“That was very cool”: The unlikely band Roger Waters thought did justice to ‘The Wall’
The 1990s were a banner year for movie soundtracks. Pulp Fiction. Above The Rim. The Crow. Waiting To Exhale. Singles. It’s a true embarrassment of riches befitting what is, so far, the last great decade for mainstream cinema. A phenomenon I’d like to see come back though is the soundtrack supergroup. When a film would bring a bunch of artists of the time together for a few songs on the soundtrack. The best version of this is the grunge Avengers assembling for Beatles biopic Backbeat. But we’re not here to talk about the best version. We’re not even here to talk about a good version. We’re here to talk about the version with the Pink Floyd cover.
In 1998, a little film called The Faculty was released. Despite being a literal Robert Rodriguez flick the film is mostly a misfire. An attempt to do Scream meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers that’s somehow too silly to be scary, whilst also being too boring to be campy. Perhaps they spent all their camp making the music video for the soundtrack’s lead single.
Credit to ‘em though, they went the extra mile for that single. The producers of the film assembled a supergroup, named them “Class of ‘99” and gave them one brief. Make a decent fist of Pink Floyd’s classic ‘Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)’. Perhaps reflecting how a film directed by Robert Rodriguez, starring Elijah Wood, Piper Laurie, Jon Stewart, Robert Patrick and the actual Usher could be dull, Class of ’99 are yet more proof that pedigree counts for nothing in rock bands.
We’ve got a band made up of bona-fide guitar genius Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine, a rhythm section cribbed from Jane’s Addiction and Porno For Pyros and Alice In Chains’ late, great Layne Staley up front. Yet still, if you go down to your nearest resort town and find their Wetherspoons’ tribute band night, you’ll almost certainly find a band with a better, more spirited Floyd cover in them.
Morello is in reserved form, reduced mainly to mindless thrashing with none of his trademark sonic inventions to be found. The biggest offender here is Staley, though. It’s unfair to say because he was about to disappear into a full-blown drug-induced reclusion that he’d never surface from. The problem is that you can tell that from how he’s singing.
This is a man totally checked out from the music industry, so why should he lift a finger for a godawful soundtrack single for a godawful movie? Put it this way, if you’re going to have one relic from the 1990s sing ‘Another Brick…’, you’re best sticking with the Korn cover. However, the music video is so incredibly funny I almost think the whole endeavour was worth it. It is a full-on mega-budget endeavour featuring not only several clips from the movie but its set and cast, too, intercut with blurry footage of the band performing that couldn’t be more 1990s if Bill Clinton himself was on the sax.
Best of all is butter-wouldn’t-melt, 17-year-old Elijah Wood trying to look intimidating while mouthing “leave them kids alone”, standing in line with his fellow castmates. Poor Clea Duvall is so mortified by the whole thing she doesn’t remove her shades for the indignity. Or mime the line. At the very least,
Roger Waters seemed cool with it. Or, at the very least, diplomatic. When asked about the cover in a 1999 interview, Rogers said “It was great. It was really good. I liked the way they treated the line “All in all it’s just another brick in the wall” without any gaps in it, just running one syllable into the next. I thought that was very cool.”
Considering that he’d just been asked about modern music and said, “By and large, I don’t listen to music. I mean I don’t listen to the radio, I count there aren’t any radio stations that I like to listen to really and I can’t watch MTV so I can’t really answer that question because I don’t know enough about it.” Perhaps that answer is to be taken with a grain of salt. Or maybe a fistful.
