The Spitting Incident: How the 1977 In the Flesh Tour Broke Roger Waters and Built The Wall

The most famous origin story for The Wall involves Roger Waters spitting on a fan during the 1977 In the Flesh tour—specifically at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium on July 6. The crowd was rowdy, fireworks were being set off near the stage, and Waters, already exhausted and disillusioned by the massive spectacle the band had become, finally snapped. He leaned over the barrier and spat in the face of a fan who was yelling at him. That moment of disgust—at the audience, at himself, at the distance between performer and fan—became the emotional spark for the entire album.

After the show, Waters sat in his hotel room and started sketching the idea of a wall: a physical and psychological barrier that performers build between themselves and their audience, and that people build between themselves and the world. He later told Rolling Stone that the tour made him feel like “a rock and roll star, a performing monkey,” and that the wall metaphor was a way to explore isolation, authority, and the damage of fame. The spitting incident directly gave us the character of Pink, the paranoid rock star who builds a wall brick by brick—each brick representing a trauma or a rejection.

That tour’s cold, impersonal stadium shows also informed the album’s sound. The haunting emptiness of songs like “Comfortably Numb” and the mechanical anger of “In the Flesh?” echo the alienation Waters felt on stage. Without that sweaty, violent Montreal night, there’s no wall—just another rock opera. Instead, it became one of the most psychologically raw concept albums ever made.