Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (50 page)

For Roger Waters, a songwriter informed by the shadow of war on his own life, this latest conflict was yet more grist to the mill. By the time Pink Floyd began work on a follow-up album to
The Wall
in July 1982, the war in the South Atlantic was foremost in his mind. The futile loss of lives on both sides was one factor, but there was also the belief that the conflict was being manipulated as a potential vote-winner in a country puffed up with nationalist pride.

‘I’m not a pacifist,’ said Waters. ‘I think there are wars that have to be fought, unfortunately. I just don’t happen to think that the Falklands was one of them.’

The death of Pink Floyd Mark II came not with a bang, nor a whimper, but with a sort of bark.
The Final Cut
, the last Pink Floyd album to feature both Roger Waters and David Gilmour, is, as Gilmour tactfully pointed out at the time, ‘very much Roger’s baby’. With all that this implies. Gilmour was sidelined, and sang lead vocals on just one song. Waters performed the remainder of the album in that heartfelt, hysterical, affecting, and occasionally rather affected, strangulated bark. It would be impossible to imagine these songs being sung by anyone else.

The final credits of
The Wall
movie promised that the soundtrack was now available. Having re-recorded some songs from the original album for the film, the band had planned to piece together enough for another full-length record,
Spare Bricks
. When the Falklands conflict began, Waters became distracted, and started writing the piece that would eventually be subtitled ‘Requiem for a Post-War Dream’. Inevitably, this new work would be dedicated to his father, Eric Fletcher Waters.
Spare Bricks
was immediately forgotten.

‘
The Final Cut
was about how, with the introduction of the Welfare State, we felt we were moving forward into something resembling a liberal country where we would all look after one another,’ explained Waters. ‘But I’d seen all that chiselled away, and I’d seen a return to an almost Dickensian society under Margaret Thatcher. I felt then, as now, that the British government should have pursued diplomatic avenues, rather than steaming in the moment that task force arrived in the South Atlantic.’

However left-leaning his views may have been in private, David Gilmour was less enamoured of Waters’ overt politicising. With wearying inevitability, the two butted heads the moment Waters proposed the album.

‘There were all sorts of arguments over political issues, and I didn’t share his political views,’ explained Gilmour in 2000. ‘But I never, never wanted to stand in the way of him expressing the story of
The Final Cut
. I just didn’t think some of the music was up to it.’

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 earmarked 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 siding 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.