Pink Floyd All the Songs
Page 54
Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)
Roger Waters / 4:00
Musicians
David Gilmour: vocals, electric rhythm and lead guitar
Rick Wright: organ, Prophet-5, Minimoog (?)
Roger Waters: vocals, bass
Nick Mason: drums
Bob Ezrin (?): tambourine
Islington Green School students: choir
Recorded
Britannia Row, Islington, London: September 1978–March 1979
Super Bear Studios, Berre-les-Alpes, Alpes-Maritimes (France): April–July 1979
Studio Miraval, Domaine de Miraval, Le Val, Var (France): April–July 1979
Cherokee Recording Studios, Los Angeles: September 6–8, 1979
Producers Workshop, Hollywood: September 12–November 1, 1979
Technical Team
Producers: Bob Ezrin, David Gilmour, Roger Waters
Co-producer: James Guthrie
Sound Engineers: James Guthrie, Nick Griffiths, Patrice Quef, Brian Christian, Rick Hart
Genesis
This second part of “Another Brick in the Wall” continues the idea of “The Happiest Days of Our Lives” with a new attack on the British education system. When Roger Waters writes and sings We don’t need no education, he is clearly not expressing a complete rejection of learning. What he is condemning is the way in which children are taught in the classroom, specifically the thought control implemented by means of dark sarcasm. And his shout of protest (Teachers leave the kids alone!) is utterly sincere. It is a protest against discipline verging on cruelty, the admonishments of the teacher at the end of the song speaking volumes: Wrong! Do it again! If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat?
This all-out condemnation of the British education system makes even more sense in light of Roger Waters’s own suffering in elementary and secondary schools, but in higher education too, where it took the form of his strong opposition to the conservatism of his lecturers after embarking on architectural studies in London. “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” should also be seen as a protest against the establishment in the wider sense, an establishment that exercises its power over the masses without compunction. This is a recurring theme with Roger Waters and one with which the rapper Ice Cube is able to sympathize: “It was a big hit, it was getting a lot of airplay at the time, even on black stations. It’s a seriously funky track, it’s got a tight drum and a killer bass line. I remember we used to march around the playground singing the lyrics from this song […]. Ha! When you’re a kid at school, of course you’re going to love a lyric like that! The idea that we’re all just bricks in the wall, just identikit packages that the system requires. That’s the shit. It’s real. And it’s true. It’s still true now.”81
A Hit Single
After having been thoroughly reworked by Bob Ezrin (with, in particular, the recording of the school choir as the second verse), “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” was released as a single on November 16, 1979 (with “One of My Turns” as the B-side), against the advice of the band members. “That ‘Another Brick’ appeared as a single,” recalls Nick Mason, “was partly due to the influence of Bob Ezrin, who curiously had always wanted to produce a disco single. […]. Bob maintains that such was the lack of enthusiasm to make a single that it was only at the last minute that the piece was tailored to the requisite length.”5 And he concludes: “a bemusement made even stronger when we ended up as the UK Christmas Number One for 1979.”5
The single would also top the charts in many other countries, including the United States, France (for five weeks at the beginning of February 1980), West Germany, Canada, Switzerland, Norway, and Sweden. Roger Waters would make the following disapproving comment: “‘Another Brick in the Wall’ really was another nail in my heart […] imagine people buying like sheep a record telling them not to let themselves be rounded up by collies.”36 “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” is currently at number 375 in Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.
Production
The second installment in The Wall’s “Another Brick” triptych was initially called “Education.” The song starts with a strange shriek of equally curious origins. After recording had finished at Super Bear and Miraval in the South of France, the group decided to take a break in August. James Guthrie took advantage of this to return to London alone in order to do a rough mix of the various songs at Utopia, one of his favorite studios. Upon listening to “Brick 2,” he realized that the scream recorded by Roger Waters—with some difficulty—to link this song to the previous one, “The Happiest Days of Our Lives,” was nowhere to be found. He searched through all his tapes but could not lay his hands on it. Guthrie then phoned Waters, who was still in France, and asked him to do it again over the phone. After screaming like a banshee in a number of different ways, Waters told him he needed to stop because the people around him were eying him nervously! Guthrie then inserted the new scream into the song with the intention of finding the original and swapping them over during the mixing stage. The exchange was never made, however, and it is therefore the shriek recorded on the phone from France that can be heard on the record.
In reality, “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” is completely atypical of Pink Floyd’s world, and for two main reasons: firstly the rhythm, which is light-years away from the group’s musical orientation, and secondly the children’s choir. Regarding the rhythm, the bass drum stresses every beat of the bar. This is the defining feature of disco music, a genre Pink Floyd would never have dreamed of attempting, not even in their worst nightmares. It was Bob Ezrin who forced the group to cross this particular Rubicon: as soon as he heard Roger Waters singing the song and accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, the tune lodged itself inside his head and he could not get it out. From this moment he knew they had a hit on their hands! The first decision was to adapt the rhythm to the taste of the day. Gilmour remembers: “It wasn’t my idea to do disco music, it was Bob’s. He said to me, ‘Go to a couple of clubs and listen to what’s happening with disco music,’ so I forced myself out and listened to loud, four-to-the-bar bass drums and stuff and thought, Gawd, awful!”116 Nevertheless, the group followed the advice of its producer and recorded an initial version. Waters had written only one verse and one chorus, however, and the whole thing lasted no more than 1:20. This was a bit short for a hit record—in fact out of the question. Ezrin wanted to pad it out by adding two verses and two refrains. But he met with a categorical refusal from the four members of the band, who, in light of their humiliating 1968 flop “Point Me at the Sky,” gave him the following uncompromising answer: “We don’t do singles, so fuck you.”116 The American was undeterred. Faced with Waters’s stubbornness, Ezrin decided to copy the instrumental parts for the verse and chorus onto a second twenty-four-track machine when the band members were not around, and edit them onto the original version: “[…] if you listen,” he explains, “you’ll realize it’s the same verse and chorus twice.”119 Having solved the issue of length, a new problem presented itself: how to fill the second verse. Ezrin then had the idea of bringing in a children’s choir, as he had on Alice Cooper’s 1972 hit “School’s Out.”
An Unforeseen Controversy
Nick Griffiths, in London, received a telephone call from Los Angeles asking him to record children from a school near Britannia Row in Islington. Strangely, Ezrin and Gilmour would both claim to have issued this request! Ezrin is categorical: “I said, ‘Give me 24 tracks of kids singing this thing. I want Cockney, I want posh, fill ’em up.”116 For his part, Gilmour claims to have given Griffiths “a lot of instructions, ten-to-fifteen-year-olds from North London, mostly boys, and I said, ‘get them to sing this song in as many ways as you like,’ and he filled up all the tracks on a 24-track machine with stereo pairs.”9 Whoever made the request, Griffiths got straight down to work. He went to Islington Green School, in the vicinity of Brita
nnia Row Studios, and succeeded in convincing the music teacher, Alun Renshaw (who was “extremely receptive” according to Mason5) to take part in the project. Seizing with both hands the opportunity to show his pupils how a real recording studio works, the teacher brought twenty-three schoolchildren along to Britannia Row without bothering to secure prior authorization from his superiors. “I was a naughty boy,” he told the Daily Telegraph in a 2013 interview, but “we didn’t expect it to be that big.”129 The children positioned themselves on the wooden drum rostrum, and one of the technicians set up a couple of Neumann U87 mics in front of them. The rough mix was then played back on a pair of JBLs installed behind the two mics, which were connected to a Neve compressor. “We sang like the school choir,” says Caroline Greeves, a member of the improvised group of singers, “They said: ‘No, we don’t want you to do that, we want you to sing like you’re in the playground.’”130 According to the technician in charge of the session, eleven stereo takes were recorded, with the last two tracks reserved for the rough mix and the synchro. The session took only half an hour, which meant the teacher was able to get his students back to school in time for their next class!
Once the twenty-four-track tape had been sent back to Los Angeles, Bob Ezrin lost no time in transferring it and preparing the new version of the song. “I played it for Roger as a surprise,” he explains,” “and the grin on his face was unbelievable. From that point on, not only did he get it, but I think he probably believed it was his idea in the first place!”119 Years later, Waters would claim that the memory of the sound at the moment he heard the children singing had made his hair stand on end.130
The success of the record caused some issues. In the press, the educational “powers that be” in Great Britain vigorously criticized the children’s media exposure, and above all the video of the single that was shown on television. In actual fact, extras appeared in this video rather than the Islington children, who lacked Actors Equity cards and were therefore unable to take part. Patricia Kirwan, a member of the London Education Authority, declared that “It is scandalous that it should be allowed to happen in school time, and it can only lead other children who hear the record to emulate the attitudes expressed in it.”9 Meanwhile Margaret Maden, the principal of Islington Green School, became the target of vehement attacks, and had to change jobs. Alun Renshaw, the music teacher, emigrated to Australia in disgust at the British educational system. The school was eventually paid £1,000 in compensation and presented with a platinum disc. The children were given concert tickets and copies of both the album and the single. However, this did not prevent them bringing legal action against Pink Floyd for unpaid royalties in 2004.
A Gold-Plated Brick
Musically, in addition to Mason’s disco drums, the song also provides an opportunity to hear Waters and Gilmour singing together. Waters’s Precision sounds powerful and funky, and provides the perfect support for the bass drum. The bass is tuned in drop D (in other words the bottom string tuned down from E to D). It seems to have been recorded on October 6, in the closing stages of production, according to the Producers Workshop recording notes. Once again, however, it is Gilmour who excels with his various guitar parts. First of all he lays down an excellent clear-toned, funky rhythm part on his “Black Strat,” which he doubles, recording directly into the console. He also adds overdubs of distorted guitar, initially underlining the vocal line and later playing power chords. The sound is probably enhanced with MXR Phase 90 or Electric Mistress. But his key moment is the superb solo he plays after the children’s singing (from 2:09). For this he uses his 1955 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop, again plugged straight into the console. He would later explain that although Bob Ezrin was completely happy with the solo, he himself felt that it lacked substance. He therefore persuaded the producer to replay what he had just played through his Mesa Boogie Mark I and record it on a new track, thereby giving his guitar a more aggressive rock sound. A tambourine can be heard during this solo, which was added (by Bob Ezrin?) at the Producers Workshop on September 15. There are also various keyboard parts played by Rick Wright and this time recorded at Cherokee Studios on September 7: a Hammond, pad sounds on the Prophet-5, and probably, as James Guthrie would claim, a Minimoog.
Following this solo section, Mason’s drums alone serve as the guide for the various different spoken phrases and effects that conclude the song (from 3:21): the sadistic voice of the teachers (Wrong, do it again!—If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding!—How can you have any pudding in you don’t eat yer meat?—You! Yes, you behind the bike sheds! Stand still, laddie!), the school playground and, finally, a ringing telephone.
The single version does not include this closing sound effects section, ending instead with a fade-out of Gilmour’s solo, and that the intro begins with four bars of Mason’s drumming and Gilmour’s two rhythm guitars, unlike the album version, which opens with Waters’s scream and the lead vocal.
“Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” was later adopted by the young black population of Soweto as a protest song in their revolt against apartheid in the schools of South Africa. The government banned both the single and the album, and the few copies that were sold would be confiscated.
Alice Cooper would pay homage to the Floyd song in his own unique way by incorporating the first part of “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” into “School’s Out” at his concerts.
For Pink Floyd Addicts
In the United Kingdom, the bike sheds are traditionally where high school students surreptitiously gather to indulge in various illicit activities such as cigarette smoking.
Mother
Roger Waters / 5:32
Musicians
David Gilmour: vocals, acoustic guitar, electric lead guitar, bass
Roger Waters: vocals, acoustic guitar
Bob Ezrin: keyboards
Jeff Porcaro: drums
Recorded
Britannia Row, Islington, London: September 1978–March 1979
Super Bear Studios, Berre-les-Alpes, Alpes-Maritimes (France): April–July 1979
Studio Miraval, Domaine de Miraval, Le Val, Var (France): April–July 1979
Cherokee Recording Studios, Los Angeles: September 6–8, 1979
Producers Workshop, Hollywood: September 12–November 1, 1979
Technical Team
Producers: Bob Ezrin, David Gilmour, Roger Waters
Co-producer: James Guthrie
Sound Engineers: James Guthrie, Nick Griffiths, Patrice Quef, Brian Christian, Rick Hart
Genesis
The third brick in the wall concerns Pink’s relationship with his mother, a mother who tries to make up for her son’s lack of a father with overprotective love that becomes suffocating. As in “Dogs” (on the album Animals), Roger Waters resorts to the technique of anaphora in writing of his mother, wherein each question he asks her begins with the same word: Mother do you think they’ll drop the bomb?… Mother should I build a wall? This hints at the state of extreme anxiety of the young Pink, for whom the world, both the external and the internal, seems to represent a permanent danger.
In the second section, Pink’s mother tries to answer all her son’s questions and soothe his anxieties: Mama’s gonna keep you right here under her wing/She won’t let you fly but she might let you sing. And then: Of course mama’ll help you build the wall. She is clearly seeking to reassure Pink (while reassuring herself?), but all she does is add to his fears by projecting her own frustrations onto him. Worst of all, she says she wants to help him construct the wall that is designed to protect him, but in reality is the main symptom of her son’s confusion.
In the final section of the song, years have elapsed and Pink has grown up. His apprehensions remain or have even intensified, for he asks his mother if she’s good enough… if she’s dangerous (“she” being his wife or rather future wife). Thus Pink is unsure of his feelings, just as he is unsure of himself. In any case, he still needs his mother’s advice—which she does
not hold back on: Mama’s gonna check out all your girlfriends for you/Mama won’t let anyone dirty get through. In short, Pink will always be her baby blue… The last line of the song is a painful acknowledgment of the dimensions of the metaphorical wall: Mother, did it need to be so high? Presumably not. But isn’t this how some human relationships work? On the one side oppression; on the other, submission. This suffocating mother is the very opposite of Lennon’s on the 1970 album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, who was absent. Are we to conclude that well-balanced mothers would not have enabled Waters and Lennon to develop into such talented and successful songwriters? It is certainly a question worth asking.
Was Roger Waters inspired to write the song by his own mother? The songwriter denied it in the radio interview he gave to Tommy Vance in 1979: “This isn’t a portrait of my mother, although some of the, you know, one or two of the things in there apply to her as well as to I’m sure lots of other people’s mothers. Funnily enough, lots of people recognize that and in fact, a woman that I know the other day who’d heard the album, called me up and said she’d liked it. And she said that listening to that track made her feel very guilty and she’s got herself three kids, and I wouldn’t have said she was particularly over-protective towards her children.”126 Subsequently, Waters would be quick to acknowledge that “it’s a very crude portrayal. It’s a cliché.”9
Production