Another Brick In The Wall #5

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

After a long summer hiatus, I'm starting back up with Part 5 of The Wall which is super exciting since we have arrived at the long awaited Disc 2.

Pink has just finished building his wall and has put in the final brick. His isolation from society is complete. Now we go into "Hey You," an acoustic number to get us back into the story. Pink has now decided that completely shunning society was not the best idea and this song is his way to try to connect again. However, his wall is still up so no one can hear him calling and as the song progresses, his cries become more desperate as he realizes that there is no escape. Fun Fact: This song was shot but not included in the movie due to time restraints.

The iconic wall that Pink is trying to break free of.

"Is There Anybody Out There?" is very similar in plot to "Hey You." It is mostly a desperate song by Pink trying to reach out and he is asking the questions since there is no response. The other half is an instrumental song with TV show dialogue snippets. One excerpt is from Gunsmoke and the other is from Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. Also, the shrill siren-like noise you where in this track is the same noise you hear in "Echoes" (Meddle, 1971) that was made to sound like a whale call. It is simply a wah-wah pedal with the cables reversed.

Now we flow into "Nobody Home" which is about how lonely Pink feels on the road with no one to talk to . But it's al pretty much about everyone's mental problems or drug abuse while on tour. Roger Water's wrote some of it about Syd Barrett's mental state in 1967 and the lines "I got a silver spoon on a chain/Got a grand piano to prop up my mortal remains" allude to Richard Wright's alleged struggle with cocaine at the time. Since there is so much allusion to drugs and deteriorating mental states, are we to assume that Pink too is suffering from an addiction or some mental disease? There is a television playing in the background with the lines "Surprise, Surprise, Surprise" that connects to the line "I got thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from." "Nobody Home" was the last song to be written for the album and it is also David Gilmour's favourite song.

Waters singing "Vera" during a Wall concert. This section is a small room that folds out of the wall. Really cool!

"Vera" is a very ironic and sad song. The Vera in this song is Vera Lynn, a singer who came to fame in World War II with her song "We'll Meet Again." Pink, similar to Waters, would never meet his father since he died in the war. The line "Vera, what has become of you?" suggests the Vera Lynn and her promise have vanished. The opening dialogue of the song "Simon, where the hell are you?" is from the 1969 movie, The Battle of Britain, a choice which makes a lot of sense contextually. This song was recorded with the New York Symphony Orchestra.


All in all, this section of The Wall is a little depressing, but all the good stuff is about to come! Pink has tried very hard to get out from his wall and reconnect with society. Will he prevail or is his resistance futile? More to come in Part 6!

Another Brick in the Wall #2

If you haven't read the first post, click here to read it!

A baby cries: the official beginning of the flashback that is The Wall and Pink Floyd's story. "Thin Ice" is the start of a cautionary tale for Pink, told by his mother. Though it starts with a soothing mother cooing to her baby that she loves him and "Daddy loves [him] too," it warns that "the sea may look warm,...the sky may look blue," but "don't be surprised if a crack in the ice appears under your feet."

Eric Fletchers Waters, a victim of war.

This song also has reference to the toll that war can take not only on the populace, but the children left behind from it. When Waters performs this song, he displays a picture of his father who died in World War II. This photo is replaced with others that have been submitted by fans for those who were also victims of war, terrorism, or intolerance.

"Thin Ice" leads into "Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 1" in which Pink learns of his father's death in the war and starts to begin building The Wall. At the end, we hear wailing, screaming, shouting kids in the background and we crossfade into "Happiest Days of Our Lives."

The Schoolteacher

With the sounds of the helicopter, we hear the school teacher yelling at a student to "stand still." Pink's school life was strict and often abusive. In video versions of this song, Pink is hit by a belt by the schoolteacher in order to cover up his own humiliation at home.

We then segue with a classic Waters scream into "Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2." After Pink is humiliated by his teacher, he dreams that the other school children are revolting against the schoolteacher. He sees education as "thought control" and forcing children to learn to conform, "just another brick in the wall" of life.With his abuse from the schoolteacher, Pink continues to build his wall.

We'll continue on again with Pink's story soon! Stay tuned for #3

Another Brick in the Wall #1

It starts with "...we came in?" Then we go to the real show. My favourite, and possibly the greatest, rock opera of all time, The Wall in which we follow the story of Mr. Pink Floyd.

I had the recent privilege to see Roger Waters perform The Wall live. It is officially the best concert I've ever been to. At 68, Mr. Waters still knows how to throw a good show. If I had the opportunity, I would totally go again.

Roger Waters performing "The Show Must Go On"

For those who are unfamiliar with the general story line of The Wall, it follows thusly:
Our main character is Mr. Pink Floyd, overprotected by his mother, abused by his school teacher, and cheated on by his cold wife. We follow his story growing up, becoming a rock star, his own infidelity to his wife, his violent tendencies, and his struggles with the wall. The wall, in this case, is an emotional wall built by the emotional stunting of his life. In the end, he goes on trial to figure out if he should tear down the wall or not.

"In the Flesh?" sets the tone and the scene of the world we are about to be immersed in.  A world where feelings are hard to come by, where conformity is the only way, and where "riff-raff" is put into a shooting line.

We find out that the band performing is actually a "surrogate band" to tell us Pink's story, and not Pink himself, since he "isn't well, he stayed back at the hotel." Should we take this to mean he's strung out on drugs? Or that he's recuperating from recently bringing down his (emotional) wall? Most likely, it's as the song says, "to find out where [we] stand" when it comes to Pink's story. This is probably because (as we find out later) he had a hallucination in which he was a fascist Neo-Nazi-esque dictator and started setting soldiers on fans at one of his concerts. But maybe this is just the world Pink lives in, since the surrogate band wishes to have everyone shot.

"Trust Us" - The Symbol of the world in which Pink Floyd lives

We'll continue to follow Mr. Pink Floyd's story in another post. This is just one of many considering how much there is to talk about this two-sided, inspired album.