The producer Bob Ezrin helped to refine the concept and bridge tensions during recording, as the band members were struggling with personal and financial problems.

Bassist and lyricist Roger Waters despised the experience – angered by the audience's rowdy behavior (such as setting off fireworks in the middle of songs) and convinced that they were not really listening to the music.

On 6 July 1977 at the Montreal Olympic Stadium, a group of noisy and excited fans near the stage irritated Waters so much that he leaned over the side and spat on one of them.

[11] While Gilmour and Wright were in France recording solo albums, and the drummer, Nick Mason, was busy producing Steve Hillage's Green, Waters began to write material.

[12] The spitting incident became the starting point for a new concept, which explored the protagonist's self-imposed isolation after years of traumatic interactions with authority figures and the loss of his father as a child.

The strategy failed when many of the businesses NWG invested in lost money, leaving the band facing tax rates potentially as high as 83 per cent.

[29][30] The first half of the album largely features events from Waters' childhood and young adulthood, such as the death of his father in WWII, and his wife's infidelity.

The album opens with Pink, a rock star, addressing a crowd of fans at one of his concerts, to whom he is about to give an apparently unexpected performance of his life story ("In the Flesh?").

A flashback on his life up to that point begins, in which it is revealed that his father was killed during World War II, leaving Pink's mother to raise him alone.

The drugs kick in, resulting in a hallucinatory on-stage performance ("The Show Must Go On") where he believes that he is a fascist dictator, and that his concert is a Neo-Nazi rally, at which he sets brownshirt-like men on fans that he considers unworthy ("In the Flesh").

He proceeds to attack minorities ("Run Like Hell"), culminating in him imagining holding a violence-inciting rally in suburban London ("Waiting for the Worms").

", with a continuation of the melody of the last song hinting at the cyclical nature of Waters' theme, and that the existential crisis at the heart of the album will never truly end.

Wright completed his duties at Cherokee Studios aided by session musicians Peter Wood and Fred Mandel, and Jeff Porcaro played drums in Mason's stead on "Mother".

This gave the engineers greater flexibility,[nb 2] but also improved the audio quality of the mix, as the original 16-track drum recordings were synced to the 24-track master and the duplicated guide tracks removed.

[39] While at Super Bear studios, Waters agreed to Ezrin's suggestion that several tracks, including "Nobody Home", "The Trial" and "Comfortably Numb", should have an orchestral accompaniment.

Following a major argument in a North Hollywood restaurant, the two compromised; the song's body included the orchestral arrangement, with Gilmour's second and final guitar solo standing alone.

Engineer Phil Taylor recorded some of the screeching tyre noises on "Run Like Hell" from a studio car park, and a television set being destroyed was used on "One of My Turns".

[68] Ezrin's suggestion to release "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" as a single with a disco-style beat did not initially find favour with Gilmour, although Mason and Waters were more enthusiastic.

With two identical verses the song was felt to be lacking, and so a copy was sent to Griffiths in London with a request to find children to perform several versions of the lyrics.

[84] Matters had not been helped when Columbia Records offered Waters smaller publishing rights on the grounds that The Wall was a double album, a position he did not accept.

[56] The record company's concerns were alleviated when "Another Brick in the Wall Part 2" reached number one in the UK, US, Norway, Portugal, West Germany and South Africa.

[88] Reviewing for Rolling Stone in February 1980, Kurt Loder hailed it as "a stunning synthesis of Waters's by now familiar thematic obsessions" that "leaps to life with a relentless lyrical rage that's clearly genuine and, in its painstaking particularity, ultimately horrifying.

"[89] By contrast, The Village Voice critic Robert Christgau regarded it as "a dumb tribulations-of-a-rock-star epic" backed by "kitschy minimal maximalism with sound effects and speech fragments",[90] adding in The New York Times that its worldview is "self-indulgent" and "presents the self-pity of its rich, famous and decidedly post-adolescent protagonist as a species of heroism".

"[92] The album topped the US Billboard 200 chart for 15 weeks,[93] selling over a million copies in its first two months of sales[88] and in 1999, it was certified 23× platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

[100] The Wall, said Billy Corgan at his induction of the Floyd into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, was "at my tender age of fourteen… too creepy, too intense, too nihilistic.

During "In the Flesh", an inflatable pig also floated over the audience (a carryover from prior tours), this time sporting a crossed hammers logo to match the uniforms of the band and stage crew.

For "Comfortably Numb", while Waters sang his opening verse, Gilmour waited in darkness at the top of the wall, standing on a flight case on casters, held steady by a technician, both precariously balanced atop a hydraulic platform.

[109] At the very end of each concert, the wall would be dramatically torn down, controlled carefully by tipping mechanisms in order to prevent the front rows of the audience from being harmed.

[110] Along with the songs on the album, the tour featured an instrumental medley, "The Last Few Bricks", played before "Goodbye Cruel World" to allow the construction crew to complete the wall.

[111] During the tour, band relationships dropped to an all-time low; at one point, they stayed in four Winnebagos parked in a circle with the doors facing away from the centre.