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.
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.