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Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live 1980–81 is an album released by Pink Floyd in 2000. It is a live rendition of The Wall, produced and engineered by James Guthrie, with tracks selected from the August 1980 and June 1981 performances at Earls Court in London. The album was first released in The Netherlands by EMI Records on 23 March 2000, who released a limited edition in the United Kingdom on 27 March. The general release followed on 18 April 2000, with US and Canadian distribution by Columbia Records.
The shows actually involved the construction of a wall on stage, throughout the first half of the show. Once it was finished, members of the band performed in small openings in the wall, atop the wall, in front of the wall, or even behind the wall.
The album artwork featured the life-masks of the four members of Pink Floyd at the time in front of a black Wall, which were worn by the "surrogate band" during the song "In the Flesh?".
s There Anybody Out There? contains live versions of all the original songs along with two additional songs: "What Shall We Do Now?" and "The Last Few Bricks". "What Shall We Do Now?" was actually planned for the original album, but removed just before release (it was left on the lyric sheet for the original LP, but excised from future CD re-releases.) "The Last Few Bricks", on the other hand, was an instrumental bridge between "Another Brick in the Wall (Part III)" and "Goodbye Cruel World" which contained themes from "The Happiest Days of Our Lives", "Don't Leave Me Now", "Young Lust" (transposed down, from E to D), and "Empty Spaces"/"What Shall We Do Now?", and was played onstage to allow the bricklayers to lay a considerable number of bricks missing to almost completely seal off the stage before Roger Waters appeared in the last one-brick-wide space in the wall to sing "Goodbye Cruel World", and end the first part of the show. Interestingly, before the release of the live album, this bridge never had an official title. Fans called the track "Almost Gone" on some bootleg albums of the shows, but the official name—"The Last Few Bricks"—was not used at the shows in 1980–1981, and instead was suggested to Roger Waters by producer James Guthrie during the mixing of the live album. There are also two spoken tracks both titled "MC:Atmos" ("Master of Ceremonies" was the title on the first North American release), one occurring before "In the Flesh?" at the beginning of the album, and one before the reprise "In the Flesh", midway through the second half. These are performed by Gary Yudman, who was the MC for the Earls Court shows in 1980 and 1981 (he also MC'd the Nassau Coliseum performances of The Wall).
The tracks slightly differed from the album, primarily in terms of longer intros and extended solos. Due to the constraints of vinyl records, the band had been forced to severely edit many songs for the album, removing whole sections, many of which were restored in concert. "The Show Must Go On" had an extra verse that was deleted from the original studio recording (but included in the lyric sheet, even on the latest CD releases.) "Outside the Wall" was longer, not to mention re-arranged, with mandolin, accordion, clarinet, acoustic guitars, tambourines and more natural-sounding vocal harmonies from the quartet of Joe Chemay, Jim Farber, Jim Haas, and John Joyce. (This would be the third official version of "Outside the Wall" available to the listener, following the extended orchestral version from the 1982 film.)
In July 2005, Is There Anybody Out There? was re-issued in the US and Canada. James Guthrie, Joel Plante and Kim Richards supplied the label with new masters, and thus the mastering credit was changed from "Doug Sax and Gavin Lurssen" to Guthrie, Plante and Richards. The booklet features some songwriting updates and mentions that the MC: Atmos on disc one used a sample of ""We'll Meet Again" by Vera Lynn.
The album reached #19 on The Billboard 200 and #1 on Billboard's Top Internet Albums charts. The disc was certified Platinum (signifying sales of half a million copies, as it is a double CD) in the US in May 2000.
This was the first (and only) Pink Floyd album which was not released on LP format. A limited-edition vinyl picture disc was published a few months later, but it only included a few songs from the setlist.
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