Goodbye Blue Sky

I have heard and seen in interviews that "The Wall" is not directly about WWII. It is my understanding that the album and movie are about the walls we build up around ourselves. It is analagous to actual war, like WWII, in that the war we fight within ourselves can be very harsh and sometmies is as bad as an actual "real" war. Look at Pink in the movie.... He grew up in a time of war, lost his dad to the war and felt isolated and alone...became a rock star, lost his wife, had a constant battle with drugs...almost killed himself to ease the pain.... On a smaller scale, this guy has basically been fighting a war within himself ever since he was young. I think Goodbye Blue Sky addresses the misconception of what we think life is. We each grow up and are taught that the world is this great place and there are nice loving people out there... this song is about how those expectations and dreams can be shattered when we go out and learn how the "real" world actually is. This life we live can seem all wonderful and great then something can happen and it all comes crashing down like "falling bombs." And then you wonder why these things are happening to you when you were always promised all these great things...you start to wonder "why you had to run for shelter when the promise of the brave new world unfurled beneath the clear blue sky..." And long after the "flames" are gone, "the pain lingers on."

IM sorry but I am gonna go out on a limb here and say it is not about WW2, yes it has distinct connotations and it has to do with war somewhat. In my opinion it is about dreams, In the middle of the song he says "When the promise of a brave new world Unfurled beneath a clear blue sky" and then the part before it is talking about bombs and fear then the part after it is talking about bombs and fear, I feel that he is trying to instill a sense of hope in between the chaos of whatever goes on in our lives, not just war.

Ok, I have no idea what puts the idea into people's heads that the kid says "theres no plane in the sky". Come on, use some common sense, why the hell would the kid just all of a sudden say to his mom, "Hey look at that, theres no plane in the sky" that doesnt make any sense, thats like saying, "Hey look, theres no monkey there" Why would anyone take the time and point out whats not there? Plus, if you turn it up, you can clearly hear a plane. If the girl actually did say theres no plane, then you would hear no plane. British kids have that halting way of speaking, plus I'm pretty sure its a boy. And its pointless to fight over what the song really means, just about every Pink Floyd song is geniusly written to have multiple meanings, or be just vague and deep enough to let people put their own views into it and sound right. No one writes songs like Roger Waters did.

To me the song is about an atomic war that never happened. The little girl says theres an aeroplane in the sky. Just one? Cant be the blitz but could be a lonely bomber unloading an atomic bomb on london or somewhere. The fact they have to run for shelter with the promise of a brave new world implies running to a fallout shelter and rebuilding a world shattered by nuclear attacks. Goodbye blue sky is obviously saying goodbye to the pre-nuclear world and its clean blue sky and hello to the scorched sky of post-nuclear world. The flames are all gone but the pain lingers on implies the radiation left by the fallout from the atomic bombs and its continuation to poison the post-nuclear survivors.
thats what I reckon.

i think it is about the battle of Britain, sounds like he is a kid and has to go in a bomb shelter while the Luftwaffe bomb England. And there was probably propaganda about how they were winning the war, but it probably didn't seem like it to them.

Roger Waters says that The Wall is about "remembering one's childhood and then getting ready to set off into the rest of one's life." As a child he witnessed bombings of London, and the movie clearly patterns the bombers on the German eagle design, nothing Soviet. The city being bombed is London, and the bombs come from masses of airplanes, not ICBMs. This all makes it very clear: It is about the German bombing of London in WW2, not a hypothetical nuclear bombing one might have feared later. Not bombs in combat that could have killed his father. German bombs, in large numbers, from airplanes, on London.

But there is relevance of those later fears. The childhood experience made him vulnerable to fearing more bombings: The song "Mother" asks "Mother, will they drop the bomb?" "The bomb" refers to the atomic bomb, and this is a fear that lingers on after his childhood experience has ended.

The 1979 album and movie, of course, had relevance to the audience in the form of the fear of nuclear war, which began to appear as a theme in more and more popular music in the early Eighties, and The Wall was ahead of the curve on this. But Waters was primed for that fear because of his childhood experience, which is what the movie illustrates.

Certainly a later audience might liken this to their own, different, experience of 9/11, but it really highlights how much smaller 9/11 was… German bombs killed about 40,000 UK civilians out of a population of 48 million. This is almost a hundred times as big as 9/11 in terms of percentage of the population killed, and the Blitz had that many again injured.

"Brave New World" of course alludes to the novel of that same name, not "1984," but the comparison isn't that deep: The phrase is ironic in both cases, but in "Goodbye, Blue Sky" it is ironic because war and devastation greeted hopes of peace and prosperity; in "Brave New World," a peaceful society is horrible in far quieter ways.

There was no way to hear this in the Eighties and not think of nuclear war, which is a wonderful thing that art can do, to enrich your experience of another situation, but it is clearly autobiographical, and refers first and foremost to the bombing of London that Waters experienced first-hand.

i think this song was originally written about WW2! through any war or battle...whenever lives are lost and there is massive destruction...the same feelings are conveyed...so i can see how ppl can relate this to Sept 11

yeah, it's about the Blitz on London by the Germans. It's on The Wall too. No way near anything about sept. 11.

Interesting views to say the least. It is about WWII and the constant bombing of London. It was a nightmare for children, in which the writers (Roger Waters, et.el) was at the time of the war. Go watch the movie (Pink Floyd: The Wall) and you'll understand. Pink Floyd is also a British Band, by the way.

"When the promise of a brave new world Unfurled beneath a clear blue sky" is an allusion to "1984" a book where perfection and utopia is sought by totalitarian control and population control, ect. this of course is much the same as Hitler's Nazi Germany. Hitler was promising his people a "brave new world" "beneath a clear blue sky" and freedom from the burdens they were given following WWI. so "When the promise of a brave new world Unfurled beneath a clear blue sky" isn`t meant to instill hope, but actually has very scary connotations. read "1984". scary stuff.