Shout out to Grumproro, who caught this when I accidentally scheduled it for the wrong day on Saturday night. Please repost your discourse from then if you had something to say about my thoughts on The Final Cut.
This is not really a Pink Floyd album, and all four members would tell you so.
In every sense that matters, this is a Roger Waters solo album that David Gilmour and Nick Mason happen to play guitar and drums on. I don’t really like a lot of Roger’s solo output, and god knows that going solo exacerbated his worst tendencies as a songwriter and a human being. But bless us and splash us, I have big deep emotions about The Final Cut, mostly having to do with its proximity to my beloved The Wall. This album actually started life as an attempt to create a soundtrack for the film edition of The Wall, though it rapidly morphed into a sort of companion piece to that titanic double album.
The Final Cut also has the interesting honor of having a visual album associated with it, featuring Roger in the role of the Wall protagonist attending a therapy session while his elderly former teacher (Alex McAvoy, reprising his role from the film), wanders through a Britain that seems to be gearing up to be the aggressor in a reprise of the war neither he nor the protagonist’s father ever came home from, one way or the other. You’ll notice some of the video clips are sequences from it.
About half the songs evidence a clear connection, delving into the perspectives of minor characters in the Wall, including the main character’s dying father, physically abusive teacher, and creatively abusive manager, as well as the title track itself seeming to be a plea for understanding and connection from the main character himself following the collapse of his psychological wall. Starting with the 2004 reissue, all subsequent pressings of the album also included the one original song composed for The Wall‘s cinematic incarnation, the autobiographical scar that is “When the Tigers Broke Free”, in my opinion the unequivocal highlight of the album. Also recommended is the manager’s song “Not Now John”, written largely as a rebuke of Wall director Alan Parker, who Roger felt was excessively apathetic about the themes of the project (“Not now, John, we’ve gotta get on with the filmshow/Hollywood waits at the end of the rainbow/Who cares what it’s about as long as the kids go?”)
The other half of the album is about the reason why this is not a soundtrack to The Wall, namely Roger’s despair and fear at the violent right-wing lurch of western politics in the 1980s, and more specifically British aggression in the Falklands War. Boy, remember when Roger Waters was against global superpowers pushing much smaller countries around over territorial pissing matches? These tracks are mostly lesser, though “The Fletcher Memorial Home” has a permanent home on the Floyd’s various best-of compilations because Gilmour is really proud of his guitar solo on it. I like the brief, sarcastic “Southampton Dock” the best out of this half of the album.
