This May, London’s Victoria & Albert Museum will open The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains, a comprehensive retrospective on the influential, chart-smashing rock band that commemorates 50 years since its first single was released, and 100 years since your high school friend who just got really into them first started talking about them. Running through October, the exhibit collects more than 350 artifacts from the group’s history, everything from instruments to set pieces from their most famous tours, as well as replicas of their old touring van and the basement bar where they got their start. But of course, no tribute to Pink Floyd would be complete without the cane that was used to spank Roger Waters.
According to Waters, the bamboo was once used to administer “flimsy” beatings across his before-it-was-famous ass, wielded reluctantly by a Cambridge school headmaster who “didn’t really have his heart” in it. (Why even become an educator, then?) Nevertheless, the experience later inspired the cane-brandishing teacher character from The Wall, who was not quite so unenthusiastic about using it to whip the dark sarcasm and double negatives from little shits insisting they don’t need no education.
And now you can see the actual cane—presumably on loan from the headmaster’s family, who have surely been proudly displaying and putting the neighbors off with it for years. Well, who’s being vulgar now, Mrs. Coddleswop? Now it’s in a museum!
Waters tells the BBC he’s “particularly looking forward” to being reunited with the cane, which will also be displayed alongside a logbook documenting the many punishments doled out to Waters and his schoolmates for fighting, including his fellow founding Pink Floyd member Syd Barrett. Londoners can soon see that cane that inspired so much musical genius beginning May 13, then go home and start hitting their own kids until they write the next Dark Side Of The Moon.