Roger Waters says The Wall side three had a different song in place of ‘Hey You’

A different song had been in the place of The Wall track Hey You, according to bassist and songwriter Roger Waters.

Pink Floyd’s 1979 double album is regarded as one of the group’s finest achievements, though it went through a period of hell in the recording studio. From albums worth of cut songs to replacement tracks which were then never performed live, The Wall provided a hectic story which Waters would go on to perform, both with the group and as a solo act, for decades to come. Some changes were made so late into production that the album was printed with the wrong track listing, which Waters has since explained. An interview given after the album’s release confirmed Hey You was initially not on the album, but was added at the last minute.

Music producer Bob Ezin reportedly told Waters that the third side “doesn’t work” and that changes had to be made before the album went to print. The cover had already been made up and it was too late in the initial production, it would seem, to change the location of the lyrics on the album sleeve. Waters said: “Bob Ezrin called me up and he said I’ve just listened to side three and it doesn’t work.

“In fact I think I’d been feeling uncomfortable about it anyway. I thought about it and in a couple of minutes I realised that Hey You could conceptually go anywhere, and it would make a much better side if we put it at the front of the side, and sandwiched the middle theatrical scene, with the guy in the hotel room, between an attempt to re-establish contact with the outside world, which is what Hey You is.

“So that’s why those lyrics are printed in the wrong place, is because that decision was made very late; I should explain at this point, the reason that all these decisions were made so late was because we’d promised lots of people a long time ago that we would finish this record by the beginning of November, and we wanted to keep that promise.”

Waters went on to explain the new context of Hey You in the position it currently holds on the album, preceding Is There Anybody Out There? and following on B-side ender, Goodbye Cruel World. The worms referenced on the song, Waters says, had a much larger part in the initial concept of The Wall.

He added: “Dave sings the first two verses of it and then there’s an instrumental passage and then there’s a bit that goes ‘but it was only fantasy’ which I sing, which is a narration of the thing, ‘the wall was too high as you can see, no matter how he tried he could not break free, and the worms ate into his brain.’ The worms.

“That’s the first reference to worms. The worms have a lot less to do with the piece than they did a year ago. A year ago, they were very much a part of it, if you like, they were my symbolic representation of decay. Because the basic idea of the whole thing really is that if you isolate yourself, you decay.”