U.K. media representatives gathered March 9th, 2000, amid tanks and fighter planes in the imposing surroundings of London's Imperial War Museum to be introduced to Pink Floyd's upcoming double live CD, "Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live Pink Floyd 1980-81."

Recorded live in 1980-81 by Pink Floyd soundman and co-producer James Guthrie on a 48-track mobile studio during the original Earl's Court, London, concerts, the particular performances on Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live were handpicked by Guthrie, who has created a hi-resolution mix for the CD set from the original multi-track concert recordings.

A good deal of the creative impulse for The Wall derived from my disillusionment with rock shows in vast open-air football stadiums. In the days prior to Dark Side of the Moon the excitement of a Pink Floyd performance lay in a certain intimacy of connection between the audience and the band. It was magical. By the late Seventies that magic and opportunity had vanished, crushed, as I saw it, by the dead weight of numbers - the sheer incoherent scale of those stadium events.

It's something of an old chestnut now, but perhaps it bears repeating: there was a moment on stage at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal during the Animals tour when I was forced to confront all the negative aspects of these circumstances and of my connivance in them.

Some crazed teenaged fan, screaming his devotion, began clawing his way up the storm netting that separated the band from the human cattle pen in front of the stage, and the boil of my frustration finally burst. I spat in his face. Immediately afterwards I was shocked by my behaviour. 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-mascohistic. I had a very vivid image of an audience being bombed - of bombs being lobbed from the stage - and a sense that those people getting blown to bits would go absolutely wild with glee at being at the center of all the action.

It was quite soon after this that I came up with the idea of building a wall during a show. The idea gripped me at once. Quite apart from its personal significance, I thought it would be a great piece of rock theatre.

The Wall is part of my narrative, my story, but I think the basic themes resonate in other people. The idea that we, as individuals, generally find it necessary to avoid or deny the painful aspects of our experience, and in fact often use them as bricks in a wall behind which we may sometimes find shelter, but behind which we may just as easily become emotionally immured, is relatively simply stated and easy to grasp. It's one a lot of people grapple with themselves. They recognize it in their own lives.

In my life this grappling tool place behind the walls of a hugely successful rock 'n' roll band. In a rock band you find yourself in a much envied and privileged position. It's apparently the stuff that dreams are made of. You have a lot of power, you earn lots of money and there's all the spurious glamour. You get easily addicted to these things and when you do choose to forget all the concomitant negative elements. You become comfortably numb. In order to remain in the dream that's the required condition. But when it finally dawns on you, as it did me, you're faced with a decision. Do you hold onto the dream because, having dreamt it, it would be too uncomfortable to let it go? Or do you embrace the realization that it isn't that great and move on from there?

I came to see that dream as no longer worth pursuing, or at least that the reality of the situation was no longer as enticing as the dream would have it. In fact, I'd already come to the conclusion in Wish You Were Here. Even then, I was no longer willing to exchange 'a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage'. And being in one of those big rock 'n' roll bands is a cage. It's a big cage with lots of seductive toys, but it's a cage nevertheless.

There was a kind of discovery and an exorcism involved in the writing of The Wall. I had to get all that stuff out or spend the rest of my life as that man in black off to the side at the party, apparently aloof behind dark glasses and cigarette, but in reality scared to death of any ordinary human encounter.

As to the actual recording and shows, I think they were the best we did together as Pink Floyd. I'm inordinately proud of the work. It has great musical and narrative shape, good tunes and it's a well-crafted piece of rock 'n' roll theatre. Who knows, I'm only 56, but it may well turn out to be the best thing I ever did.

It gives me immense pleasure that succeeding generations go on appreciating it. I get requests all the time for my permission to allow people to mount shows, but the only ones I ever agree to are the amateur productions, put on by schools and colleges.

That so many schools mount productions is especially rewarding. It's also very ironic because the favourite anthem from the piece, 'We Don't Need No Education', caused an uproar when it first came out. Politicians and educationalists lined up to denounce it as the death-knell of all schooling. In fact, the piece has turned out to be a great help to a large number of people trying to teach music and English to kids because the kids get interested in all the ideas it attempts to express. It has almost become a set book. This makes me happy.

For me, the best bit of The Wall was standing on top of it. We were a few songs into the second half of the show. The band had been bricked in, the audience left to confront a vast, blank barrier. 'Is there anybody out there?' sang Roger, a tiny figure now appearing stage-right. Then, a trick of the light, there I was, 30 feet up, with the heat of four enormous spotlights at my back, throwing my shadow as far as I could see over the audience while I belted out the solo to one of the best pieces of music I'd ever written: 'Comfortably Numb'.

The sensation was certainly incredible, almost out-of-body. For a few minutes, I was free of the crowd, the band, the 80-strong crew and the headphone-chatter. I didn't have to think where I should be standing for the next number, or direct the backing singers, or cue the roadies. I could simply do the part of my job that I enjoy most: playing the guitar, trying to make it a little better every night.

The Wall was always conceived as a studio album, a film and a stage show. The dynamic between a live band and its audience was only one of the concept's many themes. But what was so clever about Roger's idea was that the show itself was a comment on that theme. The band saw the dramatic potential as soon as he presented it - though we didn't anticipate how tricky it can be to keep time while a tower of bricks, each weighing about 20 pounds, is collapsing on to a protective rig two feet above our heads.

The first I heard of it was at a band meeting sometime after the Animals tour, called to discuss new projects. Roger brought along two pieces in demo form, of which one became The Wall. (The other, which I think became Roger's Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking, seemed stronger musically but was a less interesting idea.) Building a wall between ourselves and the audience was a striking metaphor for the intimacy we had lost as a stadium band. And though I believe we were still delivering to the majority of fans - despite the noise and conditions - the loss of control over our environment definitely troubled me. It obviously got to Roger a lot more.

Roger's plans required a schedule so punishing that he even moved his home studio next door to our recording space. The demo had to be turned into an album, the album into a split second show and the show into a film - all at the same time. For the upcoming live performances, I took the role of musical director: choosing and rehearsing the extra musicians, then keeping them up to scratch. For the recordings, I switched between producing and writing. And, of course, playing the guitar and singing.

Several tracks from the original demo were dropped, whole chunks were changed and the original 'Young Lust' only survived in its chorus. If either Bob Ezrin, the album's co-producer, or I didn't like something and argued forcefully enough with Roger, he would simply go next door and work on it. Once he had agreed to re-cast something, or to write new material, he could be incredibly effective and fast. ('Nobody Home' was a completely new song that he wrote overnight.) Apart from 'Young Lust', my own writing credits were confined to 'Run Like Hell' and 'Comfortably Numb'. Both had been originally intended for a solo album on which I had run out of time the year before. They are the musical high points of The Wall - but then I would think that, wouldn't I?

The visual presentation of the piece was the result of similar discussion and collaboration, changing considerably as we went along. Roger's original scheme had been to drive the audience to distraction by performing much of the second half unseen, from behind the wall. But by the opening night, we had worked out ways to keep the wall more or less intact while giving the fans something to look at: Gerald Scarfe's animations; Roger's 'hotel' sequence, in a room set that folded out from then wall; my own moment on 'Comfortably Numb'.

I can't say it was my favourite way of performing. Nor is The Wall my favourite Floyd piece (that's Wish You Were Here). There are some weaker sections - all that Vera Lynn, Bring the Boys Back Home stuff, for example. But when it's good, it's very very good. And the shows were fantastic in their own right. To assess the phenomenon properly, you have to shift your focus. It was as much a theatrical experience as a musical one. The album was tightly structured and the technology required to produce that type of theatre further limited our musical flexibility, giving us even less room for improvisation and spontaneity when playing live.

We had some good times during the recording and the shows. Roger and I fought tooth and nail over details that I'm not sure I could even hear now. I spent more than a year of my life working on The Wall - and for the best parts alone, it was well worth it.

What gripped me first about The Wall was the narrative idea. I often think that a thematic peg is the hardest thing to come up with for projects like ours, yet for The Wall it was complete and powerful from the beginning.

I've never felt as outraged as Roger was by our audiences because, as a rule, drummers don't get outraged. In some ways I was alarmed by Roger's original theatrical idea, which involved playing practically the whole show from behind a wall. Fortunately, he altered that initial conception in development.

The Wall is Roger's story and much of its power was generated by his personal experiences, but there were always enough instantly recognizable elements in those to give the piece a broad appeal. Not all of us have lost a father in the war, but most of us have been treated badly at school at one time or another. These elements of common ground certainly play a part in its continuing success.

I have to say that the show itself was ground-breaking. Most rock 'n' roll is conducted on the basis that there are various personalities in a band who want to show off onstage. There's nothing wrong with that, but Pink Floyd was always more interested in theatrical presentation than in promoting, as stage personalities, its individual members. This subordination of the band into images which relate to the music was always a feature of our work and The Wall in performance was the summit of that development. It pushed rock shows another step in the direction of pure theatre. Nor was this only a matter of building a wall. All through the show there were radical theatrical gestures. The opening song 'In the Flesh?', appeared to audiences to be performed by Pink Floyd when in fact what they were seeing was the surrogate band wearing moulded life masks of the real band's faces. This only became apparent after the surrogate band was dramatically 'frozen'. Lowered out of sight, and, as the lights went back up, the real Pink Floyd revealed behind it.

One of the great things about being in a successful band is that you are able to work with people who are the best in their respective fields. Gerald Scarfe, Mark Fisher, Jonathan Park, James Guthrie…everybody was top-notch and so were their contributions.

It was a brilliant team. The team members might occasionally have fought amongst themselves, this is always the case, but there was great co-operation and development. There had to be. It was a long recording process, with a long process of performance afterwards. The work load was immense. Often, when the pressure became huge, people divided up into little groups to do different things. Dave, for instance, might record the guitar parts in one studio and Roger would go off to do the vocals in another. This had absolutely nothing to do with how people were getting on with one another. It was pure expediency: how the hell can we best get through this colossal schedule? My satisfaction at the time was entirely in the work. All of us enjoyed doing it despite the pressure. There was a single-mindedness which operated over a considerable period of time.

What is immensely satisfying to me now is The Wall's obvious longevity. People still talk about the shows and the CD goes on selling. Most rock music is ephemeral, but The Wall apparently isn't. That's surely some testament to the power of it's ideas, the power of its music and to its power as a piece of extraordinary theatre.

Although I never really liked stadium shows (the loss of sound quality, and the vagaries of crowd control always bothered me), I didn't feel there was anything fundamentally amiss in my relationship with the huge audiences so I wasn't keen on Roger's idea for The Wall show when he first presented it. I felt that building a wall on stage would deliberately exclude the audience and this infringed my conception of what a rock 'n' roll show was essentially about. As his plans developed and he introduced elements into the show which would directly appeal to the audience (such as Gerald Scarfe's animation and the wall collapsing at the end), my fears no longer applied. In fact, I could see that the show was going to be a very powerful visual experience, as well as a musical one.

It's a matter of historical record that my relationship with Roger collapsed during the time the band was making the album. There had always been a personality clash, but apparently the tensions now became insurmountable. Part of this was down to me. I hadn't contributed any material to Animals, nor did I have any to offer for The Wall. I simply wasn't very creative throughout that period. I have enormous respect for Roger who works extremely hard on his own, but I find that process difficult. A good deal of Dark Side of the Moon, for example, was written when we were together. Subsequently, more and more composition was undertaken separately. After Animals Dave and I did solo albums and in that interim Roger wrote the whole of The Wall. All credit to him, but I think he became to view what he's written as a solo project.

It was a very difficult and sad time for me. Naturally, I didn't want to leave the band, but once I was thrown out I managed to persuade myself that it was bound to happen and that Roger and I couldn't work together anyway. Still, I wanted to finish the recordings - most of my parts had already been taped. I also wanted to do the shows as a kind of final goodbye. That was hard and I'm not sure how I did. I must have completely blanked out my anger and hurt. It was an awkward situation for all of us to be in, but in the English 'stiff upper lip' manner we just got on with the job.

It was an extraordinary show to have put on and, despite everything, I enjoyed performing it. The thing I remember most is the really odd feeling I got from playing without seeing the audience. I suppose it's the way members of an orchestra feel in the pit of a theatre or opera house, only I wasn't used to it. Also, when the wall was up the roadies and stage crew would be moving around and working as you were playing in a way they couldn't if they'd been visible to the audience. As someone remarked, the illusion was that we could have played tapes, returned to the hotel, then simply have run back for the final encore.

Audiences were mesmerized. Nobody had done anything like it before, nor has there been anything like it since. In some future history of rock shows, I'm quite sure The Wall will feature as one of the most influential and unforgettable.

Roger's ideas appealed to me at once. I've worked quite a bit in opera and the theatre, so the sheer scale of that theatrical device immediately engaged me. The story also seemed to make obvious sense. It's about Roger, but that didn't trouble me since one of its virtues is that it is capable of wider interpretation. I took it as a story about every man. Besides, I'm old enough to remember the war and in visiting that aspect of Roger's past I was also re-visiting a part of my own. My favourite piece from The Wall is 'Goodbye Blue Sky', which is a lyrical. Poetic piece in which the drawings - the dove exploding into the German eagle which in turn changes into a kind of warlord - evolved very much from my own memories and feelings.

In many ways I regard Roger as a kindred spirit. We seem to share the same healthy, amused cynicism. He was also extremely respectful of my work. He remarked to me once that when you employ an artist to work for you you don't tell him what to do. You employ him precisely because you approve of his vision and because you have faith in it. Roger aided and abetted and encouraged me, but he never disagreed with what I was doing. It was wonderful, really, because he let me loose which is the only way I like to work.

To some extent I think I started of with Pink Floyd on the wrong foot, artistically speaking. I was initially very affected by what they'd done musically and I began drawing very abstract images rather than specific things or characters. Somewhere along the line I realized that what they required of me was the satirical drawing I do all the time. When I came to animate 'The Trial' (the first piece I did for the show) I decided to draw cartoons and animate those, but I stumbled across another problem. By that time I'd drawn all the initial designs and was largely directing my own crew of animators. The difficulty was that people found it very hard to draw in my style: most of them had been greatly influenced by the Tom & Jerry/Disney school of animation. The practical result was that no matter how ferocious my characters were they generally would up with cuddly little eyes, or with rabbits bounding around at their feet.

After 'The Trial' I thought I'd try something different again: I decided to animate 'real' drawings. That's when the flowers came in. They were very careful drawings, not cartoons. I imagined them growing up, making love and fighting, and we joined all of that to another piece during which a wall grew across the whole landscape.

It was a long project. Sometimes it's difficult to sustain interest over so many months, but in this case I managed it. With live shows there's always the audience reaction to glee you up every night. I remember the whole period as a lot of fun. Those were the great days of rock ' n' roll, with all the accoutrements, and, of course, it was impossible not to be carried along.

It's also very satisfying to have been involved in what has subsequently become a classic. When I was traveling with Disney (I was Art Director on Hercules) I gave dozens of interviews in the Far East and nobody knew who the hell I was until I mentioned Pink Floyd. Then they'd screech with delight, 'Ah, Pink Floyd, The Warrl!'.

It's still a world-wide phenomenon.

By the time I came on board Roger's ideas for staging the show and Gerald Scarfe's designs were essentially complete. My job, along with Mark Fisher's, was to turn the ideas into practical realities: to work out how we could successfully re-create them on stage. I think what struck us both was that it was a great opportunity to do something new and bold and wonderful. Something on a grand theatrical scale.

The actual staging concept was remarkably simple and we moved quite swiftly to make it viable. Mark took the projects of getting the inflatable objects (the walking teacher, the wife, etc) modeled and built from Gerald's drawings, whilst I dealt with the wall and the problem of how to get it built and broken down during the show.

The thing about touring with a show is that you have to be able to move relatively easy. I can't recall how many bricks we eventually needed for the construction, but lets say four or five hundred. That presented an immediate logistical difficulty. I'd toyed with the idea of slotting plywood panels together to make the bricks, but I realized this would make them too heavy and we'd already rejected anything moulded as too big. The solution finally came to us in a pub. Someone suddenly remembered that cardboard boxes are delivered in flat packs, then unfolded into shape. Mark went off to work out the details) how to key the boxes together for the actual building process), then did a great deal of research to find cardboard which was both durable and fireproof.

Meanwhile, I tried to devise ways the wall could be built on stage. The bricklayers had to be able to move up and down so we needed some mechanisms that could spring up to a height of 25 feet. The standard pieces of lifting equipment in those days were genie hoists which were made by a company in Seattle. I went over there, camped out in the managing director's office for four or five weeks and re-designed the hoists so that I could couple them together to make hydraulic lifting platforms that could go up to the necessary height.

The wall also had to come down in performances and we realized that if we just knocked it over it would crush the first couple of rows of the audience. It had to be taken down from the top, so on one of the telescopic hoists we built a knocker, an arm that you could programme to knock the bricks off from the top downwards. This operated on a system of air cylinders which I devised. The point is, weeks would be spent on finding architectural or engineering solutions to various problems and the process was intensely satisfying.

There were only 29 performances of The Wall and I never saw one of them out front. I always felt the electricity though. Being involved gave you a sense that you were helping to establish a kind of legend. Even then it had been epoch making quality.

Roger told me of his idea to build a wall on stage during the show and effectively asked me whether it could be done. I did a series of drawings exploring the technical issues and produced visuals to suggest what it might look like. At the time building a wall on stage as a performance progressed was without precedent in terms of scale and originality, but I never doubted that it could be done. The main consideration for composing any of the creative/philosophical ideas of the show.

The Wall was a more ambitious project than had previously been attempted and therefore entailed more kit, but all that really meant was that there were larger versions of the same old problems. Often the solutions were surprisingly simple. We all thought, for example, that when Gerald Scarfe's animation was projected on to the wall it would be better served by special paint. I tested a whole lot of bizarrely exotic variations, but in the end discovered that household white emulsion was far and away the best of the lot for our purposes.

During rehearsals, Roger continually sought to improve the presentation, but once we were locked in at the LA Sports Arena there were no further changes. The crucial thing during the shows was the timing (the people building the wall were always racing with the band to get to the end of the first half), although occasionally something else would go temporarily awry. During on performance someone bumped into the wall and knocked a section of it down only a few minutes before the intermission so that the bricklayers had to work like hell to catch up.

Nothing really serious broke down and nobody was hurt. The opening night when a truss caught fire was a bit wacky, but that was dealt with quickly and all of us were hugely entertained the next day when the press wrote it up as if it had been a deliberate and remarkable special effect.

Probably because they were unique at the time, the shows have acquired a couple of myths. One is that they were enormously expensive to mount, the other that they were nigh on impossible to tour. There's no doubt that they were expensive and that they were a pig to move around. The equipment, staging, etc certainly took longer than most to load in (generally it was about two days), but once everything was in that was it for a week because the Floyd were able to sell out in any arena for any number of nights. Obviously, that goes a long way to ameliorate the initial costs, as well as the logistics of shifting equipment.

The show was a landmark - it's one of those things that is marvelous to lock away in the memory. It should be remembered with satisfaction and pride.

The first demo of The Wall that Roger sent me had enough material on it for three albums, but during the recording process that got whittled down to two. The four of us on the production side discussed changes and developments, as well as arrangements and instrumentation on a regular daily basis, but since the bulk of the writing and the overall concept was Roger's, he made most of the final decisions. One of his great strengths is that he's very good at deleting things: he's not concerned that something may have taken three days to produce, nor that he loves it. If it isn't appropriate, or if it serves no purpose to the overall sound or narrative, it goes. For me, that's a very important rule of production. You need to be able to be ruthless when necessary.

At various points during the sessions Roger approached me to mix the live shows. I had never mixed a live performance before, and was naturally anxious at the prospect of working in the radically different acoustic environment of the concert arena, but Roger persisted. In the end I realized that it would be a fantastic challenge and experience.

Musically, the stage show was faithful to the recording except for a few additions. 'What Shall We Do Now', for example, had been removed from the album at the last minute to make the narrative more concise and because in those days we were working to the requirements of vinyl.

The main logistical problem of the show was timing. There was just so much to coordinate: the inflatable puppets at appear on cue; sound effects; the aeroplane; Gerald's films etc. Not to mention the building of the wall itself. It was enormously complex. In fact, our in-house equipment at the mixing area was more extensive than most recording studious would have had at that time. One hundred and six input channels, not including echo returns! Since everyone wanted to produce the highest resolution sound that was possible we also had to achieve the maximum separation between the backline amplification. This meant creating on stage what were effectively studio conditions. I don't think anyone had tried to mount such an elaborate show before.