By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Love them or hate them, our schooldays are formative and, as the old cliché has it, make us what we are today, for good or ill. Many of the greatest and most famous popular songs written about schooldays don’t pull any punches about the harsh realities of school life – and one or two of the tracks I’ve chosen here see the teachers wielding their fists themselves.
Although I mostly blog here about literary topics, there are some who would argue that song lyrics are a form of literature: if the late-medieval Border ballads, originally designed to be performed to music, can make it into The Norton Anthology of Poetry alongside the lyrics of Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan, why not consider some fine masters of the lyric art?
Here’s my personal pick of the best school tracks: about enduring school, loving it (occasionally), and leaving it.
1. The Smiths, ‘The Headmaster Ritual’.
Belligerent ghouls, Morrissey informs us on the opening track to the Smiths’ second studio album, Meat Is Murder (1985), run Manchester schools. Yes, I’m kicking things off with a decidedly downbeat take on schooldays, and I don’t care.
It’s a cracking track, and Johnny Marr’s guitar riffs brilliantly complement Morrissey’s descriptions of sadistic cruelty visited upon children in northern England in the 1960s and 1970s.
2. Madness, ‘Baggy Trousers’.
Sorry, it’s more of the same. Here’s another classic 1980s track about corporal punishment at English schools, although here the Nutty Boys mix in the happy memories with the bad in this song from 1980.
Indeed, Suggs has stated that he wrote ‘Baggy Trousers’ partly in response to Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ from the year before; unlike Pink Floyd’s dour take on English grammar schools, ‘Baggy Trousers’ is a fast-paced Ian Dury-influenced take on the joyful anarchy of English comprehensive schools, where even the headmasters break all the rules.
3. Pink Floyd, ‘Another Brick in the Wall Part 2’.
And here are the Floyd themselves, from their 1979 double album The Wall. Written by Roger Waters, the song is sometimes (lazily) misinterpreted as an anti-education song, but it’s actually more of an anti-authoritarian song, calling out those who abuse power (and their fellow humans).
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more unlikely candidate for a Christmas number one single, but that’s just what the song became in the UK charts in December 1979. Curiously, it was the first of two consecutive Christmas number ones in the UK to feature a children’s choir: the following year, the St Winifred’s School Choir would top the charts with their sickly paean to grandmas everywhere, which was, presumably, bought by (or for) grandmas everywhere.
4. Taylor Swift, ‘Fifteen’.
Taylor Swift wrote this song for her old schoolfriend, Abigail, but in many ways it’s a paean to both their teenage years, and specifically their friendship at age fifteen when they realised they didn’t need to fit in with the cool kids because they had each other. A touching number, if not as catchy as Swift’s other great age-titled song, ‘22’.
5. Tears for Fears, ‘Mad World’.
The song that put Tears for Fears on the musical map features a verse in which the singer goes to school and the teacher looks right through him, as if he’s invisible. And none of the other schoolchildren know him, so he feels alone. The song gives voice to that alienating experience of being surrounded by people and yet feeling lonely all the same.
‘Mad World’ was later covered by Gary Jules and Michael Andrews, whose piano-accompanied dirge robbed the song of all of its strangeness and charm and (in this author’s humble and undoubtedly self-righteous opinion) reduced it to just another boring ballad. And it reached number one, proving we do indeed live in a mad world.
6. The Boomtown Rats, ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’.
In January 1979, 16-year-old Brenda Spencer shot and killed two people at the Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, one of whom was the school principal, and injured eight children waiting outside the school. Spencer lived across the road from the school and, when asked why she had carried out the shooting, famously replied, ‘I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.’ It was the first high-profile school shooting in the US and prefigured later horrors such as the Columbine shooting 20 years later.
The Irish band the Boomtown Rats, fronted by Live Aid co-founder Bob Geldof, turned this shocking event into a catchy pop song, which he reportedly later regretted writing because it made Spencer famous. Geldof had been struck by the senseless of the act and the banal reason Spencer offered for committing it, and was inspired to write about it.
7. Pet Shop Boys, ‘This Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave’.
Although not one of their better-known songs, this 1990 album track from the Pet Shop Boys’ album Behaviour is a powerful track about Neil Tennant’s memories of his childhood days at Catholic school in England.
8. Wheatus, ‘Teenage Dirtbag’.
This 2000 song was, would you believe, inspired by an event in 1984, when Wheatus’ founder, Brendan B. Brown, was 10 years old and heard about a Satanic teen homicide which occurred in his hometown of Long Island. But the song has become a firm favourite because it speaks to a universal experience: that high-school heartache of yearning for someone who won’t look at you twice and is in a relationship with someone who doesn’t deserve them. It’s a true singalong anthem, too, so that helps.
9. Sam Cooke, ‘Wonderful World’.
A simple song with a simple lyrical structure, this 1960 classic sees the singer expressing his lack of knowledge of a host of academic subjects, before asserting that the one thing he does know is that he loves the song’s addressee. Written by Cooke along with Herb Alpert and Lou Adler, it was memorably covered by Herman’s Hermits in 1965, but Cooke’s version is the original, and the best.
10. Busted, ‘What I Go to School For’.
There are plenty of songs about inappropriate feelings between teachers and their pupils, from The Police’s ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’ to ABBA’s ‘When I Kissed the Teacher’, but this breakthrough hit for the British trio Busted has a catchy chorus and, what’s more, is slightly unusual in focusing on the teenage boy’s obsession with his female teacher.
11. Alice Cooper, ‘School’s Out’.
Well, this one had to make the list, didn’t it? Whether you worship Alice Cooper’s oeuvre as a whole or are indifferent to it, ‘School’s Out’ is one of those universal bangers which capture a particular date in the calendar, like Christmas songs.
Indeed, Christmas was part of the inspiration for the track, which Cooper conceived as a distillation of two joyous moments in the year: Christmas morning before you open your presents, and those minutes leading up to the end of the school day. Here we are, more than 50 years since the song was recorded in 1972, and it’s still the definitive anthem for the end of the school day (and year).