(Ezrin and Waters both claim today that they had the idea themselves.) 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. On his original homemade demo, he sang the chorus (“We don’t need no education/We don’t need no thought control/No dark sarcasm in the classroom/Teacher leave these kids alone”) by himself. “Some 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,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2015.
The song was inspired by Roger Waters’ miserable experience with the British educational system as a child in the Fifties. But it was 40 years ago this week that “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” knocked Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” out of the Number One spot on the Hot 100 and stayed there for four weeks until Blondie’s “Call Me” unseated it. 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. RS Recommends: 5 Devices You Need to Set Up Your Smart Home
Singer Paulette McWilliams on Her Years With Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson, and Steely Dan They didn’t even bother releasing a single from Animals, since the prospect of any commercial station airing all 18 minutes of “Dogs” was unthinkable. The sole single from the album was “Have a Cigar,” and it largely sank without a trace. The title track from Wish You Were Here could have become a massive hit, but they didn’t even release it as a single.
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“Money” did manage to reach Number 13 on the Hot 100 in 1973, but Floyd became a quintessential album band after that brief triumph and didn’t even try to compete with the likes of John Denver, the Bee Gees, and Fleetwood Mac for Top 40 airtime.
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The only thing the group had never quite figured out was how to score a big radio hit. 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 tour that was unlike anything rock fans had ever seen. Their four most recent albums (1973’s Dark Side of the Moon, 1975’s Wish You Were Here, 1977’s Animals, and 1979’s The Wall) sold by the millions and they packed stadiums across the globe whenever they toured. By the spring of 1980, Pink Floyd were one of the biggest bands in the world.