THE FINAL CUT

What's sadly lacking here is THE PINK FLOYD SOUND which, in this listener's opinion is hugely down to one Rick Wright (he doesn't play on this album). Of course the Floyd sound was due to the chemistry of this amazing four piece and everyone contributed. But more than anything the Floyd sound was those crazy farfisa noodles in the Syd era, it was the chorused out water drops on the Echoes intro (if ever one single note defines the Floyd, that is it) it was the deep, resonant jazz chords on Great Gig in the Sky and Us and Them, the layered synths, clavinets and Rhodes of Shine On and it was last heard in the lilting jazz tinged Rhodes intro to Sheep.

I recall waiting excitedly for the release of this album. Only four years earlier had I discovered the Floyd, through the Wall, through Comfortably Numb which I thought was amazing. I had never heard lyrics ike that from any rock band. Whoever wrote these, I thought, is a genius. I then worked my way back through Animals and then Wish You Were Here. Wish You Were Here became my favourite album when I was fifteen and it still is, maybe it gets a nudge every now and again from Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. This was and is because WYWH contains THE perfect amalgam of sonic landscape with heartfelt and insightful lyrics.

When Final Cut was released I can't say I was disappointed: the sound quality, the engineering was astounding, but I knew already that something was wrong musically. I had been playing guitar for only a few short years by this stage but I could tell straight away that most of this album was G, C, D sort of stuff. Like 'Mother' on the Wall or 'Pigs on the Wing', very much Roger Waters writing by himself and then bringing it in to record. Gone was the Floyd just jamming kind of sound that was still there to some extent even on the Wall ('Another Brick Part2 for e.g.).

On Final Cut the insightful heartfelt lyrics are there. Roger Waters is a genius, and despte what many say about his tyranical approach to music production, must be a hell of a nice bloke really: he seems to have all of humanity's interests at heart. What he has lost on Final Cut and had already lost on the Wall was the touch of the everyman that is so apparent in the simple but affecting lyrics of DSOTM. The lyrics on FC are a giveaway that the whole music thing has become about him and not about 'Us'.

Not only is it tragic that he's shut the rest of the band out, gone also is his own melifluous bass, another key sonic ingredient of THE PINK FLOYD SOUND.