"Comfortably Numb" describes a state of delirium; a feeling of being detached from reality. Many assumed it's about drugs, but that's not so, according to Pink Floyd bass player Roger Waters, who wrote the lyrics and came up with the concept of the album The Wall, where the song appears.
The lyrics describe how Waters felt as a child when he was sick with a fever. As an adult, he got that feeling again sometimes under different circumstances. He told Mojo magazine (December 2009) that the lines, "When I was a child I had a fever/My hands felt just like two balloons" were autobiographical. He explained: "I remember having the flu or something, an infection with a temperature of 105 and being delirious. It wasn't like the hands looked like balloons, but they looked way too big, frightening. A lot of people think those lines are about masturbation. God knows why."
In a radio interview around 1980 with Jim Ladd from KLOS in Los Angeles, Waters said part of the song is about the time he got hepatitis but didn't know it. Pink Floyd had to do a show that night in Philadelphia, and the doctor Roger saw gave him a sedative to help the pain, thinking it was a stomach disorder. At the show, Roger's hands were numb "like two toy balloons." He was unable to focus, but also realized the fans didn't care because they were so busy screaming, hence "comfortably" numb. He said most of The Wall is about alienation between the audience and band.
Exploring further, Mojo asked Waters about the line, "That'll keep you going through the show," referring to getting medicated before going on-stage. He explained: "That comes from a specific show at the Spectrum in Philadelphia (June 29, 1977). I had stomach cramps so bad that I thought I wasn't able to go on. A doctor backstage gave me a shot of something that I swear to God would have killed a f---ing elephant. I did the whole show hardly able to raise my hand above my knee. He said it was a muscular relaxant. But it rendered me almost insensible. It was so bad that at the end of the show, the audience was baying for more. I couldn't do it. They did the encore about me."
The Wall is a concept album telling the story of Pink, a rock star who shuts himself off from the outside world by building up a figurative wall. It's a double album, with "Comfortably Numb" the last song on Side 3. By this time, Pink is a hot mess, but he has a show to perform and a doctor is trying to shoot him up with something to get him on stage.
Roger Waters is the voice of the doctor, who asks in the opening line, "Hello, is there anybody in there?" Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour takes the voice of Pink, trying to make sense of it all ("Your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying"). The doctor injects him ("just a little pinprick") and Pink goes comfortably numb.
The next song on the album is "
The Show Must Go On," where Pink musters the energy to take the stage.
This is one of three songs on
The Wall with a writing credit to David Gilmour; the others are "
Young Lust" and "
Run Like Hell."
The album was Roger Waters' idea. After the band finished touring for their
Animals album in 1977, they went their separate ways and worked on separate projects. Waters keyed into the disconnect he felt with the fans on that tour - they were playing huge stadiums and the shows sometimes felt like sporting events. When the band went back to work in 1978, Waters showed up with the demo for
The Wall.
Gilmour, meanwhile, worked on a solo album that he released in 1978. When it came time to work on "Comfortably Numb," he had some musical ideas that made it to the song.
Waters and Gilmour disagree on how much David added to the song. "My music, his words," Gilmour said in a
Mojo oral history of the album. Waters countered, "Dave gave me a chord sequence, so if you wanted to fight about it - and I don't want to fight about it - I could say that I wrote the melody, and all the lyrics, obviously. I think in the choruses he actually hummed a bit of the melody, but in the verses he certainly didn't. That's never been a problem for me, I think it's a great chord sequence."
Gilmour believes this song can be divided into two sections: dark and light. The light are the parts that begin "When I was a child," which he sings. The dark are the "Hello, is there anybody in there" parts, sung by Waters.
Waters and Gilmour had an argument over which version of the song to use on the album. They ended up editing two takes together as a compromise. David Gilmour said in Guitar World February 1993: "We changed the key of the song's opening the E to B, I think. The verse stayed exactly the same. Then we had to add a little bit, because Roger wanted to do the line, 'I have become comfortably numb.' Other than that, it was very, very simple to write. But the arguments on it were about how it should be mixed and which track we should use. We'd done one track with Nick Mason on drums that I thought was too rough and sloppy. We had another go at it and I thought that the second take was better. Roger disagreed. It was more an ego thing than anything else. We really went head to head with each other over such a minor thing. I probably couldn't tell the difference if you put both versions on a record today. But, anyway, it wound up with us taking a fill out of one version and putting it into another version."
This ended up being the last song Waters and Gilmour wrote together. In 1985, Waters left the band and was shocked that they kept it going without him. Even worse, when they toured without Waters they played some songs from The Wall, including this one. Gilmour has also played it at his solo shows, including on his 2006 tour where he was joined by Pink Floyd keyboard player Rick Wright.
When Pink Floyd played this on The Wall tour, a 35-foot wall was erected between the band and the audience as part of the show. As the wall went up, Gilmour was raised above it on a hydraulic lift to perform the guitar solo while Waters was spotlighted in front of the wall below. It was Gilmour's favorite part of the show.
In the 1982 movie The Wall, this plays in a scene where Pink, portrayed by Bob Geldof, loses his mind and enters a catatonic state before a show. It's similar to what Syd Barrett, an original member of the band, went through in 1968 when he became mentally ill and was kicked out of the band.
In the film, the song is the final step in Pink's transformation into a Neo-Nazi fascist who whips the crowd into a frenzy of hatred.
Gilmour's second guitar solo on "Comfortably Numb" regularly appears in Best Guitar Solo of All Time polls. In an August 2006 poll by viewers of TV music channel Planet Rock it was voted the greatest guitar solo of all time.
For the solo, the Pink Floyd guitarist used a heavy pick on his Fender Strat with maple neck through a Big Muff and delay via a Hiwatt amp and a Yamaha RA-200 rotating speaker cabinet. Gilmour told Guitar World that the solo didn't take long to develop: "I just went out into the studio and banged out five or six solos. From there I just followed my usual procedure, which is to listen back to each solo and mark out bar lines, saying which bits are good. In other words, I make a chart, putting ticks and crosses on different bars as I count through: two ticks if it's really good, one tick if it's good and cross if it's no go. Then I just follow the chart, whipping one fader up, then another fader, jumping from phrase to phrase and trying to make a really nice solo all the way through. That's the way we did it on 'Comfortably Numb.' It wasn't that difficult. But sometimes you find yourself jumping from one note to another in an impossible way. Then you have to go to another place and find a transition that sounds more natural."
Van Morrison played this with Roger Waters at a 1990 concert Waters organized in Berlin to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall. This version was used in the 2006 movie The Departed.
Before the rise of the internet, there was a popular Pink Floyd newsletter called The Amazing Pudding. In 1992, they polled their readers to ask their favorite song by the band, and "Comfortably Numb" came out on top.
A dance version by the Scissor Sisters was a #10 UK hit in 2004. It was released as the B-side of their first single, "Electrobix," but drew much more attention.
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Suggestion credit:
Bertrand - Paris, France
