The Floydathon gathers pace with The Final Cut.
Well now. Something has happened here that I never thought would. I actually quite like this album.
I know, knock me down with a feather.
Morose, yes. Unrelentingly whiney, yes. But you see, I've never heard an album that sums up my feelings on the real cost of both World War 2 and the Thatcher years better than The Final Cut.
Everything's there, the powerlessness, the horror of seeing the whole country fucked over by the government, the aching frustration...
"Oh Maggie, what have we done..."
I can see why people don't like this album - it's not really the Floyd that's gone before (apart from The Wall, and that doesn't count). This is the stark, bleak work of angry people. They're saying things that people don't want to hear. We don't want to know that the War killed our friends infront of our eyes, we don't want to be reminded the depths of depression we were all feeling in 1983.
The 80's these days means mis-matched clothes, boots over jeans, retro heaven. Forget that the evening news had a section every night on how many factories had closed, how many people had lost their jobs that day. Forget that everything that was built up over the previous 150 years was stripped and sold for vast profit in the space of four years. forget that they tried to tax us for simply being alive...
I've been watching "Our Friends In The North" on DVD for the first time since....oh, god knows when, and it's fascinating to watch all of these threads coming together, cohering into a solid mass of excellent drama - and then to listen to Final Cut - well, it brings the whole feeling of the times back to me.
By the way, I can also heartily recommend listening to this album back-to-back with Bowie's Hunky Dory, which I've just discovered is a thoroughly teriffic album.
