Roger Waters of Pink Floyd wrote this song about his views on formal education, which were framed during his time at the Cambridgeshire School for Boys. He hated his grammar school teachers and felt they were more interested in keeping the kids quiet than in teaching them. The wall refers to the emotional barrier Waters built around himself because he wasn't in touch with reality. The bricks in the wall are the events in his life that propelled him to build this proverbial wall around himself - his school teacher was just another brick in the wall.
Waters told Mojo, December 2009, that the song is meant to be satirical. He explained: "You couldn't find anybody in the world more pro-education than me. But the education I went through in boys' grammar school in the '50s was very controlling and demanded rebellion. The teachers were weak and therefore easy targets. The song is meant to be a rebellion against errant government, against people who have power over you, who are wrong. Then it absolutely demanded that you rebel against that."
The children's chorus that sang on this track came from a school in Islington, England, and was chosen because it was close to the studio. It was made up of 23 kids between the ages of 13 and 15. They were overdubbed 12 times, making it sound like there were a lot more of them.
The addition of the choir convinced Waters that the song would come together. He told Rolling Stone: "It suddenly made it sort of great."
Pink Floyd's producer, Bob Ezrin, had the idea for the children's choir. It wasn't the first time he enlisted schoolkids to sing on a rock song: Ezrin used a choir of kids when he produced Alice Cooper's "
School's Out" in 1972 - he liked to use children's voices on songs about school.
When performing "School's Out" live, Alice Cooper often transitions it into the chorus of "Another Brick In The Wall," a nod to Ezrin's work on both tracks.
There was some controversy when it was revealed that the kids in the chorus were not paid. It also didn't sit well with teachers that kids were singing an anti-school song. The chorus was given recording time in the studio in exchange for their contribution; the school received £1000 and a Platinum record.
The disco beat was suggested by producer Bob Ezrin, who was a fan of the group Chic. This was completely unexpected from Pink Floyd, who specialized in making records you were supposed to listen to, not dance to. Ezrin got the idea for the beat when he was in New York and heard music Nile Rodgers of Chic was making.
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Pink Floyd rarely released singles that were also on an album because they felt their songs were best appreciated in the context of an album, where the songs and the artwork come together to form a theme. Bob Ezrin, who is Canadian and didn't have the aversion to singles common in the UK, convinced the band that "Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)" could stand on its own, and that issuing it as a single would not hurt album sales. When the band relented and released it as a single, it became a huge hit, going to #1 in many countries, including the US and UK. It didn't seem to hurt album sales;
The Wall sold a staggering 23 million copies in America and also did big business internationally.
Two more songs from the album were subsequently released as singles in America and various other countries, but not in the UK: "
Run Like Hell" and "
Comfortably Numb." They had little chart impact.
The general concept of the album is to explore the metaphorical walls we put up to protect ourselves. Any time something bad happens, we withdraw further, putting up "another brick in the wall." Within that concept there are many layers, including the impact a heavy-handed education system can have on kids, which is explored here.
The album follows the character Pink, who in many ways is a proxy for Roger Waters, who was using the story as a kind of therapy (according to Waters, he started actual therapy in 1981).
The album is centered on the character Pink, a proxy of sorts for Roger Waters, who was using the story as a kind of therapy (according to Waters, he started actual therapy in 1981). Bob Ezrin took the unusual step of writing a script to help tie the songs together and provide direction to the band so they'd know what kind of atmosphere to create from song to song. Waters and Ezrin drove the project creatively.
In 1982, The Wall was made into a movie starring Bob Geldof as Pink. The original plan was to combine animated sequences by Gerald Scarfe with live footage of the band performing, but they ended up scrapping the performance footage and scripting the whole thing. The film is best viewed with a very open mind.
The Wall was one of two ideas Roger Waters brought to the band when they got together to record in 1978. His other idea was The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking, which he ended up recording as a solo album.
The band took a break after touring for their 1977 album Animals. Guitarist David Gilmour and keyboard player Richard Wright both worked on solo albums during this time, so Waters was the only member who came in with ideas for the band. As such, he had a great deal of control over the project, which didn't always sit well with his bandmates. By the time they finished the album, Wright had been booted from the band but was paid a salary to complete the tour. On the road, they all kept some distance, traveling in separate trailers.
The lead vocals are a mix of Roger Waters and David Gilmour. Most of the album has Waters on lead, but Gilmour sings some key tracks, including "
Young Lust" and the first half of "
Hey You."
When Pink Floyd first recorded this song, it was just a short interstitial piece for the album, one verse and one chorus lasting 1:20. According to producer Bob Ezrin, he wanted it longer, but the band refused. So while they were gone, Ezrin sent Nick Griffths, the engineer at the studio, to record the children in Islington singing that verse and chorus, which Ezrin added to the recording along with some drum fills to make it a complete song. He played it for Waters, who liked what he heard.
Note that the end result is the same verse and chorus repeated twice, but with Waters and Gilmour singing the first one and the school children singing the second. Rather resourceful.
There is a Part 1 and even a Part 3 of "Another Brick In The Wall." "
Part 1 is the third track on
The Wall. This section, which contains many of the motifs found on Part 2, explains that because Pink's father went off and died in World War II, he built The Wall to protect him from other people. In the 1982 movie adaptation, you see him at the playground with the other kids and their fathers, then one of the kids leaves with his father and Pink tries to touch the father's hand. The father pushes him away quite aggressively, then leaves.
This segues seamlessly into Track 4, "
The Happiest Days Of Our Lives," which runs 1:50. This is the section that includes the lines:
When we grew up and went to school
There were certain teachers who would
Hurt the children any way they could "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" explains that the teachers must have it rough in their own homes, getting thrashed by their "fat and psychopathic wives," which is why they take out their frustrations on the students.
This section flows into "Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)," which is Track 5. Radio stations would sometimes play all three songs together, or start at "The Happiest Days of Our Lives."
Part 3 is Track 6 on Side 2 (
The Wall is a double album). It finds Pink retreating from view, stung by his wife's cheating.
For
the stage show, a giant wall was erected in front of the band using hidden hydraulic lifts as they played. It measured 160x35 feet when completed, and about halfway through the show, the bricks were gradually knocked down to reveal the band.
The show was so elaborate, they had to limit it to just five venues and 31 performances that took place in 1980 and 1981. This was one of the first times a band performed an entire album on a tour - if you saw the show, you didn't hear anything from
Dark Side Of The Moon or any other Floyd albums. Criminally, it was never made into a concert film.
The version released as a single runs 3:10 and fades out on the guitar solo. On the album, there's an additional section where the teacher screams, "If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding!" We then hear a phone ringing, followed by the next track, "
Mother."
Speaking with
Top 2000 a gogo, Roger Waters said: "In the mid-'70s, I'd only just figured out a couple of years before that I was living my life, that I wasn't actually preparing for something, that life was not something that was going to start at some point. This sudden realization that it started a long time ago, you just didn't notice.
Really, the most important thing about that song is not the relationship with the school teacher. It was the first little thing I wrote where I lyrically expressed the idea that you could make or build a wall out of a number of different bricks that when they fit together provided something impermeable, and so this was just one of them.
When you hit puberty and start getting snotty, it's good to have an adult around who will say, 'Well hang on, let's talk about that,' rather than 'be quiet.'"
The line "We don't need no education" is grammatically incorrect. It's a double negative and really means "We need education." This could be a commentary on the quality of the schools.
The original idea for the concept of the actual Wall they wanted to create came from a problem Roger Waters was having during their concerts. When he started thinking about the show, he wanted to isolate himself from the public because he couldn't stand all the yelling and shouting. "The Wall" was not just a symbol and a concept, but a way of separating the band from their audience.
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Suggestion credit:
Raul - Buenos Aires, Argentina
Roger Waters made one more album with Pink Floyd - The Final Cut in 1983 - before leaving in 1985. He thought that would be the end of the band, but his bandmates carried on without him, releasing their next album, A Momentary Lapse Of Reason, in 1987 without him.
To Waters' dismay they played this song and some others from The Wall when they toured.
The 1998 movie The Faculty includes a version of this song by Class Of '99, a group assembled for the sole purpose of recording the song with Layne Staley of Alice in Chains on lead vocals and Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine on guitar.
In Britain, the song was released in November 1979 and went to #1 on December 15, staying at the top for five weeks. This made it both the coveted Christmas #1, the last #1 of the '70s, and the first of the '80s.
On July 21, 1990, Roger Waters staged a production of The Wall in Berlin to celebrate the destruction of The Berlin Wall. During that performance, Cyndi Lauper sang "Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)" in character as a rebellious schoolgirl, complete with the uniform.
In 2004, Peter Rowan, a Scottish musician who ran a royalties firm, started tracking down the kids who sang in the chorus, who were by then in their 30s. Under a 1996 copyright law, they were entitled to a small amount of money for participating on the record. Rowan was not so much interested in the money as in getting the chorus together for a reunion.
On July 7, 2007, Roger Waters performed this at the
Live Earth concert at Giants Stadium in New Jersey. Live Earth was organized to raise awareness of global warming, and the slogan for the event was "Save Our Selves" (S.O.S.). Waters poked fun at Pink Floyd and the event by flying a giant inflatable pig overhead, which was a classic Pink Floyd stage prop, except this one was emblazoned wit the words "Save Our Sausages."
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Suggestion credit:
Bertrand - Paris, France
Roger Waters did the Scottish voices on the track. He told Mojo magazine December 2009, "I can do mad Scotsman and high court judges."
The teacher character in this song shows up again in Pink Floyd's next album,
The Final Cut (1983), notably in the song "
The Hero's Return." He is based on the many men who returned from war and entered the teaching profession, as they had no other opportunities.
"Bully For You" is a song by Tom Robinson Band. The song's lyrical hook is the repeated line, "We don't need no aggravation." Tom Robinson believe Pink Floyd (with whom the TRB shared both management and record label) took it as an influence when they were writing "Another Brick In The Wall," specifically the line, "We don't need no education."
TRB Two was released in March 1979; Floyd's
The Wall followed nine months later. Tom Robinson says in
Classic Rock, November 2015: "There's no question 'We don't need no aggravation' was in the air around Roger Waters. Roger's skills as writer are were far more developed than my own. He put a great idea to better use, so fair play to him."
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Suggestion credit:
Olli - Finland
In 2021, Floyd frontman Roger Waters turned down a "huge, huge amount of money" from Facebook for the right to use "Another Brick in the Wall (part II)" in an ad campaign. For years Waters had been a very vocal supporter of Julian Assange, the head of Wikileaks, who was imprisoned in 2019 for espionage. Waters viewed Assange's arrest as an attempt to silence true journalism and to stifle dissenting voices. He sees Facebook and the other big tech platforms as being part of that effort to silence dissent and "take over absolutely everything."
Waters minced no words in his refusal of the money, stating, "And the answer is, F- you. No f-in' way." He also called Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg "one of the most powerful idiots in the world" after questioning how Zuckerberg became so powerful after starting FaceMash, which rated Harvard women based on their looks.
Waters did not make the announcement on social media. He did it the old fashioned way: at a press conference.