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Music history comes alive. Forgotten favourites & undiscovered gems from the rock, soul & reggae archive and a few of the stories behind them. Your host is Simon Tesler, former publisher and editor of 1980s music, media and pop culture magazine BLITZ.
Hello, this is Simon Tesler with more great Sounds from the Rock and Soul Archive and a few of the stories behind them. If this is your first time with me, welcome. Each week I select tracks with a specific theme, and this week the theme is SCHOOL. Coming up over the next two hours, around 20 songs on the subject of education, including tracks from The Ramones, Madness, The Police, James Brown, Steely Dan and many more. Hopefully a few you won't ever have heard before. No prizes for identifying this first track, but can you name the one that follows it?
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Yes of course, that was Pink Floyd's Another Brick In The Wall from 1979, followed by a glorious remix of it by the Swedish DJ Eric Prydz, released in 2007 as Proper Education by Eric Prydz vs Floyd. Now, I think many of us might have mixed feelings about the Pink Floyd original -- and not just the other members of Pink Floyd.
Pink Floyd's album The Wall was of course the point at which Roger Waters' feelings of bitterness about the loss of his father during World War 2, about being a successful rock musician, and to be honest about the world generally, reached their peak. Creatively, of course, The Wall was a mammoth success with sales well in excess of 30 million copies. That's still some way behind Dark Side Of The Moon, but for all the extra millions it earned the members of Pink Floyd, Waters' bitterness and desire for complete control was causing ever more tension within the band leading to their acrimonious split a few years later. And if Waters wasn't already bitter enough the loss of the Pink Floyd name to his former bandmates rubbed even more salt in to the wound.
However, even if you have reservations about the content of Another Brick In The Wall -- "We don't need no education", for example -- there's no denying its power, and it's unlikely that The Wall would have been quite as successful if it hadn't been for its release as a single. Pink Floyd had stopped releasing singles more than 10 years earlier after Point Me At The Sky failed to make any dent at all on the charts, so the release of Another Brick represented a major change of direction for the band.
That it ever became a single was largely at the urging of the album's producer Bob Ezrin. He had encouraged the band -- much against their collective will -- to think about introducing a more danceable beat to the music on The Wall.
Roger Gilmour later told Guitar World magazine "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 of Another Brick In The Wall into one of those so it would be catchy."
It was also Bob Ezrin who suggested that the resulting song might work as a single and asked for permission to experiment a little with it. Waters told him that Pink Floyd did not release singles, but "Go ahead and waste our time doing silly stuff."
So without telling the band, Ezrin came up with the idea of adding a choir of kids to sing the chorus, and approached the head of music at Islington Green School around the corner from the studio. He rehearsed the kids for a week, then brought them in to record the chorus, all of this before letting the band in on the secret. The he played the finished mix to Waters. Ezrin told Guitar World, "When he heard it, there was a total softening of his face, and you just knew that he knew it was going to be an important record." And so history was made.
Now... speaking of Bob Ezrin... By the time of The Wall, he was already one of the industry's most celebrated record producers. Here's another track he produced. You will know it as soon as I drop the needle on it; after that, two more American rockers, from The Runaways and The Ramones. But this is Alice Cooper.
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So Alice Cooper with School's Out, followed by all-girl rockers The Runaways with School Days and then The Ramones with Rock n Roll High School. So yes, long before Pink Floyd, Bob Ezrin was the producer who oversaw the rise of Alice Cooper from Detroit shock rockers to commercial superstars at the start of the 70s. In fact, Cooper himself once described Ezrin as "our George Martin", a reference to the man who supervised virtually all the creative output of The Beatles. And hey, there's that children's choir again; and after Alice Cooper Bob Ezrin went on to work with Lou Reed. If you know Reed's album Berlin, produced by Ezrin, you'll remember the children's chorus in both The Kids and the closing track Sad Song.
Cooper said the concept behind School's Out was simple. Mojo magazine asked him, What's the greatest three minutes of your life?. Cooper said: "There's two times during the year. One is Christmas morning, when you're just getting ready to open the presents. The greed factor is right there. The next one is the last three minutes of the last day of school when you're sitting there and it's like a slow fuse burning. I said, 'If we can catch that three minutes in a song, it's going to be so big." I think we're still waiting for Alice Cooper's Christmas song.
Then The Runaways, the all-girl group assembled in Los Angeles in the mid 70s by sleazy music entrepreneur Kim Fowley. They had three or four years of... well, notoriety is probably a better term than success before splitting in 1979. Guitarist Joan Jett went on to establish a successful solo career, not least with chart-topper I Love Rock n Roll in 1982.
And finally The Ramones, one of the original punk bands of the mid 1970s, though to be fair, as is clear from Rock n Roll High School as well as many of their other songs, the biggest influence on their music, especially after the first couple of albums, was always those Phil Spector Wall Of Sound pop records of the 50s and early 60s like Da Doo Ron Ron or Be My Baby. Rock n Roll High School was written specially for the teen comedy movie of the same name, released in 1979, in which The Ramones are also major characters, playing themselves. Not the best movie, but it has a great soundtrack.
What next? Let's come back to the UK for two songs about having a crush on your teacher. In a few minutes, the great but sadly short-lived I-Level with Teacher, but first three bottle-blonde blokes who conquered the world in the late 70s and early 80s until their implosion as a result of an inevitable battle of the egos. Yes, it's The Police and Don't Stand So Close.
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Sting has changed his stance a couple of times on the exact story behind Don't Stand So Close, originally recorded for their 3rd album Zenyatta Mondatta in 1980. Before he became a professional musician, he had considered a career in education. He qualified as a teacher in 1974 and spent two years teaching at St Paul's First School in Cramlington, just outside Newcastle. In 1981 he told music journalists Phil Sutcliffe & Hugh Fielder, for their book L'Historia Bandido, "I'd done teaching practice at secondary schools and been through the business of having 15-year-old girls fancying me - and me really fancying them! How I kept my hands off them I don't know... Then there was my love for Lolita which I think is a brilliant novel." That of course is the book by Vladimir Nabokov -- namechecked in the song -- about a middle-aged teacher who becomes obsessed with a 13 year old girl.
Sting was a bit more circumspect a decade later when he told Q, "I was a teacher but I never had a relationship with any of my pupils. I wouldn't want to. You have to remember we were blond bombshells at the time and most of our fans were young girls so I started role playing a bit. Let's exploit that. And it really worked."
However, that third album was the point at which the relationship between Sting and his two bandmates, drummer Stewart Copeland and guitarist Andy Summers really began to fall apart as a result of arguments, at first, over musical arrangements and soon after over money when Sting refused to recognise his colleagues' musical contribution with any share of song royalties. By the time of Synchronicity in 1983 these studio rows had evolved into fistfights. In one, Copeland actually broke one of Sting's ribs.
The bad feeling persists to this day. In 2024, Copeland and Summers sued Sting for what they described as "arrangers fees" for their musical contribution to the songs written by him. That's in keeping with a prior agreement between the three, which they claimed Sting had failed to honour. Since then, he has paid around £650,000 but Copeland and Summers are claiming a much larger sum of at least £8m to cover streaming royalties. The case, as they say, continues. Oh dear, it always ends in tears doesn't it when money is involved.
I-Level was a comparatively short-lived Brit-funk partnership between studio session musicians Duncan Bridgeman and Jo Dworniak and reggae singer Sam Jones. There were two great albums, but commercial success never came knocking, and they went their separate ways in 1985. Bridgeman became a successful producer for hire, working with numerous artists over the following decades. Among other notches in his belt, he produced the debut album by a certain 90s boy band you might have heard of called Take That... Dworniak too has enjoyed considerable success as a producer working in Spain and Latin America.
Let's stay in the UK with two great pub rock anthems from the late 1970s. In a few minutes, Graham Parker with Back To Schooldays, but first a minor classic from 1977 by Canadian-born singer Stanley Frank. This is S'cool Days.
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I can't tell you too much about Stanley Frank, who had only a brief musical career in the late 70s and early 80s. That song S'cool Days sounds like it could have been recorded above a pub in London's Camden area or a grungy little studio in Essex -- it fits seamlessly into the sort of British rhythm and blues sound of the period -- but actually it was recorded several thousand miles away in Stanley Frank's hometown of Montreal in Canada. Unfortunately, he didn't get anywhere back home, but not too surprisingly S'cool Days gained a fair bit of traction here in the UK, so Frank relocated here to try to capitalise on that success. A few more singles followed, and an album, and then Frank teamed up with David Bowie's former sideman, the guitarist Mick Ronson. But the record label pulled the plug before the album was finished, and in an odd bit of synchronicity Stanley Frank eventually lived up to his best known recording by becoming an English and Music teacher back in Montreal.
Back To Schooldays is from Graham Parker's debut album Howlin' Wind, released in 1976, and it's actually another song more along the lines of Pink Floyd's Another Brick, though a little less explicit in its purpose, with Parker railing against the injustices of school and what it teaches children to expect from the world beyond. That rockabilly guitar solo incidentally was contributed by the celebrated British rocker Dave Edmunds, who later recorded his own version of Parker's song. Parker told journalist Jay Nachman "To get a guy of that calibre playing on my record, especially on that song, playing out those notes, absolutely perfect. What a sound!"
We're going to travel back across the Atlantic now for a couple of classic tracks. In a few minutes, Hall & Oates and Adult Education, but first this is Steely Dan and My Old School.
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Steely Dan with My Old School and then Adult Education from Hall & Oates. My Old School comes from Steely Dan's Countdown To Ecstasy album from 1973, and the school in question to which Donald Fagen vows never to return is Bard College in upstate New York. There's quite a story behind the song. Fagen and bandmate Walter Becker were both at Bard in the late 60s where they first formed Steely Dan -- another student there, the comic actor Chevy Chase was actually their first drummer.
They and many of the other students used to smoke a bit of weed -- this was the 60s after all. However early one morning in May 1969, there was a police raid on the college after a female acquaintance dobbed them in to the local district attorney, and an astonishing 44 students including Fagen and Becker were arrested. Perhaps the greatest indignity inflicted on Fagen was that he was forced to have his long hair cut off by the guards in Poughkepeepsie jail while he was awaiting bail. He says in the song he will never return to Bard "until California tumbles into the sea"... But in fact, he went back in 1985 to receive an honorary Doctor of Arts degree...
Adult Education was one of two new original songs on Hall & Oates' 1984 greatest hits compilation Rock & Soul Part 1. A little like Graham Parker's Back To Schooldays, the story behind the song is that school doesn't prepare you properly for the real world. Daryl Hall told the website Songfacts "One of the big problems with the world is that people never grow up – no matter how old they get. And the song is a reminder that there is life after high school. That there's another way of looking at the world, and that other world is a false world and a meaningless world. So that's really what that's about." Woah, bit heavy there Daryl.
Let's lighten the mood before the break. I'll be back again after the news. In the mean time, here's Madness with Baggy Trousers.
[CONTINUES IN PART 2]