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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