More about: Pink Floyd

‘Another Brick In The Wall, Part Two’ landed in 1979, the first single Pink Floyd had released in the UK in 11 years.  Musically, on one level it’s an incredible anomaly – certainly nothing like anything else on the album it comes from (The Wall). Not even the 'Part One' to which the title of this refers. 

In actual fact, though, it’s a crossroads, a moment in time during which huge musical flux was in full flow.  What the Floyd have done is capture that moment and make it into an international anthem for disaffected youth. There aren’t many songs – we wouldn’t mind betting a few quid on there being no others, in fact - that have been covered by Tool and made into trance anthems. Only right for a disco record with punk vocals made by a prog band, really. 

Just as ‘Saturday Night Fever’ was in many ways a punk film, full of violence and death and the oppression of society, so the strutting disco beat in Another Brick In The Wall, Part Two’, which isn’t a million miles from the one that propels the Bee Gees’ ‘Stayin’ Alive’, is a vehicle not for glamour and glitterballs but for the sound of kids in revolt. It’s probably a complete coincidence that its promo begins with a shot of the grotty industrial landscape of St Paul’s in the heart of London, precisely the spot around which, some two years later, the Specials would be witnessed driving around in the promo for ‘Ghost Town’.  

The music may be different, but the mood, shaped by an irredeemably violent society in which you could expect to be routinely beaten as a schoolchild by your teachers, your peers or the police, is unmistakable. You can draw a straight thematic line through Alice Cooper’s School’s Out to God Save The Queen by the Sex Pistols, this record, Ghost Town and then on into The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder, another record about the brutality of existence and one that begins with very similar concerns via ‘The Headmaster Ritual’. 

Part of the appeal of this video is the way it switches between twin worlds.  Gritty normal life – the kids running riot in the playground, or emerging from housing estate doors with an implied fascistic conformity.  Then the nightmarish visons of Gerald Scarfe’s animations – the hammers marching to who knows what, the headmaster pulping his pupils in a massive blender. They remain too close for comfort though too. The headmaster appears floating, cane in hand, in the real life scene of the estate, and the cartoon sections show an abandoned, dilapidated playground in the shadow of the grey tower blocks, rubber tyre swinging forlornly. 

Stick all that together and you’ve got something which is a pretty heady and powerful – and also, sadly, very accurate – indication of what it was like to be a kid in Britain in the late 70s.  It was, as they say, another time. This writer, for one, is quite happy to see it stay that way. 

Read the first in the series: a piece on The Buggles' 'Video Killed The Radio Star' here.

More about: Pink Floyd