“From the beginning of ‘One of My Turns’ where the door opens, there, through to the end of side three, the scenario is an American hotel room, the groupie leaves at the end of ‘One of My Turns’ and then ‘Don’t Leave Me Now’ he sings, which is to anybody, it’s not to her and it’s not really to his wife, it’s kind of to anybody,” Waters explained to BBC Radio 1 in 1979 during the initial promotional cycle for The Wall. Waters returned to his initial inspiration of rock star alienation on ‘Another Brick in Wall, Part III’ – as he discovers his wife’s infidelity while on tour, Pink finally has enough bricks to build his entire wall. Quickly picking up momentum, ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part II’ became Pink Floyd’s one and only chart-topper in both the US and UK.īut there was one more brick to be laid. The results were undeniable, and the Floyd acknowledged the song’s potential by releasing it as a single. That meant extending the song beyond a single verse and, most notably, bringing in a children’s choir to sing the song’s second verse. “So I forced myself out and listened to loud, four-to-the-bar bass drums and stuff and thought, ‘Gawd, awful!’ Then we went back and tried to turn one of the parts into one of those so it would be catchy.”ĭespite the unmistakable disgust in Gilmour’s recollection, Ezrin managed to prevail and shaped the song with the idea of singles chart success in mind. “He said to me, ‘Go to a couple of clubs and listen to what’s happening with disco music,” Gilmour recalled to Guitar World in 2009. It was Ezrin who suggested the Floyd write a song with a disco beat, something that was especially detested by David Gilmour. Ezrin was able to balance what made a band unique with what a band needed to do to compete with contemporary tastes. It would take the unstoppable force of disco music.įor the production of The Wall, Pink Floyd brought in Bob Ezrin, who was already comfortable with theatricality -astute, mainstream-averse acts like Alice Cooper and Kiss to bring their unique styles to the masses. A song about an oppressive totalitarian rule in primary school was certainly a relatable subject for the British populace, but it would take more than just a sympathetic topic to get Pink Floyd a radio hit. The band were emblematic of the “Album Oriented Rock” format, and while songs like ‘Money’ and ‘Have a Cigar’ found their way onto American singles, the band were more restrictive with their output in their home country. In the UK, Pink Floyd hadn’t released a single in over a decade, with their last effort being 1968’s ‘Point Me at the Sky’. ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part I’ indicates that Pink’s mental deterioration had its roots from the very beginning of his life, and after setting the stage the next brick comes from the experiencing of dealing with abusive schoolteachers.
With only a snapshot in the family album, the death of his father left early emotional scars for Waters, which he then passed on to Pink. The first brick in the wall comes from the death of his father, a clear parallel to Waters’ loss of his own father as an infant.
The Wall began to take shape, and, with it, came a recurring set of songs that revisited how Pink’s mental wall began early in life and only kept growing more fortified as he grew older. It was the first brick in his own wall.įrom there, Waters took the initial kernel of an idea that stemmed from the spitting incident and expanded on it, bringing in his own experiences of losing his father to war, a restrictive upbringing, and rock star excesses to flesh out the story. Waters left that performance feeling a desire to completely shut out the audience that had made Pink Floyd into a global success. It culminated in the infamous moment when Waters spit on a fan who approached the front of the stage during the band’s final performance of the tour in Montreal, Canada. “It became a social event rather than a more controlled and ordinary relationship between musicians and an audience,” Waters told Radio Times in 1990.
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