by Mark Blake
Back at Super Bear, Ezrin’s idea would find a home on ‘Another Brick in the Wall Part 2’, The Wall’s stinging condemnation of the education system, in which Pink is bullied by tyrannical schoolmasters, before standing up to his oppressors. The song contained a winning chorus that denounced the need for education, and refused to bow to ‘thought control’. By the spring of 1979, only Gilmour’s clipped guitar figure gave any hint of the disco rhythm of the finished version. ‘There was all that delayed guitar and the synthesiser melody and Roger’s voice on top,’ remembers Ezrin. ‘It was a funereal, gloomy thing,’ recalls Nick Mason. ‘Dirge-like might be a little too disparaging.’
Ezrin suggested adding a disco beat to the track, telling David Gilmour to go to a nightclub and actually listen to some of the music he was talking about. The guitarist grudgingly obliged. Waters and Mason had no such reservations. ‘I thought the disco drums were great,’ says Mason. ‘But then I did have a slightly more simplistic approach anyway.’ Another song on the album, ‘Run Like Hell’, would have a similar drum beat in the end.
Listening to the new version of the song, Ezrin had another brain-wave. ‘The minute I heard the song with the beat on, I said, “This is a smash.” But the problem was it was only one verse and one chorus long.’
Despite a couple of ventures into the US singles market in recent years, Floyd were still resistant to the idea of chasing hits. ‘Roger said, “Fuck it, we don’t want a single,”’ says Ezrin. ‘So I started pleading, but he was like, “No, I’m not going to be told what to do.” So we waited until they’d gone home, and copied the track. I found a small disco break that we picked out of a verse, stuck it into the middle to link it and stuck the first verse back in and tacked the ending on. Now we had a single. James [Guthrie] and I played the song to Roger and he liked it.’
But with two verses exactly the same, the song needed some extra input. ‘There’s some controversy over who said, “Let’s put some kids on it,”’ admits Ezrin. The producer had used children’s voices on albums for Alice Cooper and Lou Reed, so has largely been credited as suggesting the same for The Wall. ‘I’m known as “the kid guy”, but James recalls that it was Roger’s idea. Whoever said it, it was a great idea.’
Guthrie and Ezrin made a twenty-four-track reel of the song, leaving twenty tracks open. They sent the tape from France to Nick Griffiths at Britannia Row in London. ‘We said to Nick, “Please find us some kids, and just fill up the tracks. Have them do it every way possible – cockney, posh, nasty, angelic …”’
Griffiths contacted Islington Green school in nearby Prebend Street and enlisted the help of the school’s head of music, Alun Renshaw. Described as an ‘anarchic teacher’ in what was then a struggling inner-city comprehensive, Renshaw had previously written his own socially conscious musical, Requiem for a Sinking Block of Flats, which had been staged at the school. He had a poster for the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks on the wall of the music room, and took what might be described as a highly individual approach to teaching. As one of his former pupils recalls, ‘We’d go outside in Alun’s music lesson, sit on the side of the road, listen to the cars and then be told to draw the sound.’
Griffiths asked Renshaw if he could round up some children to sing at Britannia Row. ‘I thought: Great, yes!’ says Renshaw, who was enticed by the promise of free recording time for the school orchestra. ‘I wanted to make music relevant to the kids – not just sitting around listening to Tchaikovsky. I thought the lyrics were great – “We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control …” I just thought it would be a wonderful experience for the kids.’ Unfortunately, Renshaw forgot to ask permission from the school’s headmistress; an oversight that would have a serious impact in the months to come.
Alun rounded up those children he could find, not all from the school choir. As one of them recalls, ‘I think it was more of a case of, “What are you doing?” “Nothing?” “Come with me.”’ Caroline Greeves (formerly Woods) was among the twenty or so pupils who found themselves at Britannia Row. To start with, Griffiths recorded just three pupils on their own before inviting the rest to join, conducting them as best he could. ‘We sang in our best school choir voices, but then we were told to shout and make it a lot more cockney,’ says Caroline. ‘They’d played us a tape of the song first and I remember it ran on to the next track. I went home that night and told my brother, who was a big Pink Floyd fan, that not only had I sung on their next album, I’d also heard some of their unreleased material.’
Not all of the ad-hoc choir were so easily impressed. ‘I was a mod wannabe and not interested in Pink Floyd at the time,’ says pupil Tabitha Mellor, who was more impressed by the ‘Space Age sound desk’ but baffled by the bales of straw placed behind them at Britannia Row during the recording. ‘The engineers told us it was to absorb the sound and improve the acoustics.’
With the session complete, Griffiths multi-tracked the voices to make it sound like the work of a full choir and then Federal Expressed the tape back to the band in Los Angeles. ‘We threw it up on the console and I opened all the faders,’ says Ezrin, ‘and when that gang came back at us, it sounded just spectacular. Roger was beaming. From the moment we heard it, we knew we had a hit record.’ While the group agreed to release the song as a single, none of them knew it would give them a Christmas number 1 hit.
The artistic disagreements between David Gilmour and Roger Waters during The Wall would, in many cases, have a positive result on the songs. As James Guthrie recalled, ‘Roger was always willing to edit, to throw away something that wasn’t working, no matter how much time he might have put it into it.’ The song ‘Nobody Home’ was a late addition to the album, recorded in October at the Producers’ Workshop. Challenged to write something by Gilmour, Waters left the studio ‘in a sulk’, according to the guitarist, before coming back the next morning with ‘something fantastic’. Waters’ temper had yielded one of the most atmospheric and moving songs on the record. In ‘Nobody’s Home’, Pink sits in his LA hotel room, spaced out in front of the television, unable or unwilling to do anything else. The lyrics were loaded with references to Syd Barrett; ‘the wild, staring eyes’, ‘the obligatory Hendrix perm’ and ‘elastic bands keeping my shoes on’ all referred to his appearance and disconnected behaviour during Pink Floyd’s first US tour in 1967.
For some of Syd’s other friends, certain moments on The Wall took them right back in time. ‘There’s a moment on the album where you hear this voice, and it’s meant to be Pink’s manager, saying, “It’s time to go … It’s time to go,”’ says Matthew Scurfield, of the spoken words leading into the song ‘Comfortably Numb’. ‘That reminds me of being with Syd in Earlham Street, and the band were downstairs waiting to take him to the gig: “Come on, let’s get him away from sitting on the floor or at the table, painting and being in his own fairytale world.”’
For ‘Comfortably Numb’, Waters would also write about his own experience during Floyd’s 1977 US tour, when he was struck down with what transpired to be hepatitis and was injected with a muscle relaxant which enabled him to go on stage and perform. In the song, Pink undergoes the same experience, slipping into a state of delirium before playing the show. But what would become one of the defining songs of Pink Floyd’s career was blighted with arguments.
“‘Comfortably Numb” was the song we argued about the most,’ remembers Bob Ezrin. Gilmour originally presented Waters with a chord sequence left over from his solo album sessions (‘I never used it then, but thought: I’ll store that and come back to it later’). Yet, as Ezrin explains, Waters was resistant to using it as ‘this was Roger’s record, about Roger, for Roger’. Ezrin insisted, as the existing song needed filling out. Waters went away and begrudgingly wrote what started out as a spoken-word verse and additional lyrics for the chorus. ‘And what he came back with just gave me goosebumps,’ says Ezrin.
Nevertheless, by the time they reached Los Angeles they had two versions of th
e song. One was stripped-down and harder, with very little of Michael Kamen’s orchestral arrangements; the other was what Ezrin describes as ‘the grander Technicolor, orchestral version’. Gilmour wanted the harder arrangement; both Waters and Ezrin favoured the wide-screen orchestral version. ‘So that turned into a real arm-wrestle,’ says Ezrin. Having repaired to an Italian restaurant in North Hollywood to thrash out a compromise, a full-scale argument erupted. ‘But at least this time there were only two sides to the argument: Dave on one side; Roger and I on the other.’ Finally, the deal was struck. The body of the song would comprise the orchestral arrangement; the outro, including that final, incendiary guitar solo, would be taken from the Gilmour-favoured, harder version. ‘I’m so glad we did that,’ raves Ezrin, who clearly adores the song. “‘Comfortably Numb” still makes me think of being in bed with a comforter pulled up around your ears, and a pillow over your head, saying, “Leave me alone. I want to be alone in this cocoon.” And then, at the end, Dave breaks out and declares himself, and a whole measure of beauty and anger has to be expressed.’
As Gilmour ruefully admitted, ‘I think things like “Comfortably Numb” were the last embers of mine and Roger’s ability to work collaboratively together.’
‘This is terrible. It’s rubbish. What are we going to do?’
Not everyone was impressed by The Wall.
The first official playback took place at Columbia’s headquarters in Century City, California. According to the band, more than one of the executives in attendance balked at what they heard. Those hoping for Dark Side of the Moon Part Two, or even another instalment of Wish You Were Here, were instead bombarded with some ninety minutes of Kurt Weill-style opera, military marching bands, dissonant heavy metal, disco, divebombing aeroplanes … all washed down with lyrics that suggested an existential cry for help. Waters had also engaged in another battle of wills with the company. After being told that, as The Wall was a double album, he would receive a reduced percentage per track, he threatened to withhold the record. Columbia backed down. It was not an auspicious start.
Then the unthinkable happened. On 16 November 1979, with the album still two weeks away from being issued in the UK, ‘Another Brick in the Wall Part 2’ was released as a single. Gerald Scarfe was badgered into producing a promotional video in time for an airing on the BBC’s Top of the Pops. ‘I said to Roger, “How on earth can I do a video in time for next Tuesday? Today is Wednesday!” He said, “Just find some kids!”’ Scarfe hastily assembled a group of stage school children to be filmed singing, intercut with footage already produced for the upcoming stage show. The video brought to life the images record buyers would first encounter on the artwork for the album.
Three weeks later, Pink Floyd, a band who hadn’t released a single in the UK since 1968, had a number 1 hit, usurping ‘Walking on the Moon’ by The Police; one of the new wave groups that had emerged as an antidote to Pink Floyd and their ilk. ‘We were astonished,’ admits Nick Mason.
‘Another Brick in the Wall Part 2’ reached number 1 in the US, Norway, Portugal, Israel, West Germany and South Africa, where it was later banned after being adopted as a protest song by black school-children against apartheid. Who knows how widespread the so-called public outcry about the song really was, but it was sufficient for the Daily Mail, one of Britain’s most staunchly right-wing newspapers, to pounce on the story. It reported that Patricia Kirwan, a member of the Inner London Education Authority, had voiced her disapproval: ‘It seems very ironical that these words should be sung by children from a school with such a bad academic record … the grammar is appalling, too.’ Islington Green was an easy target. Headmistress Margaret Maden defended her position by claiming that music teacher Alun Renshaw ‘wasn’t clear about the lyrics, but we decided it wasn’t as bad as all that’. As damage limitation, she banned the children from appearing on television or having their photographs taken in connection with the record. ‘I remember being cross that there were different kids singing it in the video,’ says Caroline Greeves. ‘But we were told we couldn’t do it as we didn’t have Equity cards. Some of the kids at our school were in [the children’s school drama] Grange Hill, so we knew about Equity cards and thought that was a good explanation. Really the school didn’t want any more adverse publicity.’
‘The parents didn’t have a problem with it,’ insists Alun Renshaw. ‘They couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.’ Within a month, with the uproar still going on around him, Renshaw emigrated to Australia, where he still lives today. ‘The forces of Conservatism had come in by then,’ he laughs. ‘I never saw the song as a big political statement, but Margaret Thatcher had become Prime Minister, and I expect she did … Although who gives a shit about her?’
With the band still in Los Angeles when the scandal broke, Britannia Row engineer Nick Griffiths found himself doorstepped by news reporters and, on one occasion, forced to escape the studio via a window. The press were also quick to point out that the children hadn’t been paid for their performances on the record and had therefore been ripped off by an unscrupulous multi-millionaire rock band. In the end, each child was given a free copy of The Wall, while the school received a £1,000 donation. In 1996, a music business lawyer traced a number of the pupils that had sung on the record and began pursuing a claim for additional royalties on their behalf. By 2007 four of the pupils had been paid.
Released on 30 November in the UK and a week later in the US, Floyd’s new work prompted both confusion and vitriol among the music press. New Musical Express had embraced punk rock and was now a tough nut to crack for bands of Pink Floyd’s vintage, especially with an album the magazine viewed as a ‘monument of self-centred pessimism’. Melody Maker was more sympathetic: ‘I’m not sure whether it’s brilliant or terrible but I find it utterly compelling.’ In America, the band’s old nemesis Rolling Stone magazine offered cautious praise, with writer Kurt Loder applauding the grandeur of the exercise but warning that Roger Waters’ worldview was ‘so unremittingly dismal and acidulous that it makes contemporary gloom-mongers such as Randy Newman or, say, Nico seem like Peter Pan and Tinker Bell’.
Behind the scenes, the suspicion that some members of Pink Floyd might agree with such criticisms is borne out by their comments about The Wall since. Wright, understandably perhaps, is said not to like all of the music on the album, while Gilmour has admitted to not quite sharing Waters’ views about the music industry and their audience, particularly the bassist’s desire to build a wall between themselves and their fans. The Wall was also, said Gilmour, ‘a year of very hard work by Roger and all of us, turning a good idea that can only be described as a pig’s ear into a silk purse.’
There was also the small matter of credits to dampen the enthusiasm. With Mason and Wright not named anywhere on the record, Gilmour eked out just three co-writer credits for ‘Run Like Hell’, ‘Young Lust’ and ‘Comfortably Numb’. ‘If anyone was not given sufficient credit it was Dave,’ said Mason.
‘I think The Wall is stupefyingly good,’ claims Waters. ‘Christ! What a brilliant idea that was. It holds together so well.’
The album now seems to encapsulate everything that both repels some and attracts others: its bombast, pretension and unstinting melodrama. While the narrative was inspired by Waters’ disgust at playing stadiums, perversely, much of The Wall’s music was perfect for being played in such large amphitheatres. The opening fanfare, ‘In the Flesh’, with its dive-bombing sound effects and grinding riff, was a pastiche of the heavy metal bands then filling stadiums across America. But for fans of the genre, Floyd had simply written a sterling heavy rock song to match similar efforts by Black Sabbath or megalomaniac guitar hero Ted Nugent. Any intended parody was likely to go over the heads of many of those listening.
Meanwhile, ‘Comfortably Numb’, ‘Run Like Hell’ and ‘Hey You’ were a gift to FM radio DJs. This was grown-up rock with a message, but the message would never encroach on David Gilmour’s next guitar solo. Listenin
g over twenty-five years later, The Wall’s hidden treasures include those often overlooked moments bridging the gaps in the story: Waters’ painful vocals on ‘Don’t Leave Me Now’ where he sounds as if he might be drawing his last breath; the ugly, amateurish-sounding synthesiser at the start of ‘One of My Turns’, both of which go against the musical grain but are perfect for the songs. These snippets give you a glimpse of how The Wall might have sounded had it been a Roger Waters solo album. Graceless and uncompromising on their own, they make perfect sense alongside Gilmour’s warmer, welcoming contributions. To paraphrase Waters, what a great team they made.
To coincide with the album’s release, Roger granted BBC Radio 1 DJ Tommy Vance an interview. Vance played the whole of The Wall, inter-cut with Waters’ comments about each track, while Floyd fans sat by their radios taping the programme. Not that it made a jot of difference to the sales. The Wall cleared a million copies in its first two months, and is now believed to have sold somewhere in the region of 23 million copies worldwide.
