Pink Floyd’s relationship with Roger Waters came to an infuriating, didactic halt with 1983’s The Final Cut, an album originally envisioned as a soundtrack to the motion picture component for their multi-media project The Wall. It ultimately became a stand-alone effort when Roger Waters got tuned up over England’s involvement in the early-1980s’ Falkland Islands conflict, though the others were less enthusiastic about tackling a theme so similar to The Wall.
It didn’t matter. In full control of Pink Floyd by then, Roger Waters had already sacked founding keyboardist Richard Wright, and subsequently relegated David Gilmour to just four interludes. That reportedly led to a heated exchange in which Gilmour said: “Look, if you need a guitar solo, phone me.” As such, The Final Cut – released March 21, 1983 – represented a tension-filled conclusion to a collaborative relationship that had sparked Pink Floyd to multi-platinum heights over the previous decade.
Occasionally, as with the coiled “Your Possible Pasts,” Pink Floyd rises to its former glory on The Final Cut. Waters tears through another series of searing societal critiques (“by the cold and religious, we were taken in hand: shown how to feel good, and told to feel bad”), while Gilmour – pushed into concise bursts of angry brilliance – matches him stride for stride.
But those moments are too few, too far between, on an album that represents the novelization of Pink Floyd, its songs reduced to simple infrastructure for narrative. Pink Floyd’s devolution into a Waters cover band was, alas, complete. The back of the original liner notes actually read: The Final Cut: A Requiem for the Post-War Dream — by Roger Waters, performed by Pink Floyd.
Gilmour, perhaps rightly, objected. After all, they had already made this album — and, some argued, done a better job of it the first time. “He was just obsessed with the idea that I was being destructive and I didn’t believe absolutely and completely in everything he did and said,” Gilmour told The Guardian. “But I’d say ‘I’m sorry, man, I’m being constructive.'”
In keeping, Gilmour adds a lusty fury to “Not Now John,” his lone vocal on The Final Cut — a sentiment made all the more menacing by the ironic backing vocals, which merrily chime in periodically with “fuck all that.” For the single release, Pink Floyd overdubbed the line with something that sounds like “stuff all that”; the lyrics on the sleeve, perhaps in a (we now know, failed) bid for airplay, read: “stop all that.”
They did. Roger Waters’ relationship with Pink Floyd became irretrievably broken. Wright, of course, was nowhere to be found. Nick Mason, the only member to have been on every Pink Floyd album, didn’t even appear on the closing track. And Gilmour emerged with nary a songwriting credit, something Waters says created no small amount of tension – but not because there were ideas to spare.
“Dave said he didn’t think the record was good enough, so I asked him if he had any songs. Well, he hadn’t got any. He wanted me to shelve it for a year, so he could write some songs,” Waters later told Greg Kot. “I said, ‘C’mon Dave, you haven’t written any songs for five years. What makes you think you’re going to start writing songs now?’ I told him I’d release it as a solo record if they wanted, but they didn’t want that either. That was the big bust-up really. There was so much rancor by the end of it.”
Despite its flickering glimmers of brilliance, and “Your Possible Pasts” is certainly one of them, The Final Cut couldn’t achieve liftoff without meaningful contributions from the others. No one can deny Waters’ passion, as he unleashes a series of searing diatribes on the kind of conflicts that tore his family apart, but the project simply lacks the magisterial musical accompaniment that used to give Pink Floyd flight. It became the band’s worst-selling album since 1972’s lightly regarded Obscured by Clouds. “Not Now John,” this album’s lone single, stalled at No. 30 in the U.K., and failed to chart at all in America.
Perhaps predictably, Pink Floyd never made another album with Roger Waters – and ended up in an entanglement of lawsuits and bad vibes when they initially attempted to move on without him. Eventually, the group would release a trio of albums around the nucleus of David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright.
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There are other glimmers of brilliance. South Hampton Dock, The Final Cut, and Two Suns.. to name a few. Plus, it’s a masterfully engineered recording. The drums by Andy Newmark on Two Suns are as good as anything ever recorded. The Final Cut is headphone ear candy.
A song from this album was quoted by Roger Waters at the United Nations when he acted like a spokesman for the terrorist organization, Hamas.
The “Gunner’s Dream” makes a veiled reference to John Lennon death and this was Waters’ way of thrusting his band mates aside in diminished roles so that they not occupy the center stage where Waters performs the amazing feat of being a living martyr, in his father’s uniform! Well no wonder Eric Clapton wouldn’t tour with him in 1985 because his freestyle would have been restricted so as to give the illusion that the contribution of Waters always looms larger than life over his band mates.
Then on that album with the appalling cover of a naked woman, “The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking”, his ideal model of what a woman should look like (no celluloid fat) was apparently intended to admonish his wife to whom this album was dedicated to. He used the title track song to attack Yoko Ono, who for some apparent reason stood in the way of Waters’ attempt to appropriate Lennon’s memory for his own personal use.
What is with this recurring theme of his where girls are holding palm branches and waiting for him as a deliverer? It’s his Viagra-induced adolescent wet dream, like “the Wall.”
Roger’s vindictiveness came to the fore during the writing of the lyrics to “The Wall”. He demanded that all the lyrics on the album be credited to him alone. This, not having been the case during the bands previous collaborations, was the first indication that he was beginning to see his bandmates as nothing more than glorified studio musicians. As he had copied verse from a pathetic former lover of one of his friends, one could surmise that he was protecting the guys from possible legal action for plagarism should the original writer of every word line and verse of “Young Lust” before the first phone ring and two entire verses of “Comfortably Numb” come forward to confront him ( and the woman who supplied him with the verse ). Of course this would assume that Roger was overcome with a sense of altruism rather than his true nature of selfishness and egotism. Roger, the gambler, rolled the dice and won when he believed the woman when she told him that the writer of those lyrics was such a weak man that he would not have the balls to come forward. She was holding something over this man’s head that he would never want to be made public. So, in fact, Roger was a co-conspirator in a blackmail scheme in which he was never held accountable.
Well, I enjoy Roger Waters’ albums.