The Final Cut
RELEASED: March 21, 1983 / LABEL: Harvest (UK) • Columbia (US) / CHART: 1 (UK) • 6 (US) Roger Waters’ powerful meditation on England and war – and Floyd Mk II’s swansong.
IN 1941, GEORGE Orwell wrote The Lion And The Unicorn, subtitled Socialism And The English Genius and built around two themes: arguing the left-wing case for war, and proving that his socialist politics could be squared with his equally passionate patriotism. Along the way, of course, came words that were both elegant and wonderfully insightful. “The gentleness of English civilisation is perhaps its most marked characteristic,” Orwell wrote. “And with this goes something that is always written off by European observers as ‘decadence’ or hypocrisy: the English hatred of war and militarism.”
Roger Waters, surely as Anglocentric a songwriter as Ray Davies or Paul Weller, is a case in point. A deep distaste for mankind’s regular habit of going into battle is streaked through a good deal of his work with Pink Floyd: from Corporal Clegg on 1968’s A Saucerful Of Secrets, through The Dark Side Of The Moon and on to The Wall. The reason for this barely needs mentioning: three years after Orwell published the aforementioned polemic, when Waters was five months old, his father was killed in combat at Anzio in Italy. “As soon as I could talk, I was asking where my daddy was,” he later reflected.
If the death of Eric Fletcher Waters had periodically surfaced in his son’s lyrics, the searingly autobiographical core of The Wall was surely bound to return the loss of his father to the centre of his thoughts. And so it proved: in its wake came the stand-alone single, When The Tigers Broke Free, quite the most stark summing-up of Waters’ trauma. “No one survived from the Royal Fusiliers Company C,” ran its concluding verse. “The were all left behind/Most of them dead/The rest of them dying/And that’s how the High Command took my daddy from me.”
That song was included in Alan Parker’s film of The Wall, and acted as the spur to a mooted soundtrack album entitled ‘Spare Bricks’. However, in the wake of that idea, Waters came up with a rather grander design: a conceptual song cycle founded on his father’s death, aimed at being “A Requiem For The Post-War Dream”.
Here, the wider political context was everything. In Waters’ telling of his personal history, his mother, on account of her Communism, had accorded huge importance to the achievements of the Labour Government of 1945-’51: the Welfare State, the NHS, the nationalisation of Britain’s heavy industry. Now, however, Mrs Thatcher was gleefully dismantling all that, fostering what Waters termed “an almost Dickensian view of society”. Worse still, he was repulsed by the fierce – and, if the likes of George Orwell are to be believed – very un-British belligerence that reared its head at the time of 1982’s Falkland’s War.
Ergo, The Final Cut: a cri de coeur against human