Just bricks in the wall…

As I suppose is inevitable, it took a foreigner to first alert me to an otherwise unnoticed national trait of ours… this time, to make a change, involving music.

Some time ago, I was asked by a friend and former colleague from the UK (note: I’m withholding his identity for now, in case of reprisals by outraged fans of the prog-rock band founded by David Gilmour, Roger Waters and Syd Barrett in 1968… don’t worry, it will all make sense in a minute) why Pink Floyd still had such an overwhelming hold over the entire Maltese musical scene.

Hard to explain, but it’s one of those innocent questions that instantly shatter all your delusions about life, the universe and everything. A bit like “the thin ice” on the second song of Side One of ‘Pink Floyd: The Wall’: a crack suddenly appears under your feet, and before you know it, you’re out of your depth and out of your mind…

“What?’ I replied in wide-eyed amazement. ‘You mean to say there are other parts of the world in which Pink Floyd are NOT regarded as gods?” But even as I asked the question, the full weight of its multiple implications sank in. 

My own reaction suggested that, to my mind, it was a sine qua non that Floyd would be globally recognised as (at minimum) a good band worthy of its international fame. Until that point, I had never really questioned this before. And it certainly never occurred to me that there might be people out there who not only disagree with that assessment… but actually dislike or even hate the band with a passion.

This same friend, I now discovered, fell into that particular category himself… which I admit came as a bit of a shock to me at the time. Not, I stress, because I’m all that much of a fan myself… well, OK, maybe I am… but not in any homicidally obsessive way… I can assure you. It’s just that this same impression of Pink Floyd as ‘automatically entitled’ to cult status was so very real in my mind, that I had always assumed it was also universal. 

In any case, I have since rationalised my earlier reaction. Let’s face it, it could have been much worse. My friend could have turned out to be a serial killer, or an undercover ISIS terrorist… or even a travelling doughnut salesman, in which case I would have been obliged to terminate him for the greater good of humankind. As things stand, he’s just someone who doesn’t like Pink Floyd all that much. Weird, I know, but… well, nobody’s perfect.

But back to the Floyd phenomenon. At one point, this Floyd-hating friend of mine made the following, rather perceptive observation. The reverence with which this band is regarded in Malta is not, he pointed out, limited only to Pink Floyd. He cited The Eagles as another example (and ‘Hotel California’ in particular) of a band whose local reverence exceeds even the most die-hard of international followings. But even sticking only to Pink Floyd: their local cult is by no means extended to all their musical output equally. 

You won’t often hear people humming ‘The Grand Vizier’s Garden’ from Ummagumma, he observed, or ‘Take Up thy Stethoscope and Walk’ from ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’. But ‘Comfortably Numb’? ‘Another Brick in the Wall Part II’? (‘We Don’t Need No Education’… to which the guitar promptly replies: ‘Yes, you do… yes, you do…’ etc.)? You could almost call them unofficial national anthems…

Which sort of revises the original question a little: it now becomes, why has this particular aspect of Pink Floyd’s entire discography – ‘The Wall’, released in 1979, and also doubled up as a 1982 movie directed by Alan Parker and starring Bob Geldof – left such a profound impact on Malta, that it would even be held up as a local curiosity by an outsider?

I confess I have no idea, but last week I got the perfect opportunity to test his theory in practice. My earthly meanderings took me to The Farsons Beer Festival, where the stage was set for a local tribute concert… not to Pink Floyd in general, as I had previously assumed… but specifically to ‘The Wall’. 

And a highly entertaining concert it turned out to be, too. The entire double album – including the two songs from the film which were not on the record – performed on stage, in sequence, by local artists including Gianni Zammit, Ivan Filetti, Trikkas, and band-members of Red Electric, Winter Moods and many more…

…so many more, in fact, that at times they almost struggled to all fit on stage. Even before the first chord of ‘In the Flesh’ rang out, the line-up had already underscored the sheer scale of this one album’s local influence. It cuts across genres as well as generations, as if to say: Blues? Rock? Folk? Folk-Rock? Doesn’t really matter, they’re all bricks in the same wall…

But it was the audience that ultimately confirmed my friend’s hypothesis. There were large parts of the lyrics I found I could sing along to by heart… but others within earshot sang every single line – from ‘So Ya Thought Ya…’ all the way down to ‘Tear Down the Wall’ – without a single omission or distortion of any kind. 

They even replicated every single sound-effect, from the dialling tone on ‘Nobody Home’, to the drawling female voice just before ‘One Of My Turns’. Their precision was almost uncanny. They could just as easily have been praying, or reciting an invocation at a pagan ritual… 

Naturally, this takes us no closer to the question of why this connection exists in the first place. But it does illustrate that there is some truth to the observation that the cult of Floyd is more deeply felt (more sincere, if you like) here than elsewhere.

Perhaps there is something about this album in particular – and maybe one or two other Pink Floyd albums, such as ‘Wish You Were Here’ or ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ – that struck such a resounding chord in its day, that it can still be felt 30 years later. At moments, I have to admit I felt the connection myself. 

One of the songs I remembered includes the following lines: 

“I’ve got electric light, and I’ve got second sight… 

I’ve got amazing powers of observation… 

and that is how I know… 

when I try to get through, on the telephone to you…

…there’ll be nobody home.”

As I sang them, it hit me: that was exactly how I felt the day before the concert, trying to contact Enemalta on its emergency Freephone number to enquire when (or whether) power was going to be restored to my neighbourhood… 

Judging by the rest of the crowd, however, other lines are equally, if not more evocative still. There was a noticeable increase in volume among the (male) chorus when it came to the specific verse (from ‘Mother’): “Mama’ll check out all your girlfriends for you... Mama won’t let anyone dirty get through…” 

And the same audible surge in vocal power also came through in the chorus of ‘Young Lust’ (three songs later): “oooh, I need a dirty woman”… 

Here, the loose threads of a common theory begin to be intertwine. ‘The Wall’ itself was a concept album, and the story it tells is very much about rebellion… against family, against school, against institutions… ultimately, against the brick wall that Gerald Scarfe portrays closing in all around the hapless rebel in the closing scenes of the film. 

As that image suggests, it is a doomed rebellion… but one which is somehow felt worth fighting all the same.

And you get snatches of the same motif in local music, too. I am reminded of the same mental image by songs like Norm Rejection’s ‘Malta Not For Sale’, for instance. It urges the country to awake from its slumber (‘Qumu Mir-Raqda’), but also starkly underscores the futility of all resistance: ‘Tiftah halqek, juru is-snien…’

As with Pink Floyd’s brick wall, the implication is of a country held in a stranglehold by all-powerful forces: a state of play we all accept as fact, because it is beyond our power to change. On that score, it’s also a little like The Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’: “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave…”

In Norm rejection’s case – and much the same applies to other (thematically) similar Maltese bands: Rage Against Society, BNI, etc.) – these forces are identified as capitalism, multinational corporations, etc. We are unable to resist, in part because we are ourselves cast into the same mould by society at large. ‘The Wall’ predates those specific concerns, but still offers the same chilling image of citizens mass-produced in a factory, and literally ‘put through the shredder’ (by the schoolmaster) to emerge as identical mince-meat. 

What remains unclear (to me, at any rate) is why this image would prove so forceful here… more forceful, it would seem, than almost anywhere else. Tell you what: I’ll listen to the record just one more time… you never know, maybe there’s a clue in there somewhere I’ve missed…