“Difficult to listen to”: The Pink Floyd song Roger Waters found irritating
Every band can’t be expected to make some of their greatest songs whenever they put out a record. They might come in with a decent idea in their head, but for every classic that launches itself into the hearts of millions, there can also be a few that leave fans scratching their heads, wondering what the hell they were on when they put the track together. Although Roger Waters had total control by the time he left Pink Floyd, even he could admit when some songs weren’t living up to his expectations.
Granted, Waters’s decision to leave Floyd was all about him being practical. It was clear that the band had reached an impasse of some kind, and it would have been impossible for him to keep the band going and still express himself creatively while being cordial to what every band member needed. He had already kicked out Richard Wright, but the thought of sacking David Gilmour would have been the single dumbest move in rock history.
If the band would carry on after The Wall, though, it was going to be done the way Waters envisioned it. But if someone is given that much control, it should have come as no surprise when he started to abuse his power when making The Final Cut, complete with nothing but table scraps that he had lying around ever since he had finished his first rock opera.
And it’s not like Waters knocked it out of the park with his second go-around. There are some fantastic sequences, but since most of the highlights from the record feature Gilmour in some capacity, Waters’s incessant need to block him out of the room while making his tribute to his father is still hard to stomach in a few places.
It’s easy to admire the craftsmanship that James Guthrie and Michael Kamen put into making the arrangements on the record, but since this was also made during the early 1980s, there are pieces that sound dated in a few spots. And while Waters went over everything with a fine-toothed comb to make sure everything came out the way he wanted it to, a song like ‘Your Possible Pasts’ couldn’t help but sound antiquated to his ears today.
The song may have been considered cutting edge at the time, but the minute that Waters listened back to everything, he felt that the production of the track was incredibly off, saying, “I think I would probably work the songs up with a band so there would be more flow. I would veer away from the over-dramatic use of the drum kit. Some of it I find difficult to listen to. A specific example is ‘Your Possible Pasts,’ which is this quite melodic thing and then the drums come in really loud, and I find that slightly irritating now.”
But even without Waters, the band would run into sounding dated on the next few albums, complete with drum machines and sequencers filling out a lot of A Momentary Lapse of Reason. It may have been the best they could work with given that Waters was suing them at the time, but since Waters wasn’t much better on Radio KAOS, it seemed like every member of the group fell victim to a serious dose of 1980s schlock.
Despite some remixes helping work out the bugs of The Final Cut in recent years, the original version does seem to give it a fair bit of character. The songs themselves aren’t getting any better or anything, but it serves as a better document to how the band were fracturing during that time.
