Waiting for the Worms

"Waiting For the Worms" is a song on the Pink Floyd album, The Wall. It is preceded by "Run Like Hell" and followed by "Stop". By now in the album, Pink has lost all hope and has let bad ideas, or "worms", control his thoughts. In his hallucination, he is a fascist dictator who spreads hatred, with the promise that his followers would see "Britannia rule again" and "send our coloured cousins home again," and announces he is "waiting to turn on the showers and fire the ovens." The count-in is Eins, zwei, drei, alle - German for "one, two, three, all..." (Probably intended to rally the masses to flock to Pink's call). The song is very drastic but quiet to begin with, then at 1:21 a muffled voice starts providing a commentary-like speech, and it continues at 1:26 where the song starts to go into a very heavy section. For the rest of the song it switches back and forth from heavy to calm, the different voices coming in at different times, until the very end where the muffled voice begins very desperate calls, and the music grows louder, making the voice incomprehensible. In the film version, it goes to an animated sequence with marching hammers. The muting (muffling) of the speaker's voice is designed (as is shown in the film) to emulate the output of a megaphone used, for example, to conduct (or direct) a rally, protest or similar gathering.

Film Version

We see a brief portion where teenagers (the same ones from In The Flesh?) run over a ragdoll version of Pink. He then shouts through a megaphone while his followers march through the street, then after we see the Nazi crowd, the screaming head and the Nazi breaking a man's skull from What Shall We Do Now?, a dog biting meat off a hook then consumed by a larger one (from the Animals tour), and the famous hammer sequence, we see Pink yell "Stop".

Personell

• David Gilmour - guitars, bass, synthesizer, lead vocals, backing vocals
• Nick Mason - drums
• Roger Waters - lead vocals, backing vocals, synthesizer
• Richard Wright - organ

• Bob Ezrin - piano, backing vocals
• Joe Chemay - backing vocals
• Stan Farber - backing vocals
• Jim Haas - backing vocals
• Bruce Johnston - backing vocals
• John Joyce - backing vocals
• Toni Tenille - backing vocals