Hear the original demo of Pink Floyd song ‘Mother’
The Pink Floyd album The Wall tells the story of Pink, a young, vitriolic, alienated rock star. One of the standout songs on the album is ‘Mother’, a song which attempts to explain that Pink is alienated from himself because he had an overprotective mother.
The reference to the titular wall comes from how Pink’s mother has tried to create a barrier around him to protect him from the horrors of the world. Even after Pink grows up and begins a successful music industry career, his mother insists that he stay by her side.
Discussing the theme of overprotective mothers, the song’s writer, Roger Waters, once said (via Songfacts): “If you can level one accusation at mothers, it is that they tend to protect their children too much. Too much and for too long. This isn’t a portrait of my mother, although one or two of the things in there apply to her, as well as to lots of other people’s mothers.”
While in that quote, Waters is insistent about the song not necessarily being about her, he admitted that it does at least have “some connection with [his] mother, for sure”. The cartoonist Gerald Scarfe had provided illustrations for the album, though Waters noted: “The mother Scarfe visualises in his drawings couldn’t be further from [his],” he said. “She’s nothing like that,” he added.
However, Waters also noted that his mother had been “suffocating in her own way. She always had to be right about everything.” Getting into the personal details, he added: “I’m not blaming her. That’s who she was. I grew up with a single parent who could never hear anything I said because nothing I said could possibly be as important as what she believed.”
So evidently, Waters’ biographical details certainly informed the writing of the song. He also noted the reasons why his mother behaved the way she did. “My mother was, to some extent, a wall herself that I was banging my head against,” Waters said. “She lived her life in the service of others. She was a schoolteacher. But it wasn’t until I was 45, 50 years old, that I realised how impossible it was for her to listen to me.” Waters’ mother was, of course, not the only person he felt would not listen to him – including ex-bandmate David Gilmour.
When asked by an interviewer whether or not Waters’ mother saw herself in the song, he said, “She’s not that recognisable. The song is more general, the idea that we can be controlled by our parents’ views on things like sex. The single mother of boys, particularly, can make sex harder than it needs to be.”
We’ve sourced the original demo of the song, which you can listen to below.
