Waiting for the Worms
| "Waiting for the Worms" | |
|---|---|
| Song by Pink Floyd from the album The Wall | |
| Published | Pink Floyd Music Publishers Ltd |
| Released | 30 November 1979 (UK) 8 December 1979 (US) |
| Recorded | April–November 1979 |
| Genre | Progressive rock, art rock, hard rock |
| Length | 4:04 |
| Label |
Harvest (UK) Columbia (US) |
| Writer(s) | Waters |
| Producer(s) | Bob Ezrin, David Gilmour, James Guthrie and Roger Waters |
"Waiting for the Worms" (working title "Follow the Worms") is a song from the 1979 Pink Floyd album The Wall. It is preceded by "Run Like Hell" and followed by "Stop".
At this point in the album, protagonist Pink has lost hope ("You cannot reach me now") and his thinking has decayed, bringing to mind the "worms". In his hallucination, he is a fascist dictator, fomenting racist outrage and violence, as begun in the preceding song, "Run Like Hell". The count-in is Eins, zwei, drei, Alle — German for "one, two, three, everybody". In the beginning and end the crowd chants "Hammer", a recurring representation of fascism and violence in The Wall.
The song is a slow, leaden march in G Major, begun with David Gilmour and Roger Waters alternating calm and strident voices, respectively. Waters takes over with an extended vamp on A minor, musically similar to the album's earlier "The Happiest Days of Our Lives". Through a megaphone, he barks strident, racist invective ("Waiting to put on a black shirt . . . for the queens and the and the reds and the Jews"). After an extended rant, Gilmour's calmer voice returns, chuckling warmly with the promise that his followers will "see Britannia rule again" and "send our coloured cousins home again," with Waters concluding "All you need to do is follow the worms!"
Finally, the song plunges into a minor-key musical theme -- root, major second, minor third, major second—that has recurred throughout the album, as the main theme to "Another Brick in the Wall", the instrumental section of "Hey You", and will be heard in the album's climax, "The Trial". The riff is repeated in E minor, with E minor and D Major chords played atop it on keyboards. From the megaphone, Waters's bigoted rant lapses into incomprehensibility, while the music and the crowd's chanting grows louder. Finally, the song abruptly halts with a shout of "Stop!"
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Wikipedia