Roger Waters always wanted Pink Floyd’s 1979 concept album The Wall to be a film too, so he handed director Alan Parker his tortured, loosely-autobiographical screenplay as a blueprint. So began work on 1982 movie The Wall, a part-surrealist affair combining Floyd’s music, Parker’s live-action sequences, and outlandish, iconoclastic animations by cartoonist Gerald Scarfe.
So far, so good, thought Waters, but who should they cast in the film’s lead role? Initially, Parker auditioned various British and US actors without success. But then he recalled seeing The Boomtown Rats’ Bob Geldof in the video for their 1979 UK Number 1 single, I Don’t Like Mondays. Might Geldof play Pink, a rock star driven to neurosis by his past traumas and the pressures of fame? The Irishman hadn’t acted in a film before, but Parker wasn’t fussed about that. Indeed, he felt sure Geldof’s potent mix of charisma and attitude would fly on the big screen.
