wall