{"id":975763,"date":"2020-03-19T10:17:12","date_gmt":"2020-03-19T16:17:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=969667"},"modified":"2020-03-19T10:17:12","modified_gmt":"2020-03-19T16:17:12","slug":"flashback-pink-floyd-take-another-brick-in-the-wall-part-2-to-number-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/music-news\/flashback-pink-floyd-take-another-brick-in-the-wall-part-2-to-number-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Flashback: Pink Floyd Take \u2018Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2\u2019 to Number 1"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By the spring of 1980, Pink Floyd<\/a> were one of the biggest bands in the world. Their four most recent albums (1973\u2019s Dark Side of the Moon<\/em>, 1975\u2019s Wish You Were Here<\/em>, 1977\u2019s Animals,<\/em> and 1979\u2019s The Wall<\/em>) sold by the millions and they packed stadiums across the globe whenever they toured. Seventies superstar bands like the Eagles and Led Zeppelin were running on fumes by this point and would split before the year ended, but Floyd had just started their ambitious Wall<\/em> tour that was unlike anything rock fans had ever seen.<\/p>\n

The only thing the group had never quite figured out was how to score a big radio hit. \u201cMoney\u201d did manage to reach Number 13 on the Hot 100 in 1973, but they became a quintessential album band after that brief triumph and didn\u2019t even try to compete with the likes of John Denver, the Bee Gees, and Fleetwood Mac for Top 40 airtime. The title track from Wish You Were Here<\/em> could have probably become a massive hit, but they didn\u2019t even release it as a single. The sole single from the album was \u201cHave a Cigar\u201d and it largely sunk without a trace. They didn\u2019t even bother releasing a single for Animals<\/em> since the prospect of any commercial station airing all 18 minutes of \u201cDogs\u201d was unthinkable.<\/p>\n

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When word got out in 1979 that their next release told the story of a bitter, depressed rock star named Pink told across four vinyl sides, few people imagined it would produce a big hit. But it was 40 years ago this week that \u201cAnother Brick in the Wall, Part 2\u201d knocked Queen\u2019s \u201cCrazy Little Thing Called Love\u201d out of the Number One spot on the Hot 100 and stayed there for four weeks until Blondie\u2019s \u201cCall Me\u201d unseated it.<\/p>\n

The song was inspired by Roger Waters<\/a>\u2019 miserable experience with the British educational system as a child in the Fifties. \u201cSome 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,\u201d he told The Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a> in 2015. \u201cThat was their idea of education.\u201d<\/p>\n

On his original homemade demo, he sang the chorus (\u201cWe don\u2019t need no education\/We don\u2019t need no thought control\/No dark sarcasm in the classroom\/Teacher leave these kids alone\u201d) by himself. But when he went into a Los Angeles studio to cut the song with producer Bob Ezrin, they sent the tape off to engineer Nick Griffiths in England and instructed him to have a choir of children sing it. (Ezrin and Waters both claim today that they had the idea themselves.)<\/p>\n

Griffiths brought 25 kids from Islington Green School in North London into the studio and had them sing the part. \u201cI originally thought we\u2019d use their voices as background for the lead vocals Dave [Gilmour] and I had recorded, but the sound we heard on the tape when it came in was so emotionally powerful that we let them sing their part alone,\u201d Waters told The WSJ.<\/em> \u201cTo hear those kids from a not-so-affluent part of London singing the lyrics took my breath away. By adding those voices, Nicky had made the song visceral and deeply moving in a very serious way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Crucially, Ezrin also added a kick drum on every beat. It gave the song a disco-like feel that made it palatable for radio audiences. Before they knew it, the song was blaring out of car stereos all across the world. Teenagers may have not understood the nuances of the story Waters was telling, but they loved singing \u201cWe don\u2019t need no education\u201d at the top of their lungs. Here\u2019s the original video that features footage from the 1982 Wall<\/em> movie.<\/p>\n

Pink Floyd never had another single even graze the Top 40 after this, but it didn\u2019t matter. They already had so much success that they could continue headlining stadiums even after Waters left a few years later. And when Waters revived The Wall<\/em> for a solo tour in 2010, it ran for three years and grossed nearly half a billion dollars. Every night, he brought out local kids to sing along to \u201cAnother Brick in the Wall, Part 2.\u201d<\/p>\n

Waters is supposed to launch his This Is Not a Drill tour on July 8th in Pittsburgh, but the coronavirus situation may delay those plans. Whenever he\u2019s able to tour, however, \u201cAnother Brick in the Wall, Part 2\u201d will almost certainly be in the set list. It remains the most popular song he ever created and it gets rediscovered by generation after generation of teenagers who viscerally connect with the message.<\/p>\n

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Popular on Rolling Stone <\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By the spring of 1980, Pink Floyd were one of the biggest bands in the world. Their four most recent albums (1973\u2019s Dark Side of the Moon, 1975\u2019s Wish You Were Here, 1977\u2019s Animals, and 1979\u2019s The Wall) sold by the millions and they packed stadiums across the globe whenever they toured. Seventies superstar bands […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-975763","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-08 05:01:42","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KFMU Solar Powered Radio","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/975763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=975763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/975763\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=975763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=975763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=975763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}