How Bob Geldof ended up in the The Wall movie despite hating Pink Floyd

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.

Credit: Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy

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.

“So he rings me out of the blue and says, ‘Will you be in The Wall?’” Geldof told me in 2005. “My manager was saying, ‘You should do it’, but I’m like, ‘I’m not doing it – it’s the fucking Pink Floyd, go and have a wank!’”

Bob Geldof in a scene from 1982 movie The Wall | Credit: M.G.M/UNITED ARTIST / Album

Geldof felt he and Pink Floyd were irreconcilable, chalk and cheese. The Boomtown Rats had been torch-bearers on the early Irish punk scene. Not quite Stiff Little Fingers perhaps, but still. Meanwhile Pink Floyd were by Geldof’s estimation yesterday’s men; something of a poisoned chalice for the hip young thing he considered himself to be at the time.

In truth, though, Geldof was 28 and changing. He was morphing from gobby pop star into gobby political activist. He and his fellow Rats were out in Ibiza, Spain recording the band’s Mondo Bongo LP when he took Parker’s initial call. The Rats’ fourth album would be home to their final UK Top Ten single Banana Republic, a record that was more dub-reggae than punk.

Still, thanks to countless outspoken interviews, the singer’s reputation as a thorn in the establishment’s side was growing, and Parker was determined to secure a slice of Geldof’s front. To that end, he continued to pester him about acting in The Wall, not taking ‘no’ for an answer.

“All through the making of Mondo Bongo he’s phoning me like, ‘Just come and do a screen test at least’, so eventually I do, and it’s fucking horrendous,” Geldof said.

Parker recalled it differently: “We did it at Shepperton [Studios in Surrey, England]. Bob read Brad Davis’s courtroom speech from Midnight Express and did it wonderfully, surprising us all with his control.”

Credit: Landmark Media/Alamy

Naturally, the singer still had reservations about The Wall, but he was also becoming more ambivalent about the role, ready to cave and try something new.

“Contrary to what people might expect, the money wasn’t great,” Geldof told me, “but I was also thinking, ‘Well, I’ll never be asked to do another movie…’

“So now it seems I’m going to meet Roger Waters, and I’m not remotely fussed. I hear he’s a bit of a cunt, actually, but I don’t care. The I get there and it turns out that I like Waters very much. I find him very embittered and interesting.”

On set at Pinewood Studios, Geldof and Waters began to feel each other out, building a decent, if somewhat guarded working relationship. By all accounts the backdrop was a highly tense working environment as ongoing artistic tensions between Waters, Parker and Gerald Scarfe played-out.

“Roger and I collided one day in the dubbing theatre both vomiting venom,” recalled Parker, who would also describe The Wall as “a scream of pain from beginning to end… quite the most miserable time I ever had making a film.”

Scarfe, meanwhile, would self-medicate before going on set each day, downing a large nip of Jack Daniels after he’d parked the car.

In one scene which required Pink to float in a swimming pool, it transpired that Geldof couldn’t swim. Elsewhere, he threw himself into his role with conviction, wholly convincing in the scene where a depressed and alienated Pink is discovered comatose in his hotel room as Comfortably Numb plays out.

“Roger was sort of sneering at me on set one day,” Geldof told me, “but at the same time he couldn’t get his head around the fact that I didn’t like his music, so he began to try and sell me the genius of Pink Floyd.

“I told him I loved [David Gilmour vehicle] Comfortably Numb; that I thought Another Brick In The Wall was a great pop single. I said, ‘I love [Syd Barrett-penned Floyd singles] See Emily Play and Arnold Layne, but the rest is shite.’

“Roger said, ‘So you don’t like the script for the film or us, then?’ Luckily, I answered, ‘Not particularly.’ But then I asked him, ‘Wait – how come you know that? Have you been talking to Parker?’

“He said, ‘No – remember when you were out making your latest album in Ibiza?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Well, when you were taking the piss out of my script and saying Pink Floyd are wankers in that taxi cab going to the airport, my brother was driving it!’”

Waters’ bombshell revelation certainly floored Geldof at the time – “I thought, ‘How bizarre is that? How unlikely?’” – but rather than ending he and the Pink Floyd man’s friendship, it cemented it. For a while, at least.

“From then on we got on great”, Geldof told me in 2005. “And now like the rest of the planet I realise how great and innovative The Dark Side Of The Moon was.”

Geldof would go on to act in other films, and recently had a cameo role alongside rapper Vanilla Ice in Zombie Plane. An action comedy / horror flick about a flight hi-jacked by the undead, it’s cheduled for release in Australian theatres in 2026 and looks likely to be a lot frothier than The Wall.