“What have we done”: When the Falklands War ended the first wave of psychedelia
It would have been hideously off-brand if Pink Floyd were to ever make a record without it seemingly having some form of overarching concept underpinning it, and while the majority of the time it worked in their favour, the argument can be made that taking it too far led to their eventual downfall.
One could even argue that The Wall was a touch overblown and that it occasionally lets its storyline falter, but for all of its faults, it’s still a remarkable achievement and the most expansive concept that the band ever released with their classic lineup.
That being said, it could easily have been the point at which the band chose to call it a day and end on a high – the exceptional levels of critical acclaim that it received were an indicator that people thought the band were still at the top of their game, and that could have been the perfect opportunity to hand over the torch to the next generation of artists. However, Roger Waters felt as though he still had plenty to say, and did so in a way that ended up being the nail in the band’s coffin.
The Falklands War was raging on during the early part of the 1980s, with Great Britain in conflict with Argentina over the South Atlantic island group. Waters wanted to turn his attention towards making an album that was firmly against Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s decision to engage in a bloody territorial dispute. Waters had always been vocally anti-war, given how his own father was killed in battle in World War II, and this was understandably a personal matter that he wanted to explore in the form of a record.
The Final Cut, in terms of its concept, is not a bad idea, and the message that Waters wanted to express is one that many listeners of the band could get behind. Because of the intelligent way in which the band had previously approached serious subject matter, such as fascism, on The Wall, there was no reason why they couldn’t tackle an anti-war record, but they were quickly proven to be hideously wrong in their estimation.
The fact that the tracklist was made up of reworks of discarded songs from the sessions of The Wall aggrieved the rest of the band, who were seemingly getting frustrated with Waters attempting to exert too much control over the project. Relationships were souring fast, and the almost dictatorial way in which Waters oversaw proceedings only worsened the atmosphere in the studio.
The rest of the band were also uncomfortable with becoming so overtly political in the lyrical content, even though lines such as “Maggie, what have we done” on the opening track ‘The Post War Dream’, are relatively tame in their anti-Thatcher sentiments.
David Gilmour had also had enough of working with Waters, and despite acknowledging that he wasn’t exactly forthcoming with alternative ideas at the time, his exhaustion from having to deal with a bandmate who was constantly furious at the world led to the two clashing over the direction of the album. “He wasn’t right about wanting to put some duff tracks on The Final Cut,” Gilmour later confessed. “I said to Roger, ‘If these songs weren’t good enough for The Wall, why are they good enough now?’”
The Final Cut was a frankly overbaked idea that didn’t need to be explored to the extent that it was, and it ultimately felt like a Waters solo venture that he’d forcibly tried to get the rest of the band involved with. His subsequent departure from the band essentially killed them, and an era was over. The changing political landscape had coincided with a change in musical trends, and the spiritual death of psychedelic rock came with the release of an album that had done everything to stop this shift in vain.
