Buttkickin' Halloween Songs: "Goodbye Blue Sky" - Pink Floyd (1979)

Look Mummy,
There’s an aeroplane up in the sky…

Like Pink Floyd needs any more talking up of The Wall, or like 99.999% of you haven’t heard this song already.

Still, Goodbye Blue Sky is a beyond worthwhile contender for our prized list of Buttkickin’ Halloween Songs. Just even for those opening lines spoken by the toddler before David Gilmour’s acoustic guitar opening, a tender moment obliterated by Roger Waters’s unforgettable imagery of fear, bombings, death, and ghosts left on the battlefield.

Beauty and calm suspended for just a handful of beats before being eviscerated by inexorable inhumanity.

And of course the character of Pink, scarred forever by the father left dead in the trenches of France during World War II, that ghostly vision haunting and tormenting him endlessly and wordlessly. For all time.

Did you see the frightened ones?
Did you hear the falling bombs?
Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter when the promise of a brave new world unfurled beneath a clear blue sky?

I don’t know how much more I can add to this evaluation. It’s one of the most heartbreaking and terrifying anti-war songs ever written, a nightmarish vision of fatalism but tinged with maybe a measure of hope, despite the regret. The blue sky of peace for so many never existed. The agony lasts forever.

But there is an afterward. Somehow. Through the pain and madness.

Goodbye, blue sky.
Goodbye, blue sky.
Goodbye.
Goodbye…