That Roger Waters was cutting-down bandmates and comrades at the kind of rate any self-regarding gunner would be proud of at the time of its original release in the early eighties will come as something of a surprise to those who consider ‘The Final Cut’ to be as philanthropic as its master would have us believe. Afterall, it is essentially a Roger Waters solo album. Staff Sergeants Dave Gilmour and Nick Mason were sidelined on wages, deployed only on an order-by-order basis whilst Private Wright had already been dismissed by Waters shortly after the recording of ‘The Wall’. So if this album has the foul-stench of the trenches and more than whiff of hypocrisy about it, then blame forward commander Waters, as it was he that sent the rest of the band scuttling for cover whilst recording got under way.
Originally planned as a kind of soundtrack from ‘The Wall’, ‘The Final Cut’ was to have featured versions of tracks recorded for the film and rejected material from the album sessions. Instead, it effectively turned into the first Roger Waters solo project and is sub-titled “A Requiem For The Post-War Dream, by Roger Waters, performed by Pink Floyd“. Not that any of it really mattered, as both ‘The Wall’ and ‘Animals’ were by and large Roger Waters creations, each being more delicately acerbic tapestries of rankled wits than either ‘Wish You Were Here’ or ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ put together.
So how did it all come about? Weren’t all the anti-war and anti-establishment rushes first glimpsed and completed during ‘The Wall’? Well yes, and no. ‘The Final Cut’ reaches further back. Whereas ‘The Wall’ was chillingly hypothetical and surreal, ‘The Final Cut’ is rooted firmly in history. The meat-industry democracy was this time round not a faceless conveyor-belt of human flesh but an observable, well-defined gallery of experience. The cogs in the machine were this time ascribed real faces, real names, real families and real consequence (marital infidelity, fatherless children). Whereas ‘The Wall’ focused on notions of individuality, ‘The Final Cut’ traces such ideas around the wounds of Waters’ own family-history: Waters having lost his own father in the war in 1944. Simply put, when you tear down the wall it’s often the disturbed images of war and futility that confront you. And this is what you have here: the trace minerals of Water’s own troubled psychology wrestled into form by tragically pretty melodies and minimal, wasteland–like arrangements that only occasionally strike firm from the mix (the mortar shell arrangements of ‘Not Now John’ for instance)
In 1983, Roger Waters published a poetic perspective of British politics dating back to the Second World War, and it’s a perspective that shapes ‘The Final Cut’. The lyrics include biting commentary on British politics during the office of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as well as chilling perspectives on the unseen events of World War II. The reinstatement of ‘When The Tigers Broke Free’ a track recorded in 1982 and featured in the movie soundtrack version of ‘The Wall’ is a testimony just how personal this album is, illustrating as it does the death of his own father to the strains of staggeringly moving male-voiced choir.
So there you have it: arguably the final Pink Floyd album. Only this time round it’s been totally remastered by those kind people at EMI who themselves have been gunning down staff as quickly as it takes to say anzio bridgehead.
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