Description
Label Review.
1983 album. 2011 remaster. Digipak. Includes "When The Tigers Broke Free", added to the album in 2004. Also available on vinyl.
Our Overview.
In the summer of 1982, the film of 'The Wall' was released and to coincide with the launch, a new album called 'Spare Bricks' was due to also come out. Supposedly to include the re-recorded songs from The Wall used in the film plus some new material all that came out from this project was a single "When The Tigers Broke Free" which just scraped into the Top 40. The song wasn't a pop number, but an elegy for Roger Waters' father who died in World War II. The Falklands War had just concluded and pacifist Roger felt a new bunch of songs coming on. "I got on a roll and I was gone" he said as his new song cycle came to life over the autumn of that year.
Although the album was defiantly anti-war, that didn't stop the remaining band members from fighting themselves. Rick Wright had departed a couple of years earlier while Nick Mason was on the sidelines for most of the sessions. This left Waters and David Gilmour scrapping over production credits. Gilmour moaned later that most of the material was stuff discarded from the original The Wall sessions. In the end Gilmour's presence was felt with the occasional guitar solo and one lead vocal.
Effectively a Waters solo album, 'The Final Cut' is one of the Floyd's least liked albums due to it's lack of hits and continued departure from their "classic" sound. Waters' anti-singing didn't help either but the album still went to No.1 and the lyrical themes are still totally relevant today. Perhaps more than ever.