You Better Run: The Battles Behind Pink Floyd’s ‘Run Like Hell’
Late in The Wall, after the wall is built, after the marriage has failed and the drugs have done their work, Pink Floyd’s fictional rock star Pink does the worst thing a man in his position can do: he starts to enjoy the power. “Run Like Hell” is the sound of that enjoyment. Driven by a galloping, delay-drenched guitar figure that seems to sprint in place, the song puts Pink on stage in the grip of a hallucination in which he has become a fascist dictator, whipping his own concert audience into a mob and sending it out into the night to terrorise the neighbourhood — to kick in doors, to hunt the people he has decided are the problem. It is, deliberately, one of the most repellent lyrics Roger Waters ever wrote. It is also, undeniably, one of the most exhilarating pieces of music Pink Floyd ever recorded, a stadium-sized chant of “run, run, run, run” that audiences have been joyfully shouting back at the band for more than forty years. That contradiction — a warning against the mob, delivered in the form of a mob anthem — is not a flaw in “Run Like Hell”. It is the song’s entire design, and it made the track the most fought-over, most frequently rescued and longest-lived warhorse in the whole Wall story.
The battles behind it are unusually concrete. “Run Like Hell” began with music by Roger Waters that was thrown away. It was rebuilt around music by David Gilmour that grew out of his solo work. It contains the only keyboard solo on the entire double album, played by a keyboard player who was in the process of being fired from the band. It was cut down because the vinyl format physically could not hold the longer version. It was released as a single and climbed into both the rock charts and, improbably, a disco chart. In the film of The Wall it soundtracks the movie’s most disturbing sequence, staged with real skinheads whose violence, the director recalled, kept going after he shouted cut. And when the band tore itself apart, “Run Like Hell” turned out to be the one piece of The Wall that both warring camps refused to surrender: the Gilmour-led Floyd closed their shows with it for years, Waters built his solo finales around it, and Gilmour eventually admitted, in his seventies, that he had stopped singing it because he now found its violence frightening. It is also, not incidentally, the last original song Gilmour and Waters ever wrote together, and the last recording by all four members of the classic 1970s line-up. A song about a crowd being ordered to run became the final collaboration of a band that was itself about to scatter. This is how that happened.
The Last Song Two Rivals Wrote Together
Start with the credit line, because on The Wall credit lines are battle maps. Twenty-six tracks; Waters wrote or co-wrote all of them; Gilmour, the band’s guitarist and its other singer, holds a co-writing credit on just three. One of those three is “Run Like Hell”, with music by Gilmour and lyrics by Waters. The other two are “Young Lust” and “Comfortably Numb”. In other words, the tiny handful of places where the fracturing partnership still functioned as a partnership are disproportionately the songs the world remembers — and “Run Like Hell” has a further, sadder distinction. It is, to date, the last original composition ever credited to Gilmour and Waters together under the Pink Floyd name, and the last song recorded by all four members of the band’s 1970s line-up: Gilmour, Waters, keyboardist Richard Wright and drummer Nick Mason.
That status was not apparent in 1979, when the two men still had a working, if poisonous, creative process: Waters the conceptualist, arriving with demos, narratives and demands; Gilmour the musician, sifting the material for the pieces that could carry a melody across an arena. But it gives “Run Like Hell” a weight in the catalogue that its four minutes and twenty seconds might not suggest. Everything Pink Floyd did afterwards — The Final Cut, the split, the lawsuit over the name, the two rival touring Floyds in all but name — happened after this song. “Run Like Hell” is where the collaboration ends, mid-sprint, at full volume. When the two men’s voices interlock on the record — Waters barking the threats, Gilmour’s stacked harmonies chanting “run, run” underneath — what you are hearing is the last time the central creative engine of Pink Floyd ever ran at full power. The song’s subject is a demagogue dividing a crowd. Its recording documents a partnership in the act of dividing itself.
Waters Had the First Version — and It Was Scrapped
The least-known battle over “Run Like Hell” happened before the song properly existed, and Waters lost it. The first version of the track had music written by Waters himself, with the lyrics that appear on the finished album; that early version survives on the Immersion box set edition of The Wall, alongside the band demos. During the demo stage, Waters’s music was scrapped in favour of music by Gilmour. Let the significance of that settle. The Wall was Waters’s concept, Waters’s story, Waters’s album in almost every contractual and creative sense, made by a band in which his authority was close to absolute — and on this track, the author’s own music was judged, in the room, not good enough, and replaced by his rival’s.
Gilmour’s replacement material had roots in his work outside the band. He has said that “Short and Sweet”, from his self-titled debut solo album of 1978, is similar to “Run Like Hell”, both songs built on a drop-D tuning and chords organised around a D root. The solo record is usually treated as a footnote to the Floyd story, but here it was a lifeline: the guitarist who was being written out of The Wall’s credits had spent his solo album developing exactly the muscular, riff-based language the album’s climax needed, and he brought it back into the sessions in his hands. Producer Bob Ezrin’s role in the album’s wider war — Ezrin, the Canadian brought in at the suggestion of Waters’s then-wife, who had once been his secretary, and who turned Waters’s sprawling material into a workable forty-page script — applied here as everywhere: to mediate between a concept that was all Waters and a sound that increasingly had to be Gilmour’s if it was going to work at all.
The settlement is preserved in the credits and in the sound. Waters kept the words, the concept and the lead vocal. Gilmour took the music, played the guitars and the bass, and supplied the chanting harmonies that give the song its forward motion. Neither man could have made this track alone: Waters’s version had been tried and discarded; Gilmour’s riff, without Waters’s lyric, would have been an outtake from a solo album. “Run Like Hell” is a genuine collaboration extracted from two people who were rapidly ceasing to collaborate — perhaps the purest example on the album of the thing Pink Floyd was about to lose forever.
A Gallop Built Out of Echoes
The famous opening of “Run Like Hell” is a technical trick that became a signature. The guitar intro begins with the scratching of strings dampened by the left hand, then settles onto an open D string, palm-muted, treated with a specific delay setting — the same dotted-eighth-note delay principle heard earlier on the album on “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1” — producing three to four loud but gradually decaying repeats, one dotted eighth-note apart. The result is that simply playing quarter notes at the song’s tempo of 116 beats per minute generates a strict rhythm of an eighth note followed by two sixteenths: a gallop, manufactured by echo, that feels like running feet. Over that pedal tone of D, Gilmour plays descending triads in D major while a quieter second guitar plays open chords, some of the tracks treated with heavy flanging. Gilmour has said he was attempting to imitate the chopping cellos on the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” — a lovely and unlikely genealogy, sunshine-pop orchestration reincarnated as the engine of a fascist rally.
The verses shift into E minor, with the guitar’s open strings ringing over a sequence of power chords coloured by added tones, and the harmonic restlessness is functional: nothing in the verse sits still, everything strains forward. Providing the low end, once again, is Gilmour himself on bass guitar, with Bobbye Hall adding congas and bongos to Nick Mason’s drums — percussion borrowed from the dance floor, a fact the charts would later confirm. Backwards cymbals, courtesy of Gilmour and engineer James Guthrie, suck the air backwards at the edges. And the whole construction was originally longer, substantially so; the song had to be edited down because of the running-time limits of the vinyl format, one of several places on The Wall where the physical medium of 1979 simply amputated the music. A longer “Run Like Hell” existed, and the format said no. The version the world knows is the survivor of that cut — tightened, arguably, into the breathless thing it is, but a reminder that even this most unstoppable-sounding of tracks was stopped, trimmed and fitted into a groove by other people’s constraints.
The Only Keyboard Solo on the Album
Here is a statistic that startles even Floyd devotees: across the twenty-six tracks of The Wall — an album by a band co-founded by a keyboard player, famous for its synthesizer textures — there is exactly one keyboard solo, and it is Richard Wright’s, in “Run Like Hell”. After the last sung line, a synthesizer solo is played over the verse sequence in place of a vocal. Then the arrangement empties out: the gallop thins to a guitar ostinato with rhythmic echoes and brief variations every other bar, and into that hollowed space the production pours its paranoia — cruel laughter, running footsteps, tyres skidding, and finally Waters’s piercing scream, before the crowd noise rolls on into “Waiting for the Worms”.
Consider who is playing that solo, and when. Wright was, during these very sessions, being forced out of Pink Floyd by Waters, who threatened to withdraw the album and make it a solo project if Wright did not leave; Wright, in the middle of a divorce and admittedly offering little, agreed to depart when the record was done and to play the tour as a salaried employee. The one moment on the whole double album where the keyboards step out of the texture and speak alone is given to the man being expelled — a Prophet-5 synthesiser, cutting through the climax of the album he was no longer going to be a member of the band for. Wright’s solo is not decoration. It is the sound of the machine idling over the empty street after the mob has passed, and it comes from the album’s most expendable man. The battles behind “Run Like Hell” do not get more Floydian than that: the expelled founder, granted the record’s only keyboard solo, on the record’s most violent song, in the sessions that ended his membership.
There is a postscript the participants themselves savoured. Wright did play the Wall tour of 1980–81, on salary — and because the production’s enormous losses were borne by the three remaining partners, the fired keyboard player was the only member of Pink Floyd who actually made money from the shows. The solo, and the salary, belong in the same sentence of Floyd history. Wright outlasted the wall that was built to exclude him, and on “Run Like Hell” you can hear him doing it.
A Dance Beat Carrying a Fascist Nightmare
Now to the lyric, and the care needed in handling it. “Run Like Hell” is sung from inside Pink’s hallucination, in the sequence of the album where the drugged, isolated star imagines himself a dictator addressing a rally. He threatens the audience in the language of the purge: their guilty pasts, their doors kicked in, their loved ones sent home in a cardboard box. He dispatches his followers against the people the preceding track, “In the Flesh”, had already marked out. Waters has never disguised what this is. The sequence is satire in its most dangerous form — not mockery from a safe distance, but ventriloquism: the writer lends the demagogue his own voice, his own charisma and his band’s most exciting music, and dares the audience to notice that they are enjoying it.
The music is the trap, and it was baited with full knowledge. The delay gallop, the disco-inflected pulse, the chant built for forty thousand people to shout — everything in the arrangement is engineered to make a crowd move as one body, which is precisely the phenomenon the lyric is warning against. Critics at the time felt the dissonance and mostly admired it. Billboard, reviewing the single, judged the lyrics less biting than those of “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” but concluded that it was the driving, dance-oriented, percussion-filled rhythm that made the song come alive; Cash Box praised Gilmour’s hard-bitten guitar and Waters’s incessant bass beat as the perfect instrumental mood for the lyrical paranoia; Record World heard a barrage of guitar and keyboard waves pounding the dance-oriented rock. In 2017 Billboard ranked it second on its list of the fifty greatest Pink Floyd songs — a ranking worth noting, because it places this Gilmour–Waters collaboration above almost the whole of a catalogue usually discussed in terms of Waters’s concepts or Gilmour’s solos alone.
Waters’s sources for the demagogue were personal before they were political. The Wall fiction grew directly from the 1977 In the Flesh tour, when Waters, playing stadiums for the first time, loathed the distance from the audience so much that at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium on July 6, 1977, he spat on a fan near the stage — the act of contempt that seeded the entire album, and whose tour name Waters pointedly reused for the dictator’s rally songs. Pink’s rally is Waters’s stadium show with the politeness removed: the star who spat at one fan imagines himself ordering the whole crowd into the streets. “Run Like Hell” is where that self-accusation reaches its climax, screamed, laughed and skidded to a halt by the production team — Guthrie and Gilmour handling the backwards cymbals and the sounds of running and panting, production assistant Phil Taylor credited, in one of rock’s great sleeve-note details, with the tyre screeching.
A Single, a Dance Chart and an Awkward Hit
In April 1980, “Run Like Hell” was released as a single, backed with “Don’t Leave Me Now” — a pairing that deserves a moment’s appreciation, the album’s most violent gallop on one side and its most abject plea on the other. The single version, and a promotional EP prepared for radio, featured a clean guitar intro without the crowd effects that frame the album track, and the EP added an extended intro and outro for good measure. As a commercial proposition it was peculiar: a four-minute slice of a concept album’s climax, sung by a fictional fascist, dependent for its full meaning on twenty preceding tracks. It charted anyway. It reached number fifteen in Canada and number eighteen in Sweden, number thirty in New Zealand and number forty-six in West Germany, and in the United States it stalled at number fifty-three on the Billboard Hot 100 — modest numbers that undersell its presence, because the twelve-inch single, bundling “Run Like Hell” with “Don’t Leave Me Now” and “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2”, climbed to number fifty-seven on Billboard’s Disco Top 100. Pink Floyd, the band of the fifteen-week number-one album, had a record on the American disco chart, and it was this one: the fascist rally, remixed by reality into club fodder.
The album around the single was a phenomenon by any measure — fifteen weeks at number one in the United States, number three in Britain, ultimately more than thirty million copies sold and a twenty-three-times-platinum certification in America — and “Run Like Hell” was positioned as its second commercially issued single, between the phenomenon of “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” and the prestige of “Comfortably Numb”. Its relative chart modesty has a simple explanation the band would have recognised: America happily bought the nine-year-old’s protest chant and, later, the guitar solo as a single, but a demagogue’s threats at 116 beats per minute were a harder sell in the spring of 1980. Radio took the song anyway, in album form, everywhere. “Run Like Hell” became one of those tracks whose fame is measured not in peak positions but in decades of rotation — the gallop is a Pavlovian trigger for anyone who listened to rock radio between 1980 and the end of the century.
The Film’s Ugliest Ten Minutes
Where “Hey You” was cut from Alan Parker’s 1982 film Pink Floyd – The Wall, “Run Like Hell” was kept — and given the film’s most notorious sequence. In the movie, Pink’s hallucination spills off the stage: his hammer guard, in the black militaristic uniforms designed by animator Gerald Scarfe, rampages through the streets. An interracial couple in the back seat of a car is attacked by neo-Nazis as the lyric’s “you better run” plays. A Pakistani diner is smashed up. Parker hired the Tilbury Skins, an actual skinhead gang from Essex, to play Pink’s thugs, and recalled that the action always seemed to continue long after he had shouted “Cut!” — a sentence that has followed the film ever since, because it collapses the distance the satire depends on. Waters wrote a fantasy about ordinary men discovering they loved being a mob. Parker hired men for whom it was not entirely a fantasy, and the camera recorded the difference.
The film version of the song is considerably shorter than the album’s — a guitar refrain removed, Wright’s synthesiser solo superimposed over the second verse, the long emptied-out instrumental break taken out — which concentrates it: less sprint, more assault. Placed alongside the album and the concerts, the film completes the song’s triangle of meanings. On record, “Run Like Hell” is a warning you can dance to. On stage, as we will see, it became a piece of audience theatre in which the crowd knowingly played the mob. On film, with real skinheads and real victims, it is simply frightening, and meant to be. That the same four minutes of music can carry all three charges is the strongest evidence for the defence Waters always offered of the material: the song does not endorse the rally. It indicts everyone who enjoys it, in proportion to how much they enjoy it — a category that, on the evidence of forty years of stadium singalongs, includes nearly everybody.
Waters, the Pig and the Speech Nobody Else Could Give
On the original Wall tour of 1980–81 — thirty-one performances in four cities, Los Angeles, Uniondale, Dortmund and London, before a wall of cardboard bricks some thirty-three feet high, in a production Nick Mason called absurdly expensive and simply not feasible — “Run Like Hell” arrived late in the show, after “In the Flesh”, and it came with a ritual. During “In the Flesh” a giant inflatable pig was released over the audience, and between the songs Waters, in character as the dictator Pink, addressed the crowd. The speech varied every night — dedications to the paranoiacs in the audience, taunts about the pig — and because it varied, bootleg collectors and archivists use its wording to identify which concert a recording comes from; the version on the live album Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live 1980–81 is a composite of the speeches of June 15 and June 17, 1981. Sometimes he introduced the song as “Run Like Fuck”. Waters and Gilmour sang alternating lines, backed by a quartet of singers, while a surrogate band of session musicians — men who had opened the show wearing rubber masks of the real band members’ faces — played alongside the Floyd, with both Waters and Andy Bown on bass. The theatre of it was exact: two bassists, two vocalists, a dictator working a crowd that was in on the joke and not entirely in on it.
The speech ritual matters to the song’s history because it established the template every later performance followed: “Run Like Hell” is never just played, it is introduced, framed, pointed at the audience like the weapon it describes. When Waters revived The Wall in Berlin in 1990 — on the strip of no-man’s-land where the Berlin Wall had stood until the previous November, before an official attendance of two hundred thousand — he made no speech and sang every line himself, without playing bass, letting the location do the framing. On his The Wall Live tour of 2010 to 2013, the song was transposed down a whole step, from D to C, and Waters clapped the audience into the beat, exhorting them to have a good time, in some performances brandishing a prop machine gun — the dictator’s theatre updated for a singer in his late sixties who understood, as he had in 1980, that the horror and the party are the same event viewed from two ends of the arena.
After the Split, Both Armies Kept the Song
Waters left Pink Floyd in 1985, declared the band a spent force, and sued when Gilmour and Mason carried on without him. The settlement left the two camps sharing a catalogue like divorced parents sharing children, and “Run Like Hell” was claimed, with unusual enthusiasm, by both. In the Gilmour-led Floyd it became a fixture of the concerts, usually the closing number, stretched past nine minutes, with Gilmour playing an extended guitar introduction and sharing the vocal with touring bassist Guy Pratt, who sang Waters’s lines. A live version served as the B-side of “On the Turning Away”; another closed the live album Delicate Sound of Thunder in 1988. On the Division Bell tour Pratt sometimes substituted the name of the host city for the word “mother” in the cardboard-box line, singing “London” at the Earls Court shows preserved on Pulse — a small, telling act of ownership: the song now belonged to whoever was singing it, wherever they happened to be.
Gilmour also carried the song through his solo career, performing it on his 1984 tour behind About Face, at the Colombian Volcano benefit concert in 1986, and again on his Rattle That Lock tour of 2015–16, trading lines with Guy Pratt as documented on Live at Pompeii. And then, on his next tour, behind Luck and Strange in 2024, he stopped. His explanation, given in interview, is the most remarkable late chapter in the song’s long life: he loves “Run Like Hell”, he said, but all that “you’d better run, run, run” — he now finds it, in his words, a bit terrifying and violent. The guitarist who built the gallop, who sang the chant for four decades in two bands and on three solo tours, looked at the lyric his old partner wrote in 1979 and concluded that the times, or he himself, had moved to a place where he no longer wanted to lead that particular chant. Waters, meanwhile, was still performing it with a prop machine gun on his This Is Not a Drill tour. The two men’s final public positions on their last co-written song are a perfect inverted image of their first ones: in 1979 Waters wrote the demagogue and Gilmour gave him the beat; in the 2020s Waters still performs the demagogue gladly, and Gilmour has laid the beat down.
The Pulse document shows how completely the song had changed jobs. On the Division Bell tour of 1994 — Pink Floyd’s final full-scale tour, and one of the highest-grossing in rock history to that date — the band structured its concerts to end with the encores from the back catalogue, and “Run Like Hell” was placed last of all, closing the Pulse live album and film exactly as it had closed so many Delicate Sound of Thunder shows before them. Think about what that placement means. A set that included the whole of The Dark Side of the Moon, “Wish You Were Here” and “Comfortably Numb” needed a final word, and the final word, night after night, in stadiums on several continents, was a song in which a hallucinated dictator orders his audience into the streets. The crowd’s job was simply to run the chant one more time, louder, under the lights and the lasers, and go home happy. Waters’s nightmare had become the most reliable goodnight in stadium rock — which is either the song’s ultimate defeat or its ultimate vindication, and the band, to its credit, never pretended to know which.
The song’s wider afterlife runs along the same fault line between thrill and menace. Canadian metal band Kittie covered it on their 2001 album Oracle, leaning into the aggression; in March 2019, Metallica’s Robert Trujillo and Kirk Hammett jammed it mid-concert in Kansas City, a moment the band itself uploaded the next day — two generations of metal musicians treating the gallop as common property. Billboard’s critics have kept returning to it, and Ultimate Classic Rock’s Michael Gallucci rated it among the finest of Waters’s Floyd songs, calling it a paranoid, drug-fuelled riff on the dangers of stardom and its parallels with fascism. Everyone who touches the song has to decide which of its two faces to play up. Nobody has ever managed to remove either one.
Cut Down, Dug Up: The Versions That Surfaced Later
One measure of how much music this song generated is how much of it the public did not hear for decades. The album version, remember, is an edit: the track as recorded was originally much longer, and it was shortened because the four sides of the 1979 vinyl double album simply had no more room. Nor was the edit the only surgery performed for the marketplace. The original seven-inch single and the promotional EP prepared for American radio — the Pink Floyd The Wall — Special Radio Construction — both replaced the album’s crowd-noise opening with a clean guitar intro, letting the gallop start from silence, and the EP went further, adding an extended thirty-two-beat introduction and an extended sixty-four-beat outro in which Gilmour’s main phrase repeats before the track ends. Radio, in other words, was offered a “Run Like Hell” with more running in it than the album could hold, a small monument to the format wars the song kept winning and losing at the same time.
The full archaeology arrived in 2012, when the Immersion box set edition of The Wall opened the vaults. There, listeners could finally hear the band demos — including the first version of “Run Like Hell” with Waters’s own music under the finished lyric, the version the sessions discarded in favour of Gilmour’s. Hearing it settles the oldest argument about the song in an unexpected way: the lyric survives the transplant intact, which proves how completely Waters’s words were built to ride a rhythm, and the rhythm in the finished record is unmistakably the one that made the song immortal, which proves how right the room was to change it. The box set turned a rumour from the sessionographies into evidence. Pink Floyd’s most argued-over album contains, in this track, a documented case of the argument improving the art — Waters’s concept and words, Gilmour’s music, Ezrin and engineer James Guthrie shaping the result, and Guthrie’s own fingerprints in the track itself, in the backwards cymbals and the recorded sounds of running and panting that chase the listener out of the song’s final minute.
The personnel sheet tells the same story of a production throwing resources at a sprint. Beyond the four Floyd members, the track credits Bobbye Hall, the great Los Angeles session percussionist, on congas and bongos; Phil Taylor with the tyre screech; and, by producer Ezrin’s decision, hired-gun guitarist Lee Ritenour was brought in, in the phrase of the session histories, to beef up the sound — one of the era’s most in-demand session players, added to a track already carrying Gilmour’s guitars, Gilmour’s bass and Gilmour’s harmonies. Nothing about “Run Like Hell” was left underpowered. It was built, deliberately and expensively, to be the loudest thing in the room, by a band whose financial advisers had lately lost so much of its money that the whole album had been recorded in tax exile, largely at Super Bear Studios in the hills above Nice, with Waters’s vocals cut at nearby Miraval. The gallop was recorded by exiles, about a demagogue, in a rented studio in the French mountains, and then flown to Los Angeles to be finished. Rock and roll has produced stranger supply chains, but not many.
Even its late official releases carry the song’s double signature. The live rendition from the Gilmour era was remixed and reissued in the Delicate Sound of Thunder restoration programme, issued by the band’s own channel as official audio — the version linked with this article — in which the voices trading Waters’s threats are Gilmour and the band he led after the split. A song written to expose what happens when a crowd surrenders to a single voice ended up, in its afterlife, as a duet between replacements, imitators, estranged partners and guest stars, and it has never once stopped working in any of their hands. The demos prove the song was bigger than its writers’ first attempt at it. The decades since have proved it is bigger than the band that fought over it.
Why It Endures
“Run Like Hell” endures, first of all, because the gallop will not die. That dotted-eighth echo, reverse-engineered from the chopping cellos of “Good Vibrations” and a disco-era rhythm section, is one of the great pieces of rock engineering: a machine for making a stadium feel like it is moving. It has closed shows for two different Pink Floyds and one Roger Waters, been stretched past nine minutes and transposed down a key, and it works every time, for the troubling reason the song itself diagnoses. People love to run together. Waters built a lyric that tells you so, in the ugliest voice he could find, and Gilmour built a beat that proves it on your own pulse. The song is a test the audience fails nightly, gloriously, and understands itself a little better for failing.
But it endures, too, as a document — the last page of the Gilmour–Waters partnership, written in the only language both men still shared by 1979, which was argument conducted through music. Waters’s first music was discarded; Gilmour’s solo-album experiments supplied the replacement; the expelled keyboardist took the album’s only keyboard solo; the vinyl format cut the result down; a disco chart, of all places, received it; real skinheads enacted it on film; two feuding camps spent forty years refusing to give it up; and its guitarist finally retired it, in his late seventies, for the most Waters-like of reasons — because he had come to believe the words, and the words frightened him. No other song in the catalogue contains the whole story of Pink Floyd in miniature: the genius, the cruelty, the theatre, the money, the split and the long, echoing aftermath. The wall came down in the show every night, and tore the band down with it in the end. “Run Like Hell” is what was still standing in the rubble, galloping — the sound of four men who could no longer stand each other making, one last time, something none of them could ever make with anyone else.