Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd: the story behind a prog classic

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and Roger Waters performing onstage in 1981 — (Image credit: Pete Still/Redferns)

Roger Waters was in agony. It was June 29, 1977, and Pink Floyd were due to play the Philadelphia Spectrum as part of their tour in support of that year’s Animals album.

The bassist and vocalist was suffering from such crippling stomach cramps that he faced a choice between cancelling that night’s show or getting a tranquiliser shot that “would have killed a fucking elephant”.

Waters played the show, despite the muscle relaxant rendering him unable to feel his hands or raise his arms. And from that anaesthetised sensation came the seed for Comfortably Numb, the cornerstone of 1979’s epic concept album The Wall and a moment of musical, if not personal, unity in the increasingly stormy Floyd camp.

The bassist was becoming increasingly dominant within the band and The Wall was emphatically his album, a hugely ambitious multi-layered concept piece that built on loss, anxiety and the alienating nature of fame. Waters’ abrasive nature would ultimately lead to Floyd’s first split a few years, but the band were still functioning as a collaborative unit during the wall – and never more so than on Comfortably Numb, which remains the perfect illustration of Waters and guitarist/vocalist David Gilmour’s yin-yang personalities.

Comfortably Numb itself began as a Waters tune titled The Doctor, which found the bassist rhyming ‘listen’ with ‘physician’,‘condition’ and ‘magician’ like an uninspired O-Level student. The bassist was reluctant when Gilmour pitched a chord sequence left over from his first solo album.

Producer Bob Ezrin persuaded him to not make the song so personal and to work with Gilmour instead. Waters would eventually accept the guitarist’s contribution under duress, though he ensured he would claw back a degree of ownership by supplying lyrics and verse music for the song that would become Comfortably Numb.

Pink Floyd&rsquo;s David Gilmour performing onstage in 1981 — Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour performing onstage in 1981 (Image credit: Pete Still/Redferns)

But still there were ructions, with Waters and Bob Ezrin favouring a version with lush orchestration by Michael Kamen, while Gilmour preferred a leaner, harder take.

“I fought for the introduction of the orchestra on that record,” recalled Ezrin. “This became a big issue on Comfortably Numb, which Dave saw as a more bare-bones track. Roger sided with me.”

“We argued over Comfortably Numb like mad,” said Gilmour. “Really had a big fight, went on for ages.”

After much heated debate, the two warring sides thrashed out a compromise, with Comfortably Numb ultimately featuring a little of both men’s visions. “On the record,” Waters told Absolute Radio, “the first verse is from the version [Gilmour] liked, and the second verse is from the version I liked. It was a negotiation and a compromise.”

Pink Floyd performing The Wall onstage in 1981 — Pink Floyd performing onstage in 1981 (Image credit: Rob Verhorst/Redferns))

Thankfully there was no such debate over Gilmour’s celebrated guitar playing. Comfortably Numb’s drama escalated with each passing verse and required a similarly dramatic solo. The finished version of Comfortably Numb contained not one but two solos. The first is just an aperitif; the second is the vintage red brought out from the cellar for special occasions only.

“We argued over Comfortably Numb like mad. Really had a big fight, went on for ages.”
David Gilmour

“I banged out five or six solos,” said Gilmour. “From there I just followed my usual procedure, which is to listen back to each solo and make a chart, noting which bits are good. Then, by following the chart I create one great composite solo by whipping one fader up, then another fader, jumping from phrase to phrase until everything flows together.”

The result was arguably the best song Pink Floyd ever recorded. Waters and Gilmour split the vocals, each seemingly mirroring their real life personalities. The former, taking the verses, brimmed with menace and malevolence as the doctor administering a shot of bliss to calm an agitated Pink. The latter, taking the song’s choruses, embodied a soul as it drifts away, his vocals at their most languid,. Those two celebrated guitar solos only deepened the dislocated, otherworldy nature of it.

Placed at the end of Side 3 on the original vinyl album, Comfortably Numb is a pivot point on The Wall, the last moment of calm before its increasingly unhinged final act. It took on another life during the extravagant shows the band played in support of The Wall, where Comfortably Numb found Gilmour playing his solo from atop the giant wall that had been constructed during the gig. In the pre-Internet age, it held audiences in raptures.

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“It was a fantastic moment, to be standing up on there, and Roger’s just finished singing his thing,” said Gilmour. “I’m in pitch darkness and no one knows I’m there yet. And Roger’s down there and he finishes his line, I start mine and the big back spots and everything go on, and the audience are all looking straight ahead and down, and suddenly there’s all this light up there and their heads all lift up. Every night there’s this sort of [gasp] from 15,000 people. And that’s quite something.”

On record and in concert, Comfortably Numb was a moment of true transcendence – one that rendered the bickering between the men that made it irrelevant. But the song would ultimately be the nail in the coffin for Pink Floyd’s most famous line-up. They followed up The Wall with 1983’s dark The Final Cut, effectively a Waters solo album that just happened to feature the other members of Floyd. Waters left acrimoniously soon afterwards, instigating a bitter battle over the soul of Pink Floyd that would run for years.

“I think things like Comfortably Numb, were the last embers of mine and Roger’s ability to work collaboratively together,” Gilmour reflected.

Yet it has also built bridges. It was notable as the final song performed by the reunited line-up at Live 8 in 2005, and in May 2011 Gilmour joined Waters during the latter’s show at the 02 Arena in London to play Comfortably Numb from the top of a recreation of the original Wall.

“Dave wanted to do this thing called the Hoping Foundation,” said Waters of the latter. “Finally, I’d heard enough and I went: ‘I tell you what. I’m gonna be doing a few nights in the O2. You come and do Comfortably Numb one of those nights, and I’ll do the bloody Hoping Foundation.’ And I thought he’d just go: ‘Fuck off.’ And he didn’t. He went: ‘All right.’ So we did it.”

Henry Yates has been a freelance journalist since 2002 and written about music for titles including The Guardian, The Telegraph, NME, Classic Rock, Guitarist, Total Guitar and Metal Hammer. He is the author of Walter Trout's official biography, Rescued From Reality, a music pundit on Times Radio and BBC TV, and an interviewer who has spoken to Brian May, Jimmy Page, Ozzy Osbourne, Ronnie Wood, Dave Grohl, Marilyn Manson, Kiefer Sutherland and many more.

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