TOP 40 DEBUT: February 9, 1980
PEAK POSITION: #1 (March 22, 1980)
“We don’t do singles.” That was Roger Waters’ response to an initial suggestion to commercialize “Another Brick In The Wall (Part II),” the Pink Floyd song that would go on to sell four million copies and hit #1 in more than a dozen countries—as a single. Bassist Waters was being his usual obstinate self, but he wasn’t exactly wrong. Prior to “Brick,” Pink Floyd had reached the Billboard Hot 100 exactly once, when they took a six-minute blues song in 7/4 to #13 in the summer of ’73. (“Money” is a 10.) In their native England, the quartet hadn’t released a commercial 7” for over a decade. Pink Floyd’s brief heyday as a “singles band” ended in 1968, after original frontman Syd Barrett dropped too much acid, lost his mind, and got fired from the group he originally founded. His bandmates would spend the next few years shedding their psychedelic skin and reinventing themselves as a brooding, mysterious, progressive rock outfit. By the late Seventies, Pink Floyd had become one of the top-selling album acts in existence and, also, completely anonymous.
Then Roger Waters spit on a fan. It happened on July 6, 1977, at Montreal Olympic Stadium, the final stop on Floyd’s “In The Flesh” tour. (Waters would later repurpose that title for twin songs that imagined rock concerts as fascist rallies.) In a split second, months of deeply impersonal shows culminated in a deeply personal attack directed towards the singer’s own audience; Waters left the stage shaken and horrified. That night, he reflected on the alienation that had pushed him to such a point. Within weeks, he began to write.
The psychological fallout from Waters’ spitting incident led directly to the creation of The Wall, a harrowing and deeply personal double album that would turn Pink Floyd into international superstars, even as it shattered their fragile chemistry for good. The Wall also gave the band their lone chart-topping single—and that particular single would turn out to be a monster. “Another Brick In The Wall (Part II)” wasn’t just the biggest hit of Floyd’s career; to this day, it remains one of the biggest rock songs in Billboard history. “Brick” went on to become a piece of the culture, both polemic and punchline, arguably more iconic than even Pink Floyd itself. It’s a bizarre fate for an improbable blockbuster that distilled one man’s psychodrama down to three minutes of pseudo-disco performed by schoolchildren.
The Pink Floyd started out like so many mid-Sixties London combos: indebted to American R&B and saddled with a superfluous “The.” (Two obscure blues musicians, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, inspired the rest of their name.) Their following increased as their songs got longer, and weirder, leading to a deal with EMI and the first of the band’s three distinct stages. Pink Floyd’s psychedelic period featured underground concerts with slide projections, colored lights, and enough LSD to take down a rhino; the focus invariably centered on Syd Barrett, a brilliant, troubled musician who spearheaded one groundbreaking album (The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn) before succumbing to mental illness in 1968. His replacement was one of his friends from college, guitarist David Gilmour.
Over the ensuing years, Pink Floyd drifted, directionless but fascinating. They explored space rock, wrote soundtracks for experimental films, and split vocal duties equally amongst Waters, Gilmour, and keyboardist Rick Wright. At some point, they managed to land a #1 album in England. (That’s the one with the cow on the cover.) All their competing strands eventually consolidated with Meddle (1971), a dark-horse career peak broad enough to encompass a side-long prog odyssey (“Echoes”), a duet between Gilmour and a dog (“Seamus”), and drummer Nick Mason intoning “One of these days I’m going to cut you into little pieces” in the voice of a demon.
The final decade of the “original” Floyd—roughly ‘73 to ’83, before Waters split and legal battles ensued—saw the quartet achieve new peaks of popularity and commercial status, selling millions while upgrading from theaters to stadiums. It also found them morphing from a collaborative enterprise into the Roger Waters Project. The Dark Side Of The Moon (1973) served as both the quartet’s commercial breakthrough and the end of an era, marking the last time all four members contributed to the writing and recording in roughly equal measure. (Dark Side was still on the Billboard 200 in January 1980, when The Wall reached #1. It was still charting when The Wall fell off a year later. It was still charting when a Waters-less Floyd returned with A Momentary Lapse Of Reason in September 1987. Dark Side is, unequivocally, a straight-up phenomenon.)
Both Wish You Were Here (1975) and Animals (1977) dove deeper into Waters’ increasingly dark worldview via long-form, multi-part compositions arranged around one central concept. (“Orwellian class warfare” in the case of Animals, “maybe we shouldn’t have kicked poor Syd out of his own band” for Wish.) The results were often spectacular—these are my two favorite records in the Floyd catalog, for what it’s worth—even as the process to achieve them grew far less democratic. Waters was now dictating direction and composing most of the material; invariably, his became the loudest voice in the room.
Wright’s final composing credit on a Pink Floyd album—until 1994’s The Division Bell, anyway—came on “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” the spellbinding epic bookending Wish You Were Here. Two years later, Gilmour’s contribution to “Dogs” would be the only non-Waters credit on the entirety of Animals. (Roger’s decision to split his own “Pigs On The Wing” into twin ninety-second fragments, simply to reduce his guitarist’s royalty rate for co-writing an eighteen-minute masterpiece, was a particularly nasty bit of Waters-style fuckery.) By the time of The Final Cut (1983), Pink Floyd were effectively a one-man show: Waters wrote everything, Mason and Gilmour functioned as hired hands, and Wright was long gone, forced out during the final sessions of Roger’s double album-cum-therapy session.
No one disputes that The Wall was Waters’ baby, his vision, his passion project. The story of a disenfranchised rock star haunted by parental loss and childhood trauma was, for all intents and purposes, autobiographical; the songs—26 in all, 22 written by Roger alone—existed primarily to serve the narrative. But there was still some push-and-pull as the rest of Floyd tried to align their own creative impulses to their new leader’s particular mindset. “Once we got out of Roger’s house and into the studio, it was very much a collaborative effort,” stated producer Bob Ezrin in an illuminating Guitar World oral history from 2009. Waters assessed the situation somewhat differently: “This was not a co-operative; it was in no sense a democratic process.”
Gilmour, at least, fought to make his presence felt. As a co-producer, he sparred with Waters over the sonic personality of what was, ostensibly, still a Pink Floyd record: “Roger and I had a good working relationship. We argued a lot, sometimes heatedly—artistic disagreements, not an ego thing. But overall we were still achieving things that were valid.” Of the three songs he co-wrote with Waters, two are as good as anything Pink Floyd ever put on tape: “Run Like Hell” (equal parts thrilling and terrifying) and “Comfortably Numb” (a six-minute downward spiral, culminating with the consensus pick for Greatest Guitar Solo of All Time). Even tracks with no Gilmour compositional credits—“Mother,” “Hey You,” and yes, “Another Brick In The Wall (Part II)”—still benefited from his spotlight vocals and beautifully fluid six-string work.
Mason and Wright, however, found themselves increasingly marginalized. Floyd’s longtime drummer saw his performances spliced, augmented, and even replaced at one point by Toto stickman Jeff Porcaro, brought in after Mason failed to navigate the odd time-signatures of “Mother.” Meanwhile, the working relationship between Wright and Waters kept deteriorating as sessions progressed. Rick disliked the material and bristled at his lack of creative input; Roger, who felt Wright wasn’t pulling his weight, eventually declared, “I can’t work with this guy.” (Five additional musicians wound up playing keyboards on The Wall, including Gilmour, Ezrin, and Roger himself.) Wright finally quit after Waters threatened to withhold the album unless he was fired; on the ensuing tour, he was paid as a salaried worker. The original liner notes for The Wall credited four engineers, two orchestra arrangers, and eight backing vocalists, including Toni Tennille of Captain & Tennille fame. Neither Mason nor Wright received a mention.
Waters’ primary collaborator on The Wall wasn’t even a member of Pink Floyd at all. Bob Ezrin was a 29-year-old producer from Canada, best known for his work with Alice Cooper, as well as KISS’ theatrical opus Destroyer; he got hired via a recommendation from his former secretary, who was dating Waters at the time. Once in place, Ezrin supervised the complicated, year-long recording process, which involved multiple studios on two continents, along with acting as arbiter between feuding band members. Most importantly, he turned Waters’ collection of demo cassettes and song fragments into a cohesive story—complete with a forty-page script. “We did a table read,” he later recounted. “It really helped to crystallize the work. From that point on, we were no longer fishing but building to a plan.”
Ezrin also deserves as much credit as anyone for transforming “Another Brick In The Wall (Part II)” into an unlikely smash. Waters’ original “Education” demo was a moody, spooky acoustic number with different lyrics; a 1978 work-in-progress of “Part One” (then called “Reminiscing”) added the full band and hewed closer to traditional Floydian dynamics. Ezrin suggested incorporating a more “disco” feel, in deference to the trend sweeping both American and European radio. “I forced myself out and listened to loud, four-to-the-bar bass drums,” said Gilmour later. “And I thought, ‘Gawd, awful!’ Then we went back and tried to turn one of the ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ parts into one of those so it would be catchy.”
The producer thought the final result sounded like a sure-fire hit, except for one slight problem: “Part 2,” as initially recorded, was only eighty seconds long. Ezrin asked the band for a second verse and chorus. He was met with the aforementioned “we don’t do singles” response. (Along with a “fuck you” for good measure.) Undaunted, Ezrin configured two tape machines to simply copy-and-paste parts, effectively creating a radio-length single out of thin air. And for the final coup de grace, he reused one of his best ideas from a previous employer.
In 1972, Ezrin had grafted a choir of children onto “School’s Out,” the title song—and eventual #7 single—from Alice Cooper’s third album. (It’s a 9.) Seven years later, he pulled the same trick for Pink Floyd. Engineer Nick Griffiths was sent to Islington Green School, just outside the band’s London studio, with specific instructions from Ezrin: “Give me 24 tracks of kids singing this thing.” Music teacher Alun Renshaw, notorious for smoking in class and swearing at students, rehearsed his class for a week prior to the recording session; they were told to sound “cockney.” Fearing she might call off the process, Renshaw also made sure to hide the lyrics from Margaret Maden, the school’s headmistress.
These days, dropping a kids’ chorus into a pop song feels like a tired gimmick and the most boring sort of cliché, largely thanks to the long tail left in the wake of this very record. But if you’re able, try listening to “Another Brick In The Wall (Part II)” with fresh ears; you’ll discover there’s something deeply subversive about an army of 13-year-olds spitting anti-authoritarian lyrics over a disco beat. None of those twenty-three voices sound trained, practiced, or—apologies to Renshaw—rehearsed. Theirs is an anger both raw and real, getting to the heart of Waters’ original sentiment in a way neither he nor Gilmour can match on their own. (Silly as it sounds now, my younger self always got a distinct Village of the Damned vibe from the whole proceedings. Seeing the putty-faced kids stomping through The Wall’s cinematic adaptation didn’t help matters.)
Ezrin later recalled the moment Waters first heard his grade-school reminiscences sung back to him by actual grade-schoolers: “When the kids came in on the second verse, there was a total softening of his face… He knew it was going to be an important record.” In a 2015 Wall Street Journal piece, Waters confirmed his reaction. “To hear those kids from a not-so-affluent part of London singing the lyrics took my breath away. Adding those voices… made the song visceral and deeply moving in a very serious way.” Islington Green received a check for £1,000 in exchange for their students’ services. Once the song became a worldwide hit, each participating child was given a Pink Floyd album, single, and concert ticket.
Helped by its fluke radio single, The Wall quickly turned into a phenomenon, topping the Billboard 200 for fifteen weeks on its way to reigning as the #1 album of 1980. But its critical reception was far more mixed, with reviews at the time ranging from “stunning” to “self-indulgent.” (A contemporaneous Melody Maker opinion summed up the conflicted response in one line: “I’m not sure whether it’s brilliant or terrible.”) Even now, the album remains one of the more polarizing entries in the Pink Floyd canon; much like the poetry of Jim Morrison, large chunks of The Wall that blew your mind as a teenager tend to scan as slightly embarrassing upon adult revisiting.
All rock operas are, by nature, inherently ridiculous. The Wall is definitely one of the better ones, but it’s not the exception. The middle sags. The transitional pieces grow tiresome on repeated listening. The back half, especially, is bloated and overlong (if redeemed somewhat by the three indisputable classics anchoring Sides Three and Four). And yet, when taken as a whole, The Wall still works. It works because no amount of classic-rock oversaturation can entirely blunt its sharpest edges, or dissipate the queasy rush of hearing an artist unpack his demons in real time. It works because every moment—even the album’s most overplayed one—still unfolds like one long primal scream in the right context.
Unfortunately, too many listeners only heard “Brick” in the wrong context. Being sandwiched between car dealership ads and mindless deejay patter made the whole thing felt patently absurd: a dunderheaded slogan, a schoolyard chant missing its own joke. But there’s a reason Pink Floyd didn’t make it easy for radio by sticking with “Another Brick In The Wall,” rather than the obvious “We Don’t Need No Education.” There’s a reason they made sure to include “Part 2” in the title, even on a 7” single with no “Part 1” in sight. They were trying to make the point obvious: “Another Brick In The Wall (Part II)” doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s merely one third of the saga, the middle section in a cycle that begins with a father’s literal death and ends with a son’s metaphorical one.
All three “Bricks” use the same bone-simple melody: the first three notes of the D-minor scale, in order, up and then down. It’s primitive, elemental, a child plunking at a piano. Waters turns it into a recurring motif throughout the album; that melody reappears, verbatim, during “Hey You” and “Waiting For The Worms,” or gets echoed and elongated elsewhere. Every version of “Another Brick In The Wall” is its own minor-key blues, rendered in different ways. In “Part 1,” it’s a muted wisp of a song, the first (of many) elegies for Second Lieutenant Eric Waters, killed in a World War II battle when Roger was just five months old. In “Part 3,” it’s the soundtrack to a psychotic break, sung at the top of Waters’ register. That particular “Brick” might be the album’s darkest juncture, especially as it segues into “Goodbye Cruel World,” the moment when “Pink” cuts himself off completely from human contact. (In the stage show, Waters’ final “goodbye” lands as the last brick is placed into an actual, physical wall between audience and band.)
On The Wall album, “Part 2” arrives on the heels of “Part 1,” bleeding directly out of “The Happiest Days Of Our Lives,” a segue piece between the two. The latter gives “Brick” some of that badly-needed context, even if Waters’ lyrics take a few listens to fully decipher: “There were certain teachers who would/ Hurt the children any way they could/ By pouring their derision/ Upon anything we did/ Exposing every weakness/ However carefully hidden by the kids.” Its sonic impact is far less subtle. “Happiest” climaxes with a series of explosions and drum fills, like firecrackers on the last day of school, peaking with a lone, terrified scream before crashing immediately into Gilmour’s blank incantation of “We don’t need no education.” (If you’ve listened to classic rock radio at all in the last four decades, this is the way you’ve heard “Part 2”: preceded by the rising horror of “Happiest,” absent the single’s nondescript intro.) For the 1982 cinematic adaption, director Alan Parker punctuated select downbeats with the visual of a belt striking a schoolboy’s backside.
Waters came up in the institutionalized era of British grammar schooling, where conformity took precedence over creativity. It was, to put it mildly, not a happy time for him. “Some of the teachers there were locked into the idea that young boys needed to be controlled with sarcasm and the exercising of brute force to subjugate us to their will,” he later explained. “That was their idea of education.” Waters was making a very specific attack on a very specific type of learning, while digging into some deeply repressed—and deeply personal—childhood memories. Over the years, the song that emerged mutated into something else entirely: an all-purpose, anti-authority screed.
Was there any way for “Another Brick In The Wall” to reach the masses without simultaneously flattening its meaning? Doubtful. Perhaps Roger could’ve made his points more obvious; perhaps Pink Floyd could’ve made the single less radio-friendly. Regardless, it’s all but impossible to hear the song now, as its author originally intended: not with its chorus woven into the popular lexicon, not with generations of bored schoolkids repurposing pain into a singalong. (In its own way, “Brick” might be the most misunderstood anthem this side of “Born In The U.S.A.”) And yet, the anger underneath Waters’ elementary exorcism didn’t go anywhere. Scratch away the years of cultural residue, and it’s just as raw as ever.
When seen through the lens of psychological trauma, “Another Brick In The Wall (Part II)” no longer becomes a harmless, discofied diversion. It echoes like a howl into the void, a torrent of adolescent humiliations all bubbling to the surface at once. That nursery-rhyme melody now drips with menace; Mason’s four-on-the-floor beat turns into a plodding death march. (The movie, again, goes one step further, syncing the rhythm with a single-file line of schoolchildren being fed to a meat grinder.)
For me, the most pivotal—and unsung—moment comes just past the halfway point, when the vocals retreat, along with most of the song’s rhythmic elements. For just over a minute, the entire track seems to hang in midair, holding its collective breath as Gilmour’s Les Paul wails and moans. (Most guitarists are lucky to get one iconic solo in a lifetime. Gilmour laid down two on the same album.) It’s a deeply human presence breaking through an otherwise inhuman construct; following the solo’s completion, “Brick” doesn’t fade as much as crumble to pieces. The song ends with disembodied playground noises and the spittle-flecked fury of some long-ago headmaster, screaming about pudding and meat. The voice of the headmaster is Waters’ own.
The public outcry over the success of “Another Brick In The Wall (Part II)” was both immediate and depressingly obvious. Authoritarians everywhere missed the point, condemning the song’s “anti-education” message in typically knee-jerk fashion: The Inner London Education Authority called the song “scandalous,” while Margaret Thatcher apparently hated it (which probably pleased Waters immensely). Margaret Maden, who bore the brunt of the criticism, refused to let her students reprise their singing roles for the music video. Disillusioned with the entire British education system, Renshaw moved to Australia for three months and never left.
Pink Floyd never came close to having another Top 40 hit in America. After released his first solo album, The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, in 1984, Waters quit the band the following year, calling Floyd “a spent force creatively.” In 1986, Gilmour and Mason announced their intention to carry on under the Pink Floyd moniker. Roger sued. After a year of legal wrangling, both parties reached an agreement. Waters retained the rights to The Wall concept and the floating pig from Animals; Gilmour and Mason kept the name.
Pink Floyd, minus Waters, released two very successful studio albums in 1987 (A Momentary Lapse Of Reason) and 1994 (The Division Bell), each promoted with a beyond successful world tour. (They also scored three #1’s on the Mainstream Rock chart: “Learning To Fly,” “On The Turning Away,” and “Keep Talking.”) Wright returned to the fold for the latter record; the accompanying run of dates would be his—and Floyd’s—last before his death in 2008. Pink Floyd’s “final” album, 2014’s The Endless River, was a collection of unused and reworked Division Bell outtakes, dedicated to the memory of their late keyboardist.
Waters, minus Floyd, released his own solo albums and launched his own solo tours, albeit with far less (initial) success. He also found ways to keep returning to The Wall. A one-off performance on July 21, 1990, held in Germany to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall, attracted an audience of over 300,000. (International television viewership was estimated at nearly a billion.) In 2010, Waters launched an elaborate, immersive update of the original stage show, entitled The Wall Live. By 2013, it had grossed more money than any other tour by a solo musician.
Even the original kids got compensated, eventually. In 1997, a change in British copyright law allowed session musicians to collect a percentage of the income generated from radio and television broadcasts. In November 2004, the twenty-three former students filed a claim for unpaid royalties. (Despite erroneous reports at the time, the plaintiffs did not sue the band directly. I suppose the “Pink Floyd: Leave Those Kids Alone!” headlines were too good to pass up.) Twenty-five years after being immortalized on one of the biggest records in rock history, each of those ex-schoolchildren finally received a payment for their contributions, in the amount of several hundred British pounds. As for the man who turned his own scholastic trauma into “Another Brick In The Wall (Part II)”? By last count, Roger Waters’ net worth was just over $300 million.
GRADE: 9/10
I WANT MY MTV: Following the 1982 theatrical release of The Wall, the “Part 2” segment of the film—in all its nightmarish, meat-grinding glory—started receiving airplay on MTV and other music channels. Within a few years, it had basically become the song’s “official” video. As it turns out, there was an earlier, truly official video commissioned years earlier, broadcast overseas but rarely shown in America. This one’s a much cheaper affair than the movie, but you can still spot a couple ideas eventually recycled by Parker for his full-length feature. And of course, Gerald Scarfe’s legendary animation (later used for The Wall tour, the film, and subsequent shows by both Floyd and Waters) remains as disturbing, and frighteningly funny, as ever.
BONUS BITS: Nü-metal pioneers KoRn covered all three parts of “Another Brick In The Wall,” plus “Goodbye Cruel World” (because of course they did), for their 2004 Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 album. Their version is surprisingly faithful, while also sounding exactly like how you’d expect a KoRn take on Pink Floyd to sound. (Nine years later, Ultimate Classic Rock included the recording on their “Terrible Rock Covers” list, which is exactly what you’d expect from a classic rock website.)
BONUS BONUS BITS: In 1999, one-off alternative supergroup Class Of ’99 scored a minor hit on Billboard’s Mainstream and Modern Rock charts with their extremely-late-Nineties version of “Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2).” (“Part 2” and “Part 1” both appeared on the soundtrack to the extremely-late-Nineties horror flick The Faculty.) The track is notable solely for being the final studio recording of Layne Staley, the great-and-tragic lead singer of Alice In Chains. It’s a poor coda to a singular career, but even under layers of ugly studio glop, that voice still haunts.
BONUS BONUS BONUS BITS: It might surprise you (or not) to learn that Pearl Jam are unabashed Wall fans. (I’ve seen them do “Comfortably Numb” in person before. It smoked.) Long before “Mother” and “Numb” started popping up in setlists, the Seattle quintet were indulging their inner Floyd with a semi-regular tag of “Brick” towards the end of their own “Daughter.” (If you don’t want to wait, the pivotal moment happens around 4:30.)