making connections not walls - mr dixon

In assembly this week I told the School that friendships can hurt, and cause pain, but that they are worth it.

The Headmaster had reminded the School that connections within our community are special, with the relationships within Rossall being an aspect which makes it special.  I very much agree, but it is easy at times to hide away for fear of hurt, and want to perhaps not connect in case of hurt.

I explained that one of my favourite albums, The Wall, by Pink Floyd, talks very much about this idea – and that isolating and protecting oneself with a wall, instead of connecting, is not the answer.

The Wall is one of the best selling albums, and certainly the best selling concept double-album of all time.  I have about five different versions of it: LP, cassette, CD, i-tunes, and latterly on my stream-service.  This does not include a few live versions too.

I told the School of a time when people would put an album on at the start and listen to it all the way through – you sort of had to with a record or cassette.  This is what some artists prefer – because their album tells a story – and The Wall is one such case.  The intention of the artist was that you would listen to the whole thing, and not select individual tracks alone.  No author wants you to read chapter 5 of their book, only, and repetitively, without reading the whole.

In fact, there was a famous court case in 2010 where Pink Floyd sued EMI, their publishing company, because EMI had been selling individual tracks from their albums, including The Wall, without their permission.  They wanted fans to buy the whole album, the principle being their artistic integrity and their design over the album.  They won the case, in fact, and EMI had to pay Pink Floyd for selling their tracks on i-tunes in a way that Pink Floyd didn’t like.  Hard to feel too much sympathy for Pink Floyd here – hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of sales, and then more money from the court case.  But there is, perhaps, an important point that the artist should have a say as to how their art if viewed, or in this case listened to – or does it stop being their property ?

It was not the only court case around The Wall.  One of the members of Pink Floyd, Roger Waters, left Pink Floyd in the 1980’s and wanted to keep the band name for himself and to keep to himself the rights to perform The Wall, which as it happens is semi-biographical.  He lost, and the remnants of Pink Floyd continued under that name.  For the next 30 years Waters would perform The Wall, and other Pink Floyd music, whilst the rest of the band did the same.  I have been lucky enough to see both perform, but never together.  They did finally perform together n in 2008, for a charity concert, – time heals, I suppose.

The Wall  is all about a young man – Pink, in the album, wanting to protect himself from hurt.  He loses his Dad at a young age, he is bullied at school, and gets ill.  His mother is over-protective and wants to protect him.  She starts to build a wall around him, to protect him from life.  Pink continues the job.  There are many bricks formed in the wall from events.

The first half of the album is about the build-up of the wall.   The famous track “Another Brick in the Wall (part 2)”  is about one such brick – constructed and placed during Pink’s school-time.

When Pink Floyd, or Roger Waters perform The Wall live, they tend to construct a wall between them and the audience during the first half of the concert.  At the end of the first track there is one single gap left in the wall, and the singer is only slightly on view through this hole, and sings to the audience:

Goodbye Cruel World, I’m leaving you today

Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.

Goodbye all you people.  There is nothing you can say to make me change my mind. Goodbye.

And with that the last brick gets placed and the wall is closed.

The second half of the album, or the show, sees the band behind the wall (often in live shows it gets rotated so the audience and the band are on the same side of the wall).  In the second half questions are asked about this isolation:

• Did the wall need to be so high

• Is there anybody out there?

Pink is now comfortably numb (okay, this is one track well worth listening to by itself) and he cannot feel hurt.  But is that good ?  He is lonely, isolated and starts to go mad.  But he cannot face tearing the wall down and risking to be out there, in the flesh, and unprotected to get hurt whilst connecting to people again.

The climax of the album and show is the trial sequence – Pink has a trial in his mind about whether he should tear the wall down or not.  He decided he will and summons up the courage to do it: “Tear Down The Wall”, “Tear Down The Wall”, is the refrain we hear for a while.

Berlin had a wall separating East and West Berlin from shortly after World War 2 to 1990, for more than 40 years.  In 1990 it came down.  Memorably Roger Waters performed a concert of the Wall in Berlin in 1990, eight months after the wall came down. The audience was large, and a wall was built in what was no-mans land in Berlin, near Potsdamer Platz.  The trial sequence as described above was an incredible moment – as the audience screamed “Tear Down The Wall”, it was a moment of celebration of this huge moment in history.  I showed the School a short video clip of this moment.

I finished by urging Rossall not to build walls, and to build connections instead.