Waiting For The Worms - Composition and Plot

Composition and Plot

At this point in the concept 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 coons 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 have to do is follow the worms!"

Finally, the song plunges into an 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!" (which segues into the next song on the album, "Stop").