by Mark Blake
Gilmour’s bugbear was that four of the pieces making up the ‘new’ song cycle, ‘Your Possible Pasts’, ‘One of the Few’, ‘The Final Cut’ and ‘The Hero’s Return’, were scraps from The Wall which had been ear-marked for the Spare Bricks album. Although the band had frequently recycled from their ‘rubbish library’ in the past, Gilmour was adamant that these particular items just weren’t good enough. Waters again seemed to be operating a closed-shop policy when it came to writing songs for Pink Floyd. But he had his reasons.
‘Dave wanted me to wait until he had written some more material,’ said Waters, ‘but given that he’d written maybe three songs in the previous five years I couldn’t see when that was going to happen.’
Gilmour has since admitted as much. ‘I’m certainly guilty at times of being lazy, and moments have arrived when Roger might say, “Well, what have you got?” And I’d be like, “Well, I haven’t got anything right now. I need a bit of time to put some ideas on tape.” There are elements of all this stuff that, years later, you can look back on and say, “Well, he had a point there.” But he wasn’t right about wanting to put some duff tracks on The Final Cut. I said to Roger, “If these songs weren’t good enough for The Wall, why are they good enough now?”’
As Bob Ezrin recalled from The Wall sessions, ‘David was a little more taciturn back then. He did a lot of smiling, and rarely went toe to toe, but when he did he was completely unmoveable.’
Unfortunately, Ezrin, the great mediator, was not available to help. He was still banished to Pink Floyd’s personal Siberia after accidentally revealing secret information about The Wall stage show, and had been busy producing new albums for his old sparring partners Alice Cooper and Kiss. Instead, Michael Kamen, who had helped score the orchestral arrangements for The Wall, was brought in. Kamen, James Guthrie and Waters, naturally, would share the final production credits; the absence of Gilmour’s name the result of a later disagreement during the final sessions for the album.
The musicians’ credits for The Final Cut read like an entry from the 1982 Who’s Who guide to session players. In Richard Wright’s absence, the classically trained Kamen played piano and harmonium and conducted the National Philharmonic Orchestra. Andy Bown, The Wall’s surrogate band member – and now Waters’ neighbour in East Sheen – was hired to play Hammond organ. Nick Mason found his role augmented by Elton John’s percussionist Ray Cooper and, when Mason struggled to master the necessary timekeeping on the song ‘Two Suns in the Sunset’, Andy Newmark, fresh from drumming on Roxy Music’s Avalon album. Veteran Floyd associate Dick Parry was now replaced by saxophonist Raphael Ravenscroft, previously heard on Gerry Rafferty’s 1978 hit single ‘Baker Street’. For a band once so insular and self-preserved, this was a very different way of working. Similarly, instead of barricading themselves in their own studio at Britannia Row, work was undertaken at no less than eight studios, including Mayfair in Primrose Hill, Gilmour’s home studio at Hookend Manor, and the ‘Billiard Room’ at Waters’ new house in East Sheen, where the bassist had installed a twenty-four-track recorder alongside the obligatory green baize table. Waters was, by all accounts, a formidable snooker player. ‘Roger would give you a ten or fifteen-point start and still beat you,’ explains Andy Bown. ‘At one point I thought he was even going to put a blindfold on to give me a fighting chance.’
Initially, Gilmour and Waters worked together in the studio. Waters would later recall that the pair preoccupied themselves with Donkey Kong, the recently launched Nintendo computer game, when not recording. But as time wore on, and the tension mounted, they chose to work separately.
‘James [Guthrie] and I would literally have one each,’ said Andy Jackson, who co-engineered The Final Cut. ‘I tended to go to Roger’s and work with him on the vocals, and James would go to Dave’s and work on the guitars. And we’d occasionally meet up again and swap what we’d done.’ While Jackson insists that this was not a particularly unusual way of working, it also had its benefits: ‘The time that Dave and Roger were in the studio together was definitely frosty.’
Andy Bown, a man who, to date, has survived nearly thirty-five years as keyboard player to Status Quo, takes a more unusual view. ‘There was quite a lot of friction,’ he admits. ‘But the difference between Pink Floyd and every other band I’ve worked with is that they are gentlemen. No outsider would be able to tell there was friction. Pink Floyd are the only band I’ve encountered who know how to behave properly.’
Yet even the quietly smiling Gilmour couldn’t keep smiling quietly for ever, as he found himself increasingly shut out of the project: ‘I lost my temper on more than one occasion. There were no fisticuffs. But it was close on a couple of occasions.’
Even Waters’ new collaborators felt the strain. Michael Kamen’s work on The Wall had taken place in New York, away from the band. When he finally came to work with them, face to face, he wisely chose to keep his distance from intra-band politics. But even his professional reserve was challenged during one particularly punishing session in the Billiard Room. Waters had never found singing particularly easy, but he was having an especially difficult day pitching. Kamen sat patiently in the control room, and eventually began writing on a pad of paper. Waters finally lost his patience, ripped off his headphones and demanded to know what Michael was writing. Kamen had become so worn down by the tortuous vocal takes that he started to believe that it was some kind of payback for misdemeanours in his past life. In his traumatised state he had begun writing ‘I Must Not Fuck Sheep’ over and over again on the pad of paper in front of him …
The involvement of ‘ship’s cook’ Nick Mason in the album was, in his own words, ‘pretty minimal’. The band’s passion for newfangled sound technology had first been indulged with a quadraphonic version of Dark Side of the Moon. The craze for quad sound had never quite caught on, as most conventional hi-fi set-ups couldn’t really do it justice. For The Final Cut, the group had been sold on the promise of ‘Holophonic’ or ‘Total Sound’, a process devised by an Italian scientist. This process worked on conventional stereo tape but when played back through headphones could effectively ‘move’ the sound around, to give the impression that it was being heard above, beside or behind the listener’s head.
A sucker for such special effects, Waters entrusted Nick Mason with overseeing the recording of various holophonic sound effects needed for the album. Mason would keep himself busy taping the sound of warplanes at an RAF base in Warwickshire and screaming car tyres at a police driving school. Away from his musical duties, though, he was also free to indulge his passion for motor racing. By the time he returned for the final sessions, relations between Gilmour and Waters had broken down completely.
‘Sometimes I drove home from the recording studio and screamed and swore, although I was alone in the car,’ Gilmour admitted. ‘That was Roger’s fault. He didn’t want my music, he didn’t want my ideas. It got to the point where I just had to say, “If you want a guitar player, give me a call and I’ll play some.”’
The upshot of the final argument was that Gilmour’s name as producer was removed from the final credits, although it was agreed that he would still be paid.
‘Dave’s attitudes and beliefs were very different from mine, and a lot of niggling developed,’ explained Waters. ‘But if you want to be in a band and go on making the money, and you want to go on being superstars, you have to have songs. Gilmour didn’t like The Final Cut’s politics. He didn’t like the attacks on Margaret Thatcher. But he needed to compromise because he didn’t have any songs of his own. Not one. It all got very nasty.’
For all his tenacity and willingness to fight to the death, even Waters was feeling the strain. ‘I was in a pretty sorry state. There was so much conflict in my professional life. By the time we had gotten a quarter of the way into making The Final Cut, I knew that I would never make another record with Dave Gilmour and Nick Mason.’ The drummer, for so long Waters’ closest ally in Pink Floyd, also found himself sid
ing with Gilmour over the musical arguments.
Argentine forces surrendered the Falklands in June 1982, by which time the total death count for both sides had almost reached 1,000. Come December 1982, Gilmour and Mason had been forced to accede to Waters’ wishes, effectively relinquishing any control they might have had over The Final Cut. Waters has since hinted that he threatened to put it out as a solo record, but, as the band were contracted to EMI to make a Pink Floyd album, it seems unlikely that the company would have permitted this.
While the process of making the record was clearly a harrowing experience, The Final Cut has suffered rather badly by association. History now views it as so bound up with the demise of Pink Floyd Mark II that it’s difficult to appraise the music independently. Roger Waters’ dominant vocals ensure that it’s not an entry-level album for the curious. However, his occasional madman ranting and, yes, strangulated bark suits most of the material. ‘A lot of the aggravation came through in the vocal performance, which, looking back, really was quite tortured,’ he admits.
If nothing else, he always sounds utterly committed to his deeply personal lyrics: calling Prime Minister Thatcher to task on ‘The Post-War Dream’ (‘Oh, Maggie, Maggie what have we done? …’), and berating her for the sinking of the General Belgrano on ‘Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert’. The thoughtful ‘Southampton Dock’, a lament to returning war heroes and those heading off to face almost certain death, taps again into Waters’ own story of an absent father, missing in action. On ‘Your Possible Pasts’ and ‘Two Suns in the Sunset’, there’s even something of Bob Dylan during his gnarly, late-seventies period, in Waters’ voice. It would have been pushing even Gilmour’s stoic professionalism to sing these songs with anywhere near as much conviction. Yet, however sidelined he may have been, his guitar solos on ‘Your Possible Pasts’ and ‘The Fletcher Memorial Home’ are almost the measure of anything on The Wall.
Despite Waters’ universal despair at the state of Great Britain, The Final Cut still managed a traditional Pink Floyd happy(ish) ending. The theme of impending nuclear Armageddon in ‘Two Suns in the Sunset’ found Waters pondering his character’s last few minutes alive. ‘It says, “Don’t be scared to live your life,”‘ Waters told writer Carol Clerk. “‘Don’t be scared to take risks. Don’t be scared to take the risk of touching people or being vulnerable.”’
Released in March 1983 in the UK, The Final Cut appeared in a sleeve designed by Waters, with photographs taken by his brother-in-law, Willie Christie. The detail on the front, of various Second World War service medals, including the Distinguished Flying Cross, was rather more subtle than a back cover photograph of a soldier, holding a film canister under one arm, with a knife protruding from his back. The Final Cut gave Pink Floyd another number 1 album, though this was clearly off the back of The Wall’s popularity, rather than on the commercial appeal of the material. In America, it managed a similarly impressive number 6 placing.
The opening sounds of several perfectly enunciating British news-casters, including one discussing the Falklands War, gives the whole record an identifiably English flavour, which must have baffled American audiences not traditionally inclined to take notice of wars in parts of the world they had never heard of. ‘Not Now John’, the one song on which Gilmour sang lead vocals, was released as a single in the UK and US, after Steve O’Rourke persuaded the band that American radio stations were keen to play it. One of the album’s few up-tempo tracks, its chorus line of ‘fuck all that’ was hastily substituted by a new line of ‘stuff all that’. Gilmour’s rasping vocal and squalling guitar were still red herrings. A song about the unquestioning, ‘fuck all that’ mentality of the jingoistic Brit, ‘Not Now John’ was still a punchy, cynical number. For British listeners there also seemed something prickly and snobbish about its closing lines of ‘Where’s the bar?’ repeated in French, Italian, Greek, Spanish and, finally, English: ‘Oi, where’s the fucking bar?’ The song made it into the UK Top 30, but failed to do anything in America.
Critical reaction veered from Melody Maker’s blunt assessment that The Final Cut was ‘a milestone in the history of awfulness’ to Rolling Stone’s belief that it was ‘art-rock’s crowning masterpiece’. In NME, Richard Cook claimed that Waters’ songwriting was ‘blown to hell. Like the poor damned Tommies that haunt his mind.’
Waters granted an interview to Karl Dallas, in which he admitted that ‘communication in the band isn’t too good’ while insisting that his comments in an earlier interview did not suggest ‘the end of the band, which is nonsense’, only that he was now toying with the idea of making a solo album.
David Gilmour stuck to the party line in an interview from the same year. ‘We did have an argument about the production credits,’ he explained carefully, ‘because my ideas of production weren’t the way that Roger saw it being [sic]. [The Final Cut] is very good but it’s not personally how I would see a Pink Floyd record going.’
In years to come, Gilmour would become increasingly bullish in his dismissal of the record, trotting out a standard response that there are only three good songs on the album: “‘The Fletcher Memorial Home”, “The Final Cut” and, umm, I can’t remember right now … there’s two of them anyway.’
However disliked it may now be among some of their audience and the band themselves (even Waters would later admit that ‘not everything can be a fucking masterpiece’), The Final Cut could never find Pink Floyd accused of complacency. The musical offerings from many of their sixties and seventies contemporaries at the time prove how difficult some of their peers found it to stay relevant in the new decade. The Rolling Stones’ Dirty Work album saw the beleaguered Jagger/Richards partnership hitting an all-time low, and The Who’s It’s Hard suggested that even their old firebrand Pete Townshend was all out of puff. In such lacklustre company, The Final Cut, however heavy-going, sounded as if Pink Floyd still gave a shit about something.
Without a tour or any serious promotional campaign to support the album, the band seemed to have fallen into professional limbo by 1983. Meanwhile, their one-time frontman, Syd Barrett, had left London and returned to Cambridge. His excessive spending had left him penniless and his poor diet had given him stomach ulcers. Syd’s old management company, Blackhill, was now looking after Ian Dury and The Clash, when a ghost from their past appeared in the office.
‘I think he wanted us to sign a passport form,’ recalls Peter Jenner. ‘He could barely talk, and he looked like a bouncer. He’d put on an enormous amount of weight and was wearing this overcoat that looked more like a tent. We were like, “Who is that?” A whisper went round the office. “My God, it’s Syd.”’
By now, Barrett’s mother had sold the house in Hills Road and moved, with her son, to nearby St Margaret’s Square. Barrett agreed to an operation to alleviate his stomach problems. According to Tim Willis’s superlative biography, Madcap, Roger Waters’ mother Mary helped him find a gardening job, but it didn’t last long. In 1982, as his former band released their challenging new album, Barrett drifted back to London and booked himself into his old haunt, the Chelsea Cloisters. Within weeks he was gone again. According to Barrett myth, walking back to Cambridge. ‘I have no idea if he really did walk back,’ ventures old friend David Gale, ‘but that’s the story.’
Two journalists from a French magazine, Actuel, trailed Barrett to Cambridge, bringing with them a bag of laundry he’d left behind at Chelsea Cloisters. Barrett answered the door, politely offering to pay them for his clothes. Asked if he played guitar while living in London, he replied, ‘No, I watch TV, that’s all.’ He allowed the pair to take a photograph before scuttling back into the house.
Old friends would run into him from time to time, but they didn’t encounter the same Syd they’d known before. Sue Kingsford was driving to her parents’ house on the outskirts of Cambridge when she saw Barrett standing by the side of the road, looking as if he were trying to hitch a lift.
‘So we stopped the car and told him to
get in,’ says Sue. ‘“Where are you going, Syd?” “I’m not going anywhere.” We took him to a pub, the Tickell Arms. He had a pint of Guinness, but didn’t say a single word. In the end, I said, “Great to see you, Syd, I have to go home now.” He said, “Yes, great to see you, too.” And we drove him back to Cambridge.’
In interviews, Roger Waters would often state that Syd was suffering from schizophrenia, though his family never confirmed this. ‘I think Syd was just terribly unlucky with one trip,’ offers Libby Gausden. ‘Syd’s mother, Win, always thought somebody had slipped something into his drink. That really was what she believed. I don’t think she knew anything about drugs.’
However, throughout the first half of the 1980s, he voluntarily spent time in nearby Fulbourn psychiatric hospital (‘That was awfully ironic,’ says Libby Gausden, ‘Syd loved that area, and we often used to sit and look at the hospital.’) and, according to some, Greenwoods Therapeutic Community near Billericay in Essex. Once again, though, he is said to have ended up walking back to Cambridge.
‘We’d get reports back about Syd during this time,’ says Storm Thorgerson. ‘He seemed very protected by his family, and I think Pink Floyd were supporting him financially. But I don’t think he was happy. One wishes it could have all been better.’
With Pink Floyd’s future uncertain, David Gilmour seemed determined to keep busy. The Gilmours now had a new addition to the family, a third daughter, Sara. The guitarist also spent his time demoing songs at his home studio, and singing backing vocals on Kate Bush’s brilliantly bizarre new album, The Dreaming.
For Gilmour’s second solo album, 1984’s About Face, he rounded up an A-list roster of session players, including drummer Jeff Porcaro and bassist Pino Palladino. By the time sessions began at Pathé-Marconi Studios in Paris, Gilmour had also called in the cavalry.
