When they arrive, they’re clueless one Italian-speaking voice asks where the bar is. Waters sees these people as overgrown babies playing with weapons much too big for their teeny hands, so his solution is to set them aside in a home (named for Waters’ father’s middle name, as “The Waters Memorial Home” would obviously sound wrong) where they’re allowed to be essentially harmless.
World peace? Sure, but get the warmongers out of the way first. You can practically see blood dripping from the corners of Waters’ mouth as he calls them out by name-Reagan, Haig, Begin, Thatcher, and who could forget Nixon? It’s a great political song not because it posits a prudent message, but because it’s such a visceral expression of anger. The angriest song to ever grace a Floyd record calls for world leaders to literally be rounded up and systematically executed. “ The Fletcher Memorial Home” – The Final Cut (1983) Yet, unfortunately, this contact never comes for the album’s narrator-“ it was only fantasy.” – Ethan Kingġ8. After Gilmour’s fiery solo disrupts the song’s subdued tone, Waters takes up the vocal reins, pitching his voice an octave higher than Gilmour had in the first and second verses, his desperation mounting as he cries, “ Hey you, don’t tell me there’s no hope at all.” Although the song is rather straightforward in its composition, its emotional pleas for help and for contact suggest a larger-than-life longing for something beyond the nihilist realm of much of the album.
Top ten pierce the veil songs full#
Withdrawn and desolate, Gilmour broods quietly: “ Hey you, out there in the cold/ Getting lonely, getting old/ Can you feel me?” When Nick Mason’s sputtering drums, along with Waters’ accompanying harmonies, enter the second verse, the song’s feelings of desperation stretch with an earnest yearning for connection.įrom there, the song’s haunting balladry strains into one of Gilmour’s most famous guitar solos, full of piercing electric wails over a second guitar’s familiar brooding drive taken from “Another Brick in the Wall,” one of The Wall’s leitmotifs. The ominous arpeggios from David Gilmour’s acoustic guitar and the careening slides and swirls from Roger Waters’ fretless bass and Richard Wright’s electric piano make for one of the band’s more disquieting intros. The opener of the second half of The Wall, “Hey You” begins with a sense of foreboding, setting the tone for the bitter feelings of alienation that comprise the remainder of the album. She’s still alive, 100 years old and going strong, retired after a final single, “I Love This Land,” commemorating the end of the Falklands War. “ Vera, Vera, what has become of you?” sings Waters. Millions of people died, and no one will ever meet them again in heaven or anywhere else. “Vera” is the elegy “We’ll Meet Again” pretended to be: a hopeless cry of rage, set to sweeping strings that sees into the flat truth of war. What does it mean to those who never met their loved ones again? “We’ll Meet Again” must have comforted thousands, but Waters sees through the bullshit.
Waters’ father went off to war and they never met again. What’s less tangible is what “We’ll Meet Again” really meant to those who grew up in the shadow of the war, and when Waters asks, “ Does anybody else in here feel the way I do?” he’s looking for affirmation that others who saw it as no more than a cheap joke. It’s clichéd now, and it probably already was by 1979, when Waters included “Vera” on The Wall. Strangelove, inspiring its use in innumerable World War II films in the same way Apocalypse Now made Creedence Clearwater Revival’s music all but synonymous with helicopters flying over the Mekong River. Stanley Kubrick used it for the apocalyptic coda of Dr. Who doesn’t? Vera Lynn was the singer of “We’ll Meet Again,” the 1939 hit whose faint promise resonated with families and soldiers during World War II and has become inexorably a song of death in the ensuing decades.
“ Does anybody here remember Vera Lynn?” cries Roger Waters. Here are what we consider Pink Floyd’s 20 best tracks. Though the band has been defunct for a long time, Pink Floyd is one of classic rock’s most beloved groups. It’s no surprise that all of the songs come from the period before Roger Waters left the band. In concert with our recent podcast about Pink Floyd, we at Spectrum Culture decided to rank the band’s 20 best songs.
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