“But so what?”: Roger Waters on why ‘The Final Cut’ was his most personal record
Anyone who has been in the music industry for a while knows that there’s more to the story than fame and fortune. There might be a handful of people who try to make do with making a few catchy songs during their career, but the ones that have enduring legacies have the music channelled from deep within before showing pieces of their soul to the world. While Roger Waters took a while before reaching that kind of empathy in Pink Floyd, he knew that some of his later career ended up saying more about him than anything he had ever done.
But for anyone who came into Pink Floyd’s music and started with projects like The Wall, chances are they know a little bit more about Waters than they could have ever wanted. Even though he is a fantastic songwriter, the massive rock opera is far from a comfortable listen, featuring many moments where Waters seems to be reliving his rockstar trauma on record and also spouting off some genuinely hateful speech in the name of satire.
Then again, it’s hard to take any of that at face value. The whole point behind The Wall was to create a heightened version of what Waters was experiencing after years of being looked at as a rock god, and this was his way of airing out his dirty laundry rather than giving you an actual representation of what everything was like.
That’s not to say that he couldn’t tug on a few heartstrings, either. Hearing him sing about the problems he had with his parents and especially his domineering mother on ‘Mother’ is still emotionally gripping, and even though it didn’t make the final album, his tribute to his father on ‘When The Tigers Broke Free’ is still one of the most emotionally resonant moments in the film adaptation.
Even for a project with this much baggage, though, Waters wasn’t done talking about his demons. He knew that there was some unfinished business, and even though The Final Cut is far from the masterpiece The Wall is, it does give him a platform to talk about his personal issues, whether that’s carrying on stories from the last record or dealing with the problems going on during The Falklands War.
While the record was a chore for the rest of the band to work through, Waters still considered The Final Cut to be fairly close to the chest, saying, “It was my father that record, and I think it was the most personal record I’ve made. I started to come to grips with my obligation to him, and maybe I unburdened some of that. So yeah, it’s kind of an important record to me. I’ve had a lot of people say that, actually. It wasn’t one of the most successful Pink Floyd records, but so what?”
But since the record was far from a walk in the park and left the rest of the band in shambles, Waters was probably better suited to release this as his first solo album instead. After all, David Gilmour only shows up for the occasional guitar solo and only one major lead vocal, and after Richard Wright was fired, this feels like all of the dramatics of The Wall without any of the great songs behind it.
Granted, that might be looking into it too much. Because when examining the album on a deeper level, this feels like less of a commercial record and closer to a tribute Waters had to get out of his system for his late father. Ir was never designed to be a massive blockbuster record, and in terms of doing what it set out to do, Waters did achieve his vision.
