The Pink Floyd song that was meant to be a disco tune
Most progressive rock bands never concerned themselves with having a hit single. While it may have been nice to have songs on the radio that everyone knew and sung along to in concert, the biggest names in the genre, like Yes and King Crimson, had adopted the album as their medium of choice, with many buying their records for the grandiose songs that went on well beyond the typical length of a single. Even though Pink Floyd was one of the few prog bands to cross over to radio, one of their biggest hits hopped on the bandwagon of one of the biggest trends in pop.
For the first half of their career, though, the band were floundering after the loss of Syd Barrett. After starting to slowly lose his battle with his mental health, Barrett would be let go during the sessions for A Saucerful of Secrets, with David Gilmour being brought in on lead guitar and vocals in his place.
While Gilmour would become a rock legend during his time with Floyd, Roger Waters would take control of the band’s songwriting going forward, playing to their strengths as a space-rock act on ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’. Once the band started to combine their collective strengths on the song ‘Echoes’, they had a formula for crafting songs unlike anything else, paving the way for landmark achievements in rock and roll on Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here.
Although Waters usually handled the lion’s share of the lyrics, The Wall marked his most ambitious creative direction yet. Telling the operatic story of a rock star closing himself off from society, Waters and producer Bob Ezrin ruled the studio trying to finish the album, with GIlmour only contributing a handful of ideas during the sessions.
As Waters sets the scene with the protagonist’s childhood at school, the ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ suite spreads across three tracks, telling different perspectives on the abusive teachers Waters dealt with at school. For all of the studio innovation behind the scenes, the band got the idea of adding pieces of disco into the mix.
Starting as an offshoot of soul and R&B music, disco was fast becoming one of the biggest forces in pop music, with rock artists like The Rolling Stones and Rod Stewart trying their hand at making dance music. When it came to laying down the backing track for the second part of ‘Another Brick in the Wall’, the band decided to try their hand at making a more pronounced groove than their previous songs.
According to Gilmour, their flirtation with disco was done at Ezrin’s suggestions, telling Guitar World, “[He] 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”.
While the song sounds more dystopian in practice, it does have the hallmarks of disco tracks from around the same time, including the laid-back groove from Nick Mason and Gilmour’s stabs invoking the same rhythmic percussion as Nile Rodgers’s work with Chic. Even though Pink Floyd may get inspiration from anything around them, any genre that they experimented with was usually going to end up sounding completely different by the time they were finished.
