The Trial (song)
| "The Trial" | |
|---|---|
| Song by Pink Floyd | |
| from the album The Wall | |
| Published | Pink Floyd Music Publishers Ltd |
| Released | 30 November 1979 (UK) 8 December 1979 (US) |
| Recorded | April – November 1979 |
| Genre | Symphonic rock, art rock, hard rock |
| Length | 5:13 |
| Label |
Harvest (UK) Columbia (US) |
| Songwriter(s) | Roger Waters, Bob Ezrin |
| Producer(s) | Bob Ezrin, David Gilmour, James Guthrie, Roger Waters |
"The Trial" (working title "Trial by Puppet") is a track from Pink Floyd's 1979 rock opera/concept album The Wall. Written by Roger Waters and Bob Ezrin, it marks the climax of the album and film.
The song centres on the main character, Pink, who having lived a life filled with emotional trauma and substance abuse has reached a critical psychological break. "The Trial" is the fulcrum on which Pink's mental state balances. In the song, Pink is charged with "showing feelings of an almost human nature." This means that Pink has committed a crime against himself by actually attempting to interact with his fellow human beings, defying the mission towards self-isolation that defined much of his life. Through the course of the song, he is confronted by the primary influences of his life (who have been introduced over the course of the album): an abusive schoolmaster, his wife, and his overprotective mother; in the animated sequence, they are depicted as grotesque caricatures. Pink's subconscious struggle for sanity is overseen by a new character, "The Judge." In Pink Floyd -- The Wall and the concert animations, the Judge is a giant worm for most of the song until his verse, at which point he transforms into a giant anthropomorphic body from the waist-down (bigger than the marching hammers in "Waiting for the Worms"), his face constructed from various elements of the buttocks and genitals. A prosecutor conducts the early portions, which consist of the antagonists explaining their actions, intercut with Pink's refrains, "Crazy/Toys in the attic, I am crazy,/Truly gone fishing" and "Crazy/Over the rainbow, I am crazy,/Bars in the window." The culmination of the trial is the judge's sentence for Pink "to be exposed before your peers" whereupon he orders Pink to "Tear down the wall!"
As Waters sings the dialogue for each character he transitions into different accents including: upper-class British dialect (the prosecutor and judge), Scottish accent (the schoolmaster) and Northern English accent (Pink's mother). For the character of Pink's wife he used his normal voice on the album and the original 1980-81 tour. However, in his solo 2010-13 tour of The Wall he portrays the wife with a distinctively French accent.
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