The musician Pink Floyd “traumatised” while making ‘The Final Cut’
In a perfect world, Pink Floyd probably would have called it quits after making The Wall. After creating such a dramatic rock opera, it was clear that Roger Waters and David Gilmour had done all they could do together as a creative team, ultimately splitting into two separate factions for the next few years. Although Waters had a singular vision for what the band’s next album would be, The Final Cut featured the band unintentionally traumatising arranger Michael Kamen during production.
Before looking at the music within, it’s important to contextualise where the band was at the time. After the leadup to making their previous effort, keyboardist Richard Wright would be fired midway through the production, leading to him going out on the road as a salaried performer rather than a core member of the band.
The entire stage show would also be marred by lavish expenses, including the massive wall that had to be erected for the first half of the concert and then torn down in the second half. While the thought of turning the same story into a concept album, a stage show, and a movie should have been enough, The Final Cut was made up from table scraps Waters had left over from The Wall.
Sounding more like a companion piece to the rock opera, The Final Cut is practically a Roger Waters solo album that just happened to have the name Pink Floyd slapped on it. Throughout the recording, Gilmour was known to question whether they were doing the right thing, famously saying, “If it wasn’t good enough to be on The Wall, why is it good enough now?”.
While Gilmour had a valid point, Waters would not be stopped, working both the band and the session musicians down to the bone trying to create it. Although Kamen had been used to Waters’s work ethic when working on The Wall, he eventually went through emotional distress when working alongside them again.
In the book Pigs Might Fly, the sessions ground to a halt one day when Kamen started to become traumatised by Waters. During one playback, biographer Mark Blake recalled, “Kamen had become so worn down by the torturous vocal takes that he started to believe that it was some kind of payback for misdemeanours in his past life. In his traumatised state, he had begun writing ‘I Must Not Fuck Sheep’ over and over again on the pad of paper in front of him”.
Even for all of Kamen’s hard work, much of the great material had already been used up. Despite adding some decent arrangements to songs like ‘Your Possible Pasts’, a lot of the album tends to feel like a B-sides collection, reserved for the people who wanted to hear The Wall again but with a bit more melodrama this time around.
By the time the band were finished with it, Waters had washed his hands of the band, leaving the group for good in the early 1980s and eventually suing them for the use of the name due to him being the leader of the band. While Kamen would eventually return to work with the band on albums like A Momentary Lapse of Reason, The Final Cut is the kind of album that needed to come with trigger warnings before entering the studio.
