Roger Waters reflects on the most tortured Pink Floyd album: “A lot of that aggravation”
There’s a degree to which the 1983 Pink Floyd album The Final Cut sounds like a good idea on the surface. After all, it was a record based around unreleased material from their 1979 masterpiece The Wall, comfortably one of the biggest successes of the entire 1970s, let alone the band’s career. Considering that both of those categories contain their previous masterpiece, The Dark Side of the Moon, that’s a very high bar to clear.
By the early 1980s, a big-budget Hollywood film adaptation of the album was in production. Take a moment to consider how utterly absurd that is—an album so successful it justified a $10million movie (around $30m in today’s money). This led to the initial idea behind The Final Cut: to release a soundtrack album that coincided with the film’s release.
This seemed like a fine idea on the surface. However, the Falklands War began, and Waters, ever the mercurial artiste, began working on a series of songs in response to it. Waters was then presented with two choices. The first was to continue the album as it was originally intended, a soundtrack album to the movie The Wall. The second was to redirect the album to a project Waters called “Requiem for a Post-War Dream”.
Waters, in his infinite wisdom, decided to mash the two ideas together and see what happened. Now, dear reader, if you’re wondering why I’m talking so much about Roger Waters and thinking, “Wasn’t Pink Floyd meant to be a band?”—then you have something in common with David Gilmour and Nick Mason, the other members of Pink Floyd at the time.
It’s not that Waters didn’t have a leg to stand on here. The Wall had been his baby creatively. However, the rest of the band were getting intensely frustrated by his control freak tendencies. The band recalling their days making the album with all the harrowed, barely concealed trauma of Blitz survivors recalling the war. Waters himself called the album “an absolute misery to make” that the band was “fighting like cats and dogs” throughout its making in an interview with Q.
In another interview with Rock Compact Disk, Waters explained that you could hear how much of a trial the making of the record was in the music itself. Of how strained the record sounds, he said, “That was a reflection of the time and the problems we were going through. A lot of that aggravation came through in the vocal performance, which looking back really was quite tortured.”
He wasn’t wrong. Critics were merciless when the album was released, and the sales weren’t much better. Despite being the biggest and most successful rock band in the world barely three years earlier, The Final Cut was essentially the sign that Floyd as a band was essentially over. There may have been Floyd records released afterwards, but barely anything was released that shouldn’t have had the telling, devastating subtitle that the album has in its liner notes.
“The Final Cut: A Requiem For The Post-War Dream by Roger Waters, performed by Pink Floyd.”
