Outside The Wall

I spent hours at the local record store, looking at the back cover of The Wall LP, reading the scrawled lyrics on the cover, until I got told to piss off by the surly owner. That store hired out some old video tapes and sold some music, and the only thing I ever remember actually buying from them was the Batman soundtrack by Prince. It smelled weird, a bit dusty, a bit musty, a bit sweaty and a lot dopey. That's the smell of the Wall for me.

There's a moment, very early on in the transition from childhood to being an adult, where music suddenly becomes very, very important. It's something to do with hormones and brain development and all that, but we all go through it, and can only hope our first great musical love won't embarrass us forever. 

My first love was The Wall. The album, the movie, the live show - the whole damn thing. Every brick of it.

When I was 12, my mate Stephen Albert taped his brother's copy of Momentary Lapse of Reason onto a blank casette for me, and that was the first music that was ever mine. It was booming and hollow in all the best 80s ways, but when Stephen followed that up with The Wall a week later, I was absolutely besotted. 

Like all good schoolkids, I knew all about Another Brick in the Wall (part two), and it's rage against the confines of formal education. And like This Is Spinal Tap, the time I had ever anything about The Wall was a poster at a strange cinema in Dunedin, with Gerald Scarfe's beautiful screaming monstrosity giving me all sorts of wonderful new nightmares.

I fell hard for the heavy riffs, the acoustic picking and the awesomely pretentious vision for the whole thing. Underneath it all, I connected with a rock star's plaintive pleading for love and connection, even if he couldn't get out of that fucking hotel room.

And more than that, it was just so weird, and felt so otherwordly. Fuck Narnia and Middle Earth, this was real fantasy just outside the door, where old dead soldiers file past and hammers stalk across the street.

A copy of the movie was the first video tape I ever bought tha twasn't a blank tape I used to record star Wars on. It cost me $35 from the video shop in the Stafford Mall in 1988 money and I literally watched it to death.

By my late teens, I was already a bit embarrassed about my love for the Floyd - it wasn't the kind of thing young punks were meant to listen to - and it took me another decade before I realised that shit didn't mater, and you could like what you like

And when I came back to it, I still knew all the lyrics that had been burned into my brain by those furtive glances in that stinky old store. You never forget your first love.