To make a perfect album once is to achieve the ultimate pinnacle of being a musician. While a single song certainly has its own sense of pure artistic endeavour, it is the album by which so many bands and artists are judged. Pink Floyd are one band to have achieved that impressive feat.
But, even still, that has never made the art of creating the perfect record any easier. The truth is, even if an audience loves a record, it doesn’t mean the artist who made it will. It’s hard for any artist to be completely satisfied with their work.
Since there are only so many hours you can devote to one song or album, it’s up to you to make it the best that you can under the circumstances before the label starts wondering where the product is. Although Roger Waters had the rest of Pink Floyd wrapped around his finger after The Wall, his last album with the band was still half-finished compared to all of his other visions.
As far as Waters was concerned, though, Pink Floyd was practically his brainchild by the end of the 1970s. Having been there from the beginning with Syd Barrett still in the band, Waters was one known for taking bits and pieces from different songs and meshing them together to create his masterpieces, ruminating on the nature of humanity throughout albums like Dark Side of the Moon.
After the band’s 1973 album became one of the biggest albums of all time and a fixture of dorm room walls the world over, Waters was convinced that he needed to carve out a vision for how the rest of their career would go. Not happy being just a songwriter, Waters could be best described as the band’s conceptual director on records like Wish You Were Here and Animals.
While it would be stretching to call anything Waters was doing intricate, the best contributions he made to the band was making albums that stood as works of art. When working on The Wall, that art came at the expense of some of his bandmates, leading to Waters firing Richard Wright halfway through the record and only hiring him back as a salaried musician when working on the accompanying tour.
When the band got back to work on a new project, Waters figured that he wasn’t done with the concept of The Wall. Despite David Gilmour’s objection, The Final Cut would be the glorified B-sides of what was left from their previous album. While it’s a crime to leave off songs like ‘When the Tigers Broke Free’, much of the album teeters closer to musical theatre than anything remotely rock and roll.
The Final Cut may well be one of the band’s better efforts, but it does hold a certain resignation which will not please avid Pink Floyd fans. The album represents a moment where David Gilmour gives up the ghost and lets Roger Waters run wild.
The record was originally written to be the soundtrack to The Wall film but was given its own release after Waters realised the album’s potential. A lot of that spark came from Britain’s involvement in the Falklands War and therefore acted as a moment of global protest, something Waters would become very astute at.
Compared to any of the other Pink Floyd projects he had ever worked on, Waters said that he would have loved to get back into the studio and have another crack at the album, saying, “There are parts of the production of The Final Cut that I would redo.”
For Waters, the mix just doesn’t sit right, “I’m not sure that James Guthrie and I and Michael Kamen made all the right choices, particularly in the mix… the drum levels on some of the tracks. Some of it’s a bit overwrought and thinking too much, in my view”.
Even if the record could have benefited from better production, no amount of studio tweaks was able to repair the broken bond between the band members. Shortly after wrapping up work on The Final Cut, Waters announced that Pink Floyd was done, leaving for a solo career before Gilmour decided to carry on with Nick Mason for the next few years, creating even more daring rock music on albums like The Division Bell. If Waters were to redo some elements of The Final Cut, let’s hope to God that it fares better than his neutered take on Dark Side of the Moon.
