All those kids who sang in Pink Floyd’s The Wall? You remember, the one with the tune,
We don’t need no education,
We don’t need no thought control,
No dark sarcasm in the classroom,
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
Turns out they have learned something: how to sue for overdue royalties.
The pupils from the 1979 fourthform music class at Islington Green School secretly recorded vocals after their teacher was approached by the band’s management.
Now the 23 ex-pupils are suing for overdue session musician royalties, taking advantage of the Copyright Act 1997 to claim a percentage of the money from broadcasts.
I remember this song vividly, as I started college in the fall of 1979, after its release, and it seemed that every now-on-their-own-with-a-dorm-room-and-stereo kid thought it was endless fun to crank up the tune to 11, 24/7.
I find this latest development most amusing.
(via J-Walk)
Heeeeeeee. That should come to a handy chunk o’ change, eh.
I was shopping on Thursday and that very song came on over the store’s system. It wasn’t a muzak version, it was the real thing. It was oddly surreal, hearing something that subversive in a place designed to make me a placid little consumer.
It’s amazing what sort of once-subversive-now-passe music you can hear, in the original versions, in stores and the like.