Pink Floyd "The Wall" Harvest SHDW 411 UK 1st press A6/B3/A3/B3 g/fold

	£		36
	$		48

Pink Floyd ? "The Wall"  Harvest ?SHDW 411  UK 1st pressing 2 × Vinyl, LPs housed in a gate-fold sleeve and released in 1979.
Both LPs appear to have been lightly played and are in great condition. They played through beautifully on my elderly stereo - no hop, stick or jump. They are housed in their original printed inner sleeves, with rounded corners and a nine-inch thumb notch at the top. The sleeves for sides 2 and 4 have the catalog number (SHDW 411), pressing number (OC-158 63410), and the record number (SHSP 4111) in the lower right corner. The gate-fold sleeve is cream coloured, not true white. The bricks on the front cover are not aligned right to the bottom of the cover on the outside or inside. The sleeve is a single sheet of wrap-around cardboard with the seam across the inner top edge of the cover. Apart from a couple of dinks to the corners, the sleeve is in good order, with no rips or writing. The spine is intact. Matrix / Runout Side 1 : SHSP 4111 A-6U TML-X Matrix / Runout Side 2 : SHSP 4111 B-3U TML-X Matrix / Runout Side 3 : SHSP 4112 A-3U TML-X Matrix / Runout Side 4 : SHSP 4112 B-2U TML-M
"The Wall" is Pink Floyd's eleventh studio album, released as a double album on 30 November 1979, by Harvest Records in the United Kingdom and by Columbia Records in the United States. The album, a rock opera, initially received a mixed critical response, but was commercially successful, reaching number 3 on the UK Albums Chart, and topping the US Billboard 200 chart for 15 weeks. It became the band's second-best selling album, one of the best-selling albums of all time, and one of the most well-known concept albums, with a 1982 film adaptation.
Bass guitarist and songwriter Roger Waters conceived the album during Pink Floyd's 1977 'In the Flesh Tour', when his frustration with the audience became so acute that he spat on them. Its story explores Pink, a jaded rock star character that Waters modeled after himself and the band's original leader Syd Barrett. Pink's life begins with the loss of his father during the Second World War, and continues with abuse from his schoolteachers, an overprotective mother, and the breakdown of his marriage; all contribute to his eventual self-imposed isolation from society, symbolised by a wall.
Recording lasted from December 1978 to November 1979, with stops in France, England, New York, and Los Angeles. Waters enlisted an outside collaborator, Canadian producer Bob Ezrin, who helped refine the concept and bridge worsening band tensions; keyboardist Richard Wright was fired by Waters during production, but stayed as a salaried musician, making "The Wall" the last studio album recorded with the 11-year-spanning line-up of Waters, Wright, guitarist David Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason. It produced three singles: "Run Like Hell", "Comfortably Numb", and Pink Floyd's only number-one single, "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2". 
The album's cover art is one of Pink Floyd's most minimal – a white brick wall and no text. Waters had a falling out with Hipgnosis designer Storm Thorgerson a few years earlier when Thorgerson had included the cover of "Animals" in his book "Walk Away Rene". "The Wall" is therefore the first album cover of the band since "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" not to be created by the design group. Issues of the album would include the lettering of the artist name and album title by cartoonist Gerald Scarfe, either as a sticker on sleeve wrapping or printed onto the cover itself, in either black or red. Scarfe, who had previously created animations for the band's "In the Flesh" tour, also created the LP's inside sleeve art and labels of both vinyl records of the album, showing the eponymous wall in various stages of construction, accompanied by characters from the story. The drawings would be translated into dolls for The Wall Tour, as well as into Scarfe's animated segments for the film based on the album.
When the completed album was played for an assembled group of executives at Columbia's headquarters in California, several were reportedly unimpressed by what they heard. Matters had not been helped when Columbia Records offered Waters smaller publishing rights on the grounds that "The Wall" was a double album, a position he did not accept. When one executive offered to settle the dispute with a coin toss, Waters asked why he should gamble on something he owned. He eventually prevailed. The record company's concerns were alleviated when "Another Brick in the Wall Part 2" reached number one in the UK, US, Norway, Portugal, West Germany and South Africa. It was certified platinum in the UK in December 1979, and platinum in the US three months later.
"The Wall" was released in the UK and in the US on 30 November 1979. Coinciding with its release, Waters was interviewed by veteran DJ Tommy Vance, who played the album in its entirety on BBC Radio 1. Critical opinion of its content was mixed, ranging from The Village Voice critic Robert Christgau's "a dumb tribulations-of-a-rock-star epic" backed by "kitschy minimal maximalism with sound effects and speech fragments", and Rolling Stone writer Kurt Loder's "a stunning synthesis of Waters's by now familiar thematic obsessions", to Melody Maker's "I'm not sure whether it's brilliant or terrible, but I find it utterly compelling." Nevertheless, the album topped the Billboard charts for 15 weeks, selling over a million copies in its first two months of sales and in 1999 was certified 23x platinum. It remains one of the best-selling albums of all time in the US, between 1979 and 1990 selling over 19 million copies worldwide. "The Wall" is Pink Floyd's second best selling album after 1973's "The Dark Side of the Moon". Engineer James Guthrie's efforts were rewarded in 1980 with a Grammy award for Best Engineered Recording (non-classical). According to Acclaimed Music, "The Wall" is the 145th most ranked record on critics' all-time lists. Rolling Stone placed it at number 87 on its 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list in 2003.