The Thin Ice (Reprise): The Lost Children’s Choir Outtake from The Wall Sessions

During the sprawling sessions for The Wall, Roger Waters experimented with a reprise of “The Thin Ice” that swapped the fragile, solitary vocal for a full children’s choir. This outtake, never released, was cut from the album likely because it undercut the calculated emotional isolation of the main track—where the thin ice is a metaphor for Pink’s fragile psyche, cracked only by his mother’s voice. The choir version turns that private moment into a public wail, almost like a Greek chorus announcing the tragedy before it happens.

The contrast is stark: the final album’s “The Thin Ice” treads softly, a single motherly vocal over spare piano, before David Gilmour’s wailing guitar crashes in. The outtake replaces that intimacy with a collective of children singing the same melody, giving the song a nursery-rhyme eeriness that borders on the The Wall film’s animated nightmares. It’s a fascinating glimpse into how Waters initially saw the wall being built by society, not just by Pink, before pulling back to make the wounds more personal.