I love this band.” I was never into Dark Side Of The Moon too much, it was a bit too jammy. It was really like: “Oh my God! That’s amazing. I’d been taking a lot of hallucinogenics when The Wall film came out. That ‘ We don’t need no education…’ We were 14 years old and that whole ‘fuck school, get stoned’ stuff completely connected with me. I remember The Wall was a big hit in the Bay Area. Me and my friends would smoke weed and drink beer and listen to the radio. To this day, all the rock stations in the Bay Area still play Pink Floyd. They’ve got the ability to be simple, in the same way The Beatles did In My Life. They’re great musicians, great thinkers and great conceptualists.
You hear the greatest guitar solo, that will endure for generations. And all of a sudden, it gets to the guitar solo, and then you know why they’re as great as they are. The line between greatness and crap is so fine, and they tread it with the skill of a mountain goat. The clever thing about Pink Floyd records is if you took away one single element, the whole thing would disintegrate into rubbish! It hangs together by the thinnest thread, but somehow it’s enough to make it great. Greg Lake (ELP): I really like David Gilmour’s guitar solo in Another Brick In The Wall. At the time, I believed we’d all be talking about this for years to come. What made it special was that the recording is so impressive. I first heard Another Brick In The Wall when I was living in Switzerland in the lateish 70s, and thought immediately that it was a classic song. As an adult, I’ve really grown into Pink Floyd and they’re now extremely important in my life. I remember playing Another Brick In The Wall and identifying with that feeling of being part of some machine – wanting to step out and become an individual. I picked it up as a cassette at a flea market. Although I was more influenced by alternative mid-80s rock of bands like the Smiths, U2 and REM, The Wall was the first album I ever bought.