Another Brick in the Wall

There are three of them

The single most useful thing to know about this song is that it is not one song. "Another Brick in the Wall" is a three-part composition spread across The Wall, Pink Floyd's eleventh studio album, and the parts are separated by other tracks. Together they run 8:28.

Each is essentially a single verse, built on the same descending figure, and each marks a different thing being added to the wall the protagonist — a rock star called Pink — is building around himself.

Part 1 (3:11) is about his father, killed in the Second World War when Pink was a child — the album sets the death at the Battle of Anzio. It is the first brick, and it is where the whole record's grief comes from. Part 2 (3:59) is the famous one: the traumas of an overprotective mother and abusive schoolteachers going into the same wall. Part 3 (1:18) arrives after a violent breakdown, and it is the bleakest of the three — Pink dismissing everyone he has ever known as "just bricks in the wall". By that point the phrase has stopped meaning "things that damaged me" and started meaning "people I no longer need".

That progression is the reason the song is worth reading as a sequence rather than as a chorus. It begins as an explanation of how somebody got hurt and ends as a description of what the hurt turned him into.

What Part 2 is protesting

Part 2 is regularly summarised as an anti-education song, and it is worth being more precise than that. What Waters wrote is a protest against corporal punishment and abusive schooling — not against learning, and not against teachers as a class. The complaint is about a particular English boarding-and-grammar-school culture in which humiliating children was an accepted teaching method.

The lyric's sharpest phrase is not the chorus everybody shouts but the line about "dark sarcasm in the classroom" — the specific weapon of a teacher who is cleverer than the child in front of them and enjoys proving it. Set beside "thought control" and "leave them kids alone", the target is clearly a method rather than an institution.

Which is also the answer to the question people most often ask about it. "We don't need no education" is a double negative, and it is supposed to be. The line is written in the voice of the children being schooled, not in the voice of a man making an argument about pedagogy — and the grammar is part of the joke, since the sentence proves the case against itself while being sung by twenty-three actual schoolchildren.

The wider album supplies the context. The Wall is a rock opera about a man's self-imposed isolation after years of traumatic encounters with authority figures — a story about one person, not a policy position on schools. Alun Renshaw, the teacher who organised the children's choir, made the same point when the song was attacked: it was, he said, "[Waters'] reflections on his life and how his schooling was part of that."

The 23 children from Islington

The choir was not the band's idea, and it very nearly did not happen.

Producer Bob Ezrin asked engineer Nick Griffiths to record some children singing the verse at Islington Green School, near the band's studio in north London. Griffiths was told to get two or three voices. Remembering a Todd Rundgren album that put an audience in each stereo channel, he suggested recording a whole school choir instead. The school gave him forty minutes.

Alun Renshaw, the head of music, was enthusiastic: "I wanted to make music relevant to the kids — not just sitting around listening to Tchaikovsky. I thought the lyrics were great … I just thought it would be a wonderful experience for the kids." He also hid the lyrics from the headteacher, Margaret Maden, in case she stopped it. She found out afterwards: "I was only told about it after the event, which didn't please me. But on balance it was part of a very rich musical education."

Twenty-three pupils sang on the record, after about a week of rehearsal. Ezrin's account of playing the result to Waters is the moment the song became what it is: "There was a total softening of his face, and you just knew that he knew it was going to be an important record."

What the children got for it is the uncomfortable part. They received concert tickets, an album and a single; the school was paid £1,000; and no arrangement was made for royalties. A change to UK copyright law in 1996 made performers eligible for broadcast royalties, and in 2004 — after the royalties agent Peter Rowan tracked the choir members down, partly through Friends Reunited — they successfully lodged a claim with the Performing Artists' Media Rights Association. Twenty-five years after singing the most famous children's chorus in rock, they were finally paid for it.

The disco beat the band hated

Pink Floyd did not release singles. Part 2 was their first in Britain since "Point Me at the Sky" in 1968 — eleven years — and it exists as a single largely because their producer went behind their backs.

The four-to-the-floor beat under the song is disco, and it was Ezrin's instruction. David Gilmour's account is not flattering to anybody:

[Ezrin] said to me, "Go to a couple of clubs and listen to what's happening with disco music," 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.

Ezrin was sure it could be a hit but thought it was too short — it needed a second verse and a second chorus. The band refused, and Waters told him: "Go ahead and waste your time doing silly stuff." So while they were away, Ezrin edited the takes into the extended version, and had the children recorded to sing the second pass. That edit is the record that went to number one in fourteen countries.

Gilmour's solo — one of his most quoted — was played on a 1955 Gibson Les Paul Gold Top with P-90 pickups. The session guitarist Lee Ritenour said in a 2024 interview that Ezrin had him record ideas for the ending because the band could not decide how to finish it; his parts were not used, though he thought he could hear his influence in Gilmour's last bars. The song is written in the Dorian mode, which is most of why a track in a minor key can sound this driving rather than mournful.

Gilmour's own verdict, disco beat and all, was that it still sounded like Pink Floyd.

The meat grinder

The images most people attach to this song come from Pink Floyd – The Wall, the 1982 film directed by Alan Parker with animation by Gerald Scarfe, who also drew the album's cover.

The official video, on Pink Floyd's own channel.

In the Part 2 sequence, children file into a school and march in unison through a meat grinder, coming out the other side as identical putty-faced clones — and then riot and burn the school down. It is a rare case of a promotional film that argues the lyric rather than decorating it: the wall is built out of people who have been processed into interchangeable units, which is exactly what the phrase "another brick in the wall" means.

Banned in South Africa

The song's reception in Britain was roughly what you would expect. The Inner London Education Authority called it "scandalous"; according to Renshaw, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher "hated it". Renshaw's own response was that "there was a political knee-jerk reaction to a song that had nothing to do with the education system."

What happened next is the part that has largely dropped out of the story, and it is the most consequential thing the song ever did.

In 1980, "Another Brick in the Wall" was taken up by supporters of a nationwide school boycott in South Africa, protesting the racial inequities written into education under apartheid. Black schoolchildren sang it. The apartheid government's response was to ban both the single and the album outright.

That is an unusual afterlife for a song written about an English grammar school. A lyric about one man's memory of being humiliated by his teachers turned out to travel: "we don't need no thought control" reads very differently when the curriculum in question is Bantu Education. The ban is also the clearest evidence that the song was understood, by the people it was aimed at, as being about power rather than about homework.

What it did on the charts

For a band who had spent a decade refusing to release singles, the result was almost comic. Part 2 went to No. 1 in the UK, becoming the 1979 Christmas number one; it stayed there into mid-January, which made it both the last British No. 1 of the 1970s and the first of the 1980s.

In America it reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — the only US chart-topping single of Pink Floyd's career — and finished 1980 as the year's second-biggest song there. It topped the charts in fourteen countries in all, among them Canada, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and, before the ban, South Africa. It reached No. 2 in Australia, Italy and Spain.

It has sold more than four million copies worldwide, including 1,146,548 in the UK alone, where it is certified Platinum. Rolling Stone placed it at No. 384 on its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and Waters won the 1983 BAFTA for Best Original Song for its use in the film. It was also nominated for a Grammy.

The lyrics

Read all three verses in order and the song stops being a chant and becomes a short, brutal biography: a father who never came back, a mother and a school that did the damage, and a man who ends by deciding that other people are masonry. The chorus is the same every time. What changes is who is being called a brick.