Run Like Hell
| "Run Like Hell" | |||||||||
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| Single by Pink Floyd | |||||||||
| from the album The Wall | |||||||||
| B-side | "Don't Leave Me Now" (Netherlands, Sweden and some US releases) "Comfortably Numb" (Later US releases) |
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| Released | 17 April 1980 | ||||||||
| Format | 7" | ||||||||
| Recorded | April–November, 1979 | ||||||||
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| Length | 4:20 (album version) 3:41 (7" single edit) |
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"Run Like Hell" is a song by the English progressive rock band Pink Floyd, written by David Gilmour and Roger Waters. It appears on the album The Wall. It was released as a single in 1980, reaching #15 in the Canadian singles chart as well as #18 in Sweden.
The song is written from the narrative point of view of antihero Pink, an alienated and bitter rock star, during a hallucination in which he becomes a fascist dictator and turns a concert audience into an angry mob. The lyrics are explicitly threatening, directed at the listener, one with an "empty smile" and "hungry heart", "dirty feelings" and a "guilty past", "nerves in tatters" as "hammers batter down your door." Even the act of sexual intercourse is doomed, for "if they catch you in the back seat trying to pick her locks", the results will be fatal. Although the lyric "You better run like hell" appears twice in the liner notes, the title is never actually sung; each verse simply concludes with "You better run".
In the film adaptation, Pink directs his jackbooted thugs to attack the "riff-raff" mentioned in the previous song, in which he ordered them to raid and destroy the homes of queers, Jews, and black people, among others. One scene depicts an interracial couple cuddling in the back seat of a car when a group of neo-Nazis accost them, beating the boy and raping the girl.
The Wall director Alan Parker hired the Tilbury Skins, a skinhead group from Essex, for a scene in which Pink's "hammer guard" (in black, militaristic uniforms designed by the film's animator, Gerald Scarfe) smashes up a Pakistani diner; Parker recalled how the action "always seemed to continue long after I had yelled out 'Cut!'."
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Wikipedia