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What have we done? How
Spare Bricks became The Final Cut. In 1978, when Roger Waters first started writing the songs that would become The Wall, the project may have been largely unrecognizable to fans familiar only with the final product. Some songs were heavily reworked at the insistence of the band and producer Bob Ezrin. Others, such as "Comfortably Numb", had yet to be written at all. And some tracks from Waters' initial concept were cut entirely. Following the release of the album and the subsequent tour, there was serious talk of releasing a 'satellite' album made up of songs reworked for The Wall film, some leftover tracks, and possibly some of the music that was written for the film but left on the cutting room floor. Spare Bricks was to be the album's title-- yet it never surfaced. As Floyd biographer Nicholas Schaffner put it, "the spare bricks took on a life of their own and became The Final Cut." Today, some fans look at The Final Cut as an extension of The Wall, both thematically and musically. Others think of The Final Cut as Waters' first solo album. Still others (perhaps a minority) think it is one of the most brilliant albums Waters' ever wrote. Rolling Stone loved it, then hated it. David Gilmour reportedly hates it-- or at least the parts on which he didn't get to play a solo. So which is it? And how did it rise from the rubble of The Wall? The band had been contracted to produce a soundtrack album for the film, but Roger Waters said "there really wasn't enough new material in the movie to make a record that I thought was interesting." He began writing new songs, and "[he] got on a roll and started writing this piece about [his] father." Waters took the 1982 war between the UK and Argentina over the Falkland Islands very personally, and soon he was scrapping the Spare Bricks idea in favor of something else entirely. Nick Mason said, "I think it probably drifted away from one idea and then became a sort of new concept, and a new story. And that happened halfway through." Waters says that he had become "more interested in the remembrance and requiem aspects of the thing." The final product revealed glimpses of this varied lineage. In part, The Final Cut was about the feelings of those orphaned by World War II, much like the character Pink from The Wall. It was also about the soldiers who had returned from WWII scarred and battered. And in part it was about the Falklands War. Mostly, it was about the fact that those who had died in WWII had seemingly died in vain-- the post war dream of peace and prosperity had not come true. As The Final Cut begins, the speaker could well be The Wall's Pink-- the feelings expressed are very similar to those found in "Vera" or "Bring the Boys Back Home." In "The Post War Dream" Waters sings "Is it for this that Daddy died?" and "Was it me? Did I watch too much TV?" The character is lamenting the death of his father, wondering in childlike innocence if he was somehow to blame. Yet this speaker is not exactly a child-- he is mature enough to see that the world is not as perfect as some would like us to believe. Is it for this that Daddy died? This flawed world of poverty and racial hate and crime? Waters knows that his father, and thousands more like him, went off to believing that their sacrifice would make the world a better place. But Waters looks around at the world and sees that the world is not a better place. He sees a world in which world leaders (such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher) can claim to be the defenders of freedom and democracy, all the while sending young men off to their deaths in meaningless military actions. Thus, the song's final line (and the album's repeated refrain): "Maggie, what have we done?" The next song, "Your Possible Pasts," was apparently written originally for The Wall, then shelved at the insistence of others. (David Gilmour said, "Nobody thought [Your Possible Pasts and The Hero's Return] were good then: what makes them so good now?") Yet its dark portrayal of post-war society found new life as part of The Final Cut. Coming just after a song about a WWII orphan, it seems to represent the feelings of someone who has grown up fatherless, and who is constantly reminded of the longstanding effects war can have on a nation. Unlike those for whom the war is merely history, the speaker still feels its effects. This song's lyrics are unflinchingly personal and starkly abstract. "She stood in the doorway, the ghost of a smile/Haunting her face like a cheap hotel sign/Her cold eyes imploring the men in their macs/For the gold in their bags or the knives in their backs." They read like a dark dream-- disjointed images and figures acting out highly symbolic scenes. It might be hard to imagine how this could have ever been a part of The Wall's strange tale of isolation and totalitarianism, but in the context of the more personal and politically motivated The Final Cut, it begins to make some sense. "One of the Few" and "The Hero's Return" mark a clear change in the narrator. No longer is this a grown up war orphan; rather, the voice belongs to a member of Waters' father's generation who fought in the war but survived. Having now returned, he (like the earlier narrator) sees that world is not a better place, and that many of his generation did in fact die in vain. To make matters worse, he has to deal with the "desperate memories" of the war's horrors. As noted above, "The Hero's Return" was written for The Wall and later cut. The coupling of this song with "One of the Few" ties this even closer to The Wall: the teacher described was originally the masochistic teacher from The Wall. Yet unlike the cruel portrait painted in The Wall, we are now shown a more sympathetic character, and we see the reasons for his harsh treatment of his pupils. Forced into teaching "to make ends meet", he sees his students as spoiled "little ingrates" that have a much easier life than he ever had. His harsh, sarcastic exterior is meant to cover up the inner anguish of his wartime memories. He must face these memories alone, and cannot even talk to his wife about his feelings. It is easy to see why Bob Ezrin might have wanted to cut such weighty material from The Wall-- it doesn't really advance the story about Pink, and an audience that is supposed to be sympathetic toward Pink is not interested in the evil teacher's motivations. In fact, "The Hero's Return" really represents Waters' coping with the loss of so many lives in WWII from a viewpoint different from his own war orphan's viewpoint. Yet the fact that Waters saw this character as an extension of The Wall's teacher is driven home further by the The Final Cut video EP, in which the aging WWII veteran is played by Alex McAvoy, the actor who portrayed the teacher in The Wall. At the end of "The Hero's Return," the teacher mentions the painful, burning memory of the death of a companion, a gunner, and that companion's final, dying words. In "The Gunners Dream," that dead soldier's voice comes from beyond the grave to describe the dream of a peaceful world, a world in which the weak do not have to fear oppression, and in which the government does not participate in that oppression. The lyrics suggest that gunner's final wish was that the survivor (the teacher) would hold onto this dream and help it become a reality. But the haunting reality that "is driving [the survivor] insane" is that the world did not turn out how the gunner had hoped. Instead, war and oppression are as prevalent as ever. Just as "The Hero's Return" naturally progressed to "The Gunners Dream," "Paranoid Eyes" develops logically from "The Gunners Dream." With words that strongly foreshadow the sentiments expressed in "The Bravery of Being Out of Range" from Amused to Death, Waters describes the facade of contentment that the teacher puts on as he faces a world that doesn't understand his inner pain. He tries to fit in with "the boys in the crowd" at a local pub, but ultimately, he feels alone. Bob Ezrin, David Gilmour, and other massaged much of the autobiographical, anti-war material out of The Wall. Yet the film version, which Ezrin had nothing to do with, had much of this autobiographical detail reinserted: the inclusion of the Anzio memorial, the portrayal of the death of Pink's father, the addition of "When the Tigers Broke Free", and the scenes in which Pink (young and old) confronts the death of his father. And since The Final Cut was developed from the Spare Bricks project shortly after this period, it is only natural that the new album became another pulpit from which Waters could preach his anti-war message. In "Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert" and "The Fletcher Memorial Home," Waters seems to completely turn from the concerns of a WWII survivor, and focuses instead on the contemporary political situation, singling out world leaders of the day and calling them "overgrown children." After poking fun at their warlike and self-serving ways, he calls for them to be killed, appropriating the verbiage of the Nazis. Not only does this somewhat recall the fascist vein of The Wall, but it should be noted that the lyrics of these two songs are full of witty, biting humor-- the very thing that Waters has repeatedly said was missing from The Wall film. Perhaps this is the sort of humor we expect if Waters ever really does produce a stage version of The Wall. Still clinging to the war in the Falklands, Waters then draws several parallels between the contemporary war and World War II in "Southampton Dock". He describes how UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has done a disservice to all of the soldiers who died in WWII, essentially stabbing them in the backs. And the song's final lines he describes how those who do choose to remember the sacrifices made by those slain soldiers feel this 'final cut' as well. "The Final Cut" may contain the most personal lyrics in the album, and they are certainly closely tied to the images of isolation found in The Wall. We are told of an emotionally exposed, vulnerable person trapped in a well-guarded bunker, and at the end of the song he seems desperate to tear down the barriers that hide his true feelings This is the teacher/war veteran again, whose wartime memories still haunt him, and who is hiding behind a "bullet proof mask" of loud-mouthed bullying. He, like Pink, wants to free himself from these barriers, but in the end he could not do it. (As a side note, it is intriguing to wonder if the middle section about "a kid who had a big hallucination/Making love to the girls in magazines" was inspired by or taken directly from the original purpose behind The Wall's "Young Lust," which Waters described as "hanging around outside porno movies and dirty book shops... being very interested in sex but too frightened to get involved.") Still, these very personal lyrics do not sway David Gilmour from naming "The Final Cut" as one of the three songs on the album that he considers "really great." (The other two being "The Gunners Dream" and "The Fletcher Memorial Home.") In 1988, he told Nicholas Schaffner, "It could have been a great album, but it's unbalanced. There's too much filler, meandering rubbish between songs." If he elaborated further, Schaffner failed to publish it, so we are left to wonder exactly which cuts Gilmour considered 'meandering rubbish'. "One of the Few" comes to mind as a likely candidate, with its minimalist melody and production. "The Fletcher Memorial Home" might also fit the bill, except that Gilmour already set it apart as "really great." Perhaps the songs he finds so objectionable are the ones originally cut from The Wall. "Your Possible Pasts" has an uneven meter and sparse production, but also features a trademark Gilmour guitar solo, thus making a case for Gilmour's claims that he did what he could to help bring the foundering The Final Cut up to previous Floyd standards. Surely Gilmour does not consider "Not Now John" to be 'meandering rubbish'. A fairly straightforward up-tempo rocker, it features Gilmour's only vocal credit on the album and a little trademark Floyd profanity. The lyrics seem to incorporate all of the warmongering, nationalistic sentiments so popular in Falklands-era Britain, and the drive to win the Cold War with Russia and the trade wars with Japan. Like "The Fletcher Memorial Home", this song seems to have been written primarily out of Waters' frustration with the political situation rather than out of a need to further develop the characters found in The Wall. In "Two Suns in the Sunset", Waters envisions a world in which the leaders have completely turned their backs on the post war dream, and plunge the world into nuclear holocaust. Not only is this a dreary, downbeat closer, but it is also a musically weak ending, with its unusual cadence and its overly simplistic arrangement. It lack the bombastic, emotional quality of "Eclipse" or "The Trial", and it doesn't offer the peaceful denouement of the last bits of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond." Instead of bringing the album to a close, Waters seems more interested in leaving a warning to us about what course the world seems to be on, and in doing so he provokes us to think about how we could change it before it is too late. All in all, that's what Waters was trying to do in The Final Cut: make the audience think. This wasn't music to trip to, and it certainly wasn't the lightweight pop rock David Gilmour and Rick Wright's solo albums had featured. It may have started out as another brick in the wall, but it quickly took on its own identity.
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