Pink Floyd has released some of the best-selling albums in rock history. But the band generally hasn’t been known for lighting up the pop charts with individual singles. This has been particularly true in the U.S., where Pink Floyd didn’t have a Top 40 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 until 1973. They finally made it with “Money,” from the group’s massively successful eighth studio effort, The Dark Side Of The Moon. The song peaked at No. 13 on the Hot 100.
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After “Money,” Pink Floyd had only one other major pop hit in the U.S., but it was a big one. On March 22, 1980, “Another Brick In The Wall (Part II),” from the band’s chart-topping 1979 concept album The Wall, hit No. 1 on the Hot 100.
The song knocked Queen’s old-time rock ‘n’ roll homage “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” from the top spot on the tally. “Another Brick In The Wall (Part II)” spent four weeks at No. 1 before being replaced by Blondie’s “Call Me.”
“Another Brick In The Wall (Part II)” was part of a three-part composition by Pink Floyd bassist, vocalist, and principal songwriter Roger Waters. The song rails against the physical punishment and abusive treatment to which some teachers were guilty of subjecting their students in U.K. schools.
Waters and guitarist David Gilmour shared lead vocals on the track, which includes some disco elements. The song also features additional vocals by a children’s choir from Islington Green School in London.
The idea for the children’s choir and for adding disco elements to the track came from The Wall’s producer, Bob Ezrin. Ezrin also encouraged the band to release the song as a single.
More About “Another Brick In The Wall (Part II)”
In a 1979 interview with British radio presenter Tommy Vance, Waters explained that “Another Brick In The Wall (Part II)” was inspired by his own experiences at a boys’ grammar school.
“My school life was very like that,” Waters maintained. “Oh, it was awful, it was really terrible. When I hear people whining on now about bringing back grammar schools, it really makes me quite ill to listen to it. … I want to make it plain that … some of the men who taught there were very nice guys. … [I]t’s not meant to be a blanket condemnation of teachers everywhere, but the bad ones can really do people in.”
He continued, “[T]here were some [teachers] at my school who were just incredibly bad and treated the children so badly, just putting them down … all the time. Never encouraging them to do things, not really trying to interest them in anything, just trying to keep them quiet and still, and crush them into the right shape, so that they would go to university and ‘do well.’”
Prior to “Another Brick In The Wall (Part II)” topping the Hot 100, it spent five weeks at No. 1 on the U.K. singles chart in December 1979 and January 1980.
The Wall, meanwhile, spent 15 straight weeks atop the Billboard 200 chart, from January through April 1980. The double album has been certified 23-times Platinum by the RIAA for equivalent sales of 23 million units in the U.S.
In 1983, “Another Brick In The Wall” won the Best Original Song prize at the U.K.’s BAFTA Film Awards thanks to its use in the film adaption of The Wall.
Songfacts: Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2) | Pink Floyd
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.
(Photo by Rob Verhorst/Redferns)
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