Equally, closer 'Two Suns In The Sunset' – which imagines the bombs falling and blotting out the sun - makes the narrative arc of the album a little too easy. This is Surrey Blues rock as vapid as the views it seeks to satirise. 'Not Now John' – written in the voice of the arrogant, self-employed man who would find ultimate shape in Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney - is fun, but musically crass and obvious. There are sections which are utterly routine. Its vulnerability suits the album’s theme of (what Wilfred Owen called) "the pity of war". His curiously edgy voice has rarely been better suited to a piece of music. And, if it does occasionally creak under its own pretensions, The Final Cut’s saving grace is Waters’ compassion. Whatever else one might think about this album, it’s ambitious stuff. The record weaves three themes – Waters’ orphaned grief for his father killed at Anzio in 1944, his fury at leaders making political capital out of ‘modern’ conflicts like the Falklands, and an attempt to imagine the impact of conflict on veterans and their families. For, flawed though it is, The Final Cut remains a tremendous album. It’s hard to dislodge this conventional view, but it’s also wrong on many levels. It is what a dangerous world looks like to a left-leaning, but very rich rock star. The primary interest of the album, from this point of view, is as a statement of musical breakdown and cultural paranoia. It is certainly a candidate for most depressing album of the 80s. If Floyd had famously been falling apart for years, under stress from the conflicting egos of Waters and Gilmour, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that The Final Cut is, from the title down, the ultimate public statement of a band’s collapse into self-indulgence and failure. Keyboardist Rick Wright had, of course, already been ‘disappeared’ by this time, replaced by Michael Kamen and Andy Bown. Waters’ imprimatur covers this music so completely that Gilmour and Mason had as much status as hired hands. Secondly, some will dismiss The Final Cut on the grounds that it is no Floyd album at all. It morphed into The Final Cut in light of Waters’ disgust at the Falklands ‘adventure’. This, perhaps, is unsurprising since, on one account, originally the album was conceived as an expanded soundtrack to the film of The Wall. Indeed, the 1994 re-mastered version of The Final Cut includes a tune that was in the film version of The Wall. Firstly, at a musical level, it is beholden to Waters’ other vanity projects The Wall and The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking. Beginning with the question, "Maggie, what have we done to England?" and ending with the nukes falling, The Final Cut is the essence of 1980s Cold War paranoia.įor some, this would be enough to consign the album to the remainder bin, but there’s more. The Final Cut, scattered as it is with references to the Falklands, Sefton, General Galtieri and, above all, Thatcher, might be seen as the very acme of the ‘historical-specific’. He might have added another clause: never make an album so utterly time-specific it will date almost before the vinyl is lathed. Vizzini, the inconceivably unctuous criminal in Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride, suggests there are two things you should never do: get involved in a land war in Asia, and have a battle of wits with an Italian.