‘The Final Cut’: The album that signalled the end of Pink Floyd
Whilst Pink Floyd are famed for their high points, The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and many others, their career also came with crushing lows. One of the most fractious was making their 12th album, 1983’s The Final Cut, which saw Roger Waters and David Gilmour’s relationship finally reach breaking point. Things were so bad that it is the last Pink Floyd record to feature Waters, with him leaving acrimoniously in 1985. This also meant the end of the classic Pink Floyd lineup, with keyboardist Rick Wright already absent, who had walked out because of the intense sessions for 1979’s The Wall but remained a touring part of the group for a few years after.
Interestingly, The Final Cut was released almost ten years to the day since the band’s masterpiece, The Dark Side of the Moon, was sent into the world, with all four members of the classic lineup receiving credits on that album. However, things could not be much more different for The Final Cut. Waters was now mostly in control of proceedings, Wright was nowhere to be seen, drummer Nick Mason was deeply ensconced in his love for racing cars whilst navigating a failing relationship, and Gilmour wasn’t offering much new material. Duly, session musicians are featured throughout. Adding to his sea change, co-producer of The Wall, Bob Ezrin, was absent, with Michael Kamen and James Guthrie co-producing with Waters and Gilmour.
The album was the first UK Number One album that Pink Floyd had since 1975’s Wish You Were Here, with most of this attributed to their fans waiting three and a half years for a new album, their longest wait at the time. Despite The Final Cut being contemporaneously criticised for having no discernible musical brilliance, at the time of release, Rolling Stone gave it five stars, asserting that it might well be “art rock’s crowning masterpiece”.
Much of this warm reception was to do with the themes. Coloured by Waters’ horror at the Falklands war, the collapse of the post-war consensus, and the death of his father in the Second World War, thematically, The Final Cut is one of the most robust philosophical efforts Pink Floyd released. Often characterised as a protest album, it made sense that the album’s genesis emerged from The Wall, with it said to have been originally conceived as a soundtrack album to the film of the same name.
However, for all of the supposed brilliance of The Final Cut and the fanfare it received when released, it failed to have any tangible impact on culture. There were no group publicity photos, tours, or promotional appearances. All it offered was the single ‘Not Now John’ and the 19-minute ‘video album’. If it wasn’t already clear to fans at this point, the classic lineup of Pink Floyd was gradually breaking down, with a schism on the horizon, only a couple of years away. Neither Waters nor Gilmour would ever resolve this. They are still at loggerheads today.
Discussing the album retrospectively, both Waters and Gilmour describe the making of it as a “miserable” time. Needing to work separately due to the total breakdown in their relationship, engineer Andy Jackson worked with Waters and Guthrie with Gilmour. The parties would very rarely meet to discuss creative matters. This was the nature of the impasse. “That’s how it ended up,” Gilmour told Rolling Stone in 1987. “Very miserable. Even Roger says what a miserable period it was – and he was the one who made it entirely miserable, in my opinion.”
“It was obvious Roger was making the running,” Nick Mason reflected in Inside Out. “Roger is sometimes credited with enjoying confrontation, but I don’t think that’s the case. I do think Roger is often unaware of just how alarming he can be, and once he sees a confrontation as necessary, he is so grimly committed to winning that he throws everything into the fray – and his everything can be pretty scary… David, on the other hand, may not be so initially alarming, but once decided on a course of action is hard to sway. When his immovable object met Roger’s irresistible force, difficulties were guaranteed to follow.”
Gilmour added another dimension to the struggle in 2000: “There were all sorts of arguments over political issues, and I didn’t share his political views. But I never, never wanted to stand in the way of him expressing the story of The Final Cut. I just didn’t think some of the music was up to it.”
Things got so frosty, and the pair argued so extensively that Gilmour eventually surrendered his producer credit for The Final Cut, but not the royalties. He later said: “It reached a point that I just had to say: ‘If you need a guitar player, give me a call, and I’ll come and do it.'”
“It came and died, really, didn’t it?” Willie Christie, the photographer behind the album’s cover, told Louder Sound. Waters’ brother-in-law, at the time, was living in an outhouse over the garage at Waters’ house in Sheen, southwest London. He had more insight than most into what was going down.
“Because the break-up was on the horizon,” he continued, “I think David was finding it very tough, Roger, for different reasons. That was a great shame. David had said publicly that the songs were off-cuts from The Wall. Why regurgitate? I never saw it like that. I loved it and thought there was some great stuff on it.”
“I was in a pretty sorry state,” Waters later said. “By the time we had got a quarter of the way into making The Final Cut, I knew I would never make another record with Dave Gilmour or Nick Mason.” Indeed, he never would. Given Waters and Gilmour’s recent highly-charged dispute, it seems any hope for the pair reuniting under the Pink Floyd banner will remain a pipedream.
