Uneducated Former Children Sue Pink Floyd

he disturbingly enduring English space-rock band Pink Floyd has come under fire this week, thanks to a lawsuit filed by twenty former children who sang on the band’s 1979 hit “Another Brick in the Wall.� According to lawyers for the now-adults, Floyd never paid them for their services, and also didn’t bother to use them on the band’s 1983 follow-up The Final Cut, which sucked hard because of it.

“These children gave minutes of their time, time that could have been spent in the classroom learning about fish, to contribute to this album, with only years of local notoriety and a permanent place in rock ‘n roll history as their reward,� explained the former-children’s lawyer, Theodore Chuck. “It’s time this injustice was rectified, and by that I don’t mean ‘put up your bum.’ As I’ve explained to my clients time and time again, that’s not what ‘rectified’ means.�

While recording the track for their hugemongously successful 1979 album The Wall, Floyd’s management recruited the children from nearby Islington Green School, offering the school’s music teacher Alun Renshaw 1,000 pounds and “a shot at Debra,� a reference to one of the band’s roster of loose groupies. The teacher insists that aside from getting his rocks off with the Floyd groupie, he wasn’t compensated in any way for the children’s appearance on the album. The 1,000 pounds apparently went to the school itself, which it reportedly spent on adding windows to the grim, lightless building which had originally been used as a slaughterhouse.

“We were just going to go over how they make pickles that day,� explained Renshaw. “So I figured what the hell.�

School officials were mortified when they discovered their students’ involvement in a song with the lyrics “We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control, no dark sarcasm in the classroom – teachers leave them kids alone.�

“We just thought they were terribly hackneyed,� explained Islington’s headmistress Margaret Maden. “And at the time we were worried that this song would inspire British children to take less interest in their education. But what we quickly learned was that Pink Floyd only inspired prolonged attention in the heavily stoned, and except for those jokers who sang on the album, the rest of England’s children quickly went back to their studies.�

Those jokers, however, went about their own not learning with a passion, sure they would be able to coast through the rest of their lives on their association with the psychedelic prog-rock band. The academic habits of the twenty children involved, already questionable, took a turn for the worse after the song’s astonishing success. The children then felt like they needed to respect their newfound roles as spokeschildren for a generation, and feared being branded as sellouts if they were to learn their multiplication tables. Repeated efforts by teachers to point out that nobody in the outside world even knew who they were met with consistent failure. Convinced that stoners everywhere were praising them for their anti-establishment stance and their collective position on dark sarcasm in the classroom, the children succeeded in failing to learn anything for the rest of their academic careers.

After Floyd refused to prolong the children’s careers through more backup singing opportunities, Renshaw attempted to wrong that right with the children’s follow-up album in 1981, We Don’t Need No Hygiene, Neither. But without Pink Floyd’s publicity machine the album was doomed to fairly poor showing, selling few copies. Worst of all, Renshaw learned he’d been beaten to the punch by some knob over in Langley, Canada, and was personally sued for stealing a bad idea.

Though thoroughly uneducated, the now-adult claimants are clear on their expectations for a delayed slice of the Pink Floyd pie.

“I don’t know, I think we should get a million, trillion pounds,� offered former schoolchild Roary Mills. “A kapchillion maybe.�

“No way,� argued fellow former child Paul Richards. “I’m not getting ripped off. I won’t settle for anything less than twenty-five pounds.�

Should the matter go to trial, Mills believes the legal process will involve throwing fruit at the band until the truth is revealed. Richards, on the other hand, believes the judge will turn Pink Floyd upside-down and shake them until enough money falls out for everyone to buy ice cream. Stan Chancey, the group’s expert on the legal system due to his having seen a courtroom drama on television years ago, explains to the others that a jury of their peers will decide Floyd’s fate, meaning the jury will be made up of assorted British rock ‘n roll legends.

Chancey envisions seminal British rockers like Eric Clapton, Ray Davies and the Rolling Stones delivering their verdict via an electrifying supergroup courtroom concert the likes of which the world has never seen. If the jury decides in favor of the band, Chancey explains, look for them to reprise the obscure George Harrison classic “Not Guilty,� especially if Harrison himself is on the jury. If Floyd are found guilty, however, the band may compose a brand-new tune to unveil at the verdict reading, with a title something like “They’re Guilty,� which will likely feature each of the jury members singing a line of lyrics in turn, sort of like the Traveling Wilburys or that big Dylan benefit concert years back.

Chuck, who has long since given up explaining the British legal system to the former children, hopes the settlement will be large enough for him to retire and never have to deal with the uneducated ever again.

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I say, as long as hiding out from the mob leaves you trapped in a backwards country like Australia, make the best of it. Or at least I'm saying it this week, since it's not yet safe enough for me to return to the states. And make the best of it I will. And I'll make Camembert make the best of it, because making him do things he doesn't want to do is my only source of fun in this primitive aspiring Bayou.

Let it never be said Australia isn't rich in beautiful, untouched natural beauty. Or make sure it's never said around here, since a fat Aussie named Mick will pound you. Since there is so much natural beauty, though, I thought it was high time I lived out my dream of being a rugged outdoorsman. Ever since I was a child, age 41-49, I wanted to be one of those amazing men who made their living off the untamed frontier, like a cowboy, a lumberjack, or perhaps a headhunting cannibal. But since I can't ride a horse, am too short to wield an ax, and get queasy when I taste human flesh, most of those avenues have been closed to me until now. Before, however, I never considered gator-taunting—it's a top 5 upwardly-mobile field here in Australia.

If you've ever seen one of these gator-taunting shows, or their ancestral 1970s kin, the all-kinds-of-animal-taunting shows like Wild Kingdom, you know they're populated by fearless men who can stare dangerous beasts in the face without pissing their pants, are cunning enough to avoid serious injury, and know how to bounce back from those injuries they can't avoid. They also have another requirement—a bold partner, capable of narrating with a dashing voice. This is the job I want.

Yes, the dashing narrator—good people, those guys get laid like eggshell-colored bathroom tile. Not that it's my motivation, but any career admired by the ladies is good enough for Rok Finger. However, I obviously can't narrate to a video of an untaunted alligator, so that's where Camembert comes in. He might be a little slower to get out of the way of their vicious snapping jaws, confined to a wheelchair as he is, but Camembert has more than enough moxie to make up for a lack of agility. And moxie grows back when severed, I hear.

Before you bleeding hearts start emailing me again in defense of Camembert, I should let you know I haven't simply dragged him to the outback and thrown him into the maw of vicious gators without any practice. I brought gators home, and left them in our backyard, where he's sure to stumble across them while doing the laundry. If he succeeds with these "pop quizzes," we should be able to journey to the outback to confront them on their own turf as early as next week, excluding any necessary healing time.

The gators won't be his first experience with wild animals either. For years I have surprised him by letting loose squirrels or hungry raccoons in his bedroom while he slept—I originally started it to make him more alert to possible prowlers, but it worked out better than I could have imagined. I can't say his reaction time was always first-rate, but apart from the paint-peeling shrieks he composed himself respectably. I think perhaps the squirrels were too small, and the raccoons blended into the background of his bedroom too easy. Alligators ought to be much easier to see, and therefore react to. I tested this theory last week by having Felchyana toss a snake at him, and he reacted quite well, swatting it down and crushing its skull under his chair's wheel, all the while asking her what the fuck she thought she was doing.

Of course, none of this prepares me at all. I've practiced a little bit on my narration, turning down the TV while watching nature programs and doing running commentary on what's going on, and I suppose I need a little more background information on animals so I will be able to say something beyond "Look at this pervert" when the times comes. Not that it isn't a wonderful start to a very promising career.

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Before my days as a newspaperman, and slightly after my days as the Spoonman, I served my time in the American school system as a teacher. Or a learning person, as we used to say before they invented proper grammar.

My earliest teaching experiences were at a prep school, the kind where it's all boys (or girls, but I couldn't land a gig for that one) and they have to wear uniforms and conduct themselves like rich and snobby gentlemen. At first, the fellows were all leery of me, because I was so close to them in age. After a while, they came to think of me as their favorite teacher. Some of that was because I was so close in age, they thought they could trust me, but it was more than that as well. I actually enjoyed teaching, and tried to make all the subjects we studied connect to their own lives.

This is not always an easy task. We were going through a rough period where ventilation and air conditioning was being forced into the classroom, and while I think I did a good job, I couldn't always make the kids see the value in knowing how the thermostat works. I did better in other subjects, like teaching poetry.

All of my students came to love Walt Whitman quite a lot. Before my class, they thought of him as some stuffy, recently-dead hooligan who wrote homo garbage. But then I actually read a few of the poems for them, some of them in an amusing Italian dialect, and they were thrilled. One student told me "I Sing the Body Electric" was the best verse he had ever heard, and I don't think he was trying to get extra-credit by saying it. I gave it to him all the same, though.

Then, they fired me from the job. My students took it hard. They threatened to protest when I told them I had been fired for reading all the poems in an Italian accent. They said they would storm the school, bust out all the windows, and rape the faculty, but not because they wanted to do it. They wanted to show support for me. I told them if they wanted to show support for me, really wanted to prove their loyalty, they would continue their educations and forget about my troubles.

They did that. But on the last day, as I was escorted off the campus, they all leaned out the windows and recited my favorite Walt Whitman poem, chanting "O Captain! My Captain!" just like Grand Funk Railroad later would. They turned all this into a movie, but since they threw out my original draft screenplay, I want no part of that Hollywood garbage.

I eventually wound up in public schools, where my under-informed and incompetent teaching made me fit in quite well. It had been the real reason I was fired, of course. No one's ever been fired for reading poetry in a bad accent.

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