What if?

[mosespa]

Vernon Fitch and Richard Mahon's book on The Wall Era does mention "Sexual Revolution" as having been part of The Wall early on.

It also mentions a song called "Teacher, Teacher" which ultimately became "The Hero's Return."

If memory serves correctly, that's it. I don't believe that there was any mention of "The Final Cut" as ever having been a part of The Wall at any stage.

I think this rumour (I DO believe it to be only that,) persists simply due to the fact that the orchestral score is similar to Comfortably Numb's.

Funnily enough, Comfortably Numb's orchestral arrangement is virtually identical to that of "Sad Song" from Lou Reed's "Berlin" album. Bob Ezrin (who produced both The Wall and Berlin) certainly seems to love those cascading triplets.

And it seems that it rubbed off on Michael Kamen (who worked on orchestrations for The Wall and The Final Cut.)

Besides..."The Final Cut" ends far too hopefully to have ever been a part of The Wall.

"I hold the blade in trembling hands/prepared to make it, but/just then the phone rang/I never had the nerve to make the final cut."

Someone called...reached out and prevented him from ending his life.

No one called Pink.

So...I don't see how the song could fit in the scheme of The Wall.

I could, however, buy into the notion that lines from it like "there's a kid who had a big hallucination/making love to girls in magazines," might have once been lyrics for "Sexual Revolution" when it was part of The Wall...before Young Lust took it's place.

Waters has always said that "Young Lust" was supposed to have been about being very interested in having sex, but being too afraid to actually try to have it.

[Hudini]

Wikipedia clearly states

I don't really know why people keep thinking that Wikipedia is an unreliable source of information. The articles in it are carefully verified by the moderating team, and any questionable info is either linked to an outer source or deleted very soon. If you don't believe me, try to write an article about yourself. It will be deleted as irrelevant within couple of hours. The same thing happens to every thing you write that can't be verified in any way. Just the fact that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone doesn't mean that there isn't a serious team of people checking these information out.

So, Wikipedia clearly states that during the production of "The Final Cut" Gilmour asked Waters for more time to finish a few songs, and Waters rejected it.

That should pretty much prove wrong anyone who claims that there are leftovers from "The Final Cut" on "About Face". But if you prefer to think that way, I won't make you change your opinion, no matter if it's objectively wrong.

[pastchristmas]

Wow. So many informed people commenting on this thread! It's been almost as much of a pleasure to read as its been confusing.

I agree that The Final Cut (song) does not seem to fit the motif of The Wall. The character's decline must continue until The Trial, when everything begins to come crashing down.

The Final Cut would insert too much of an up note too soon.

This is my opinion though. I don't claim to know as much as you all do but I am certainly learning.

[crowman]

If memory serves correctly, that's it. I don't believe that there was any mention of "The Final Cut" as ever having been a part of The Wall at any stage.

Absolutely. And the notion that Final Cut was dropped from The Wall because it wasn't good enough is patently false because even Dave Gilmour thinks it's a great song. If it had been around during the development of The Wall why would anyone have insisted it be dropped? Particularly when you consider that side 3 was running short at one point, which led Roger to write Nobody Home.

Besides..."The Final Cut" ends far too hopefully to have ever been a part of The Wall.

"I hold the blade in trembling hands/prepared to make it, but/just then the phone rang/I never had the nerve to make the final cut."

Someone called...reached out and prevented him from ending his life.

No one called Pink.

So...I don't see how the song could fit in the scheme of The Wall.

But here's where I'd disagree. It may not ever have been part of the original Wall album, but it was clearly part of the Wall soundtrack back in the Spare Bricks phase. At one point the working title of the album was even given as The Final Cut: Spare Bricks From the Wall, before Roger's focus fully shifted to Maggie and the Falklands. I think it was one of the songs written to fill out a soundtrack album for the movie, one that fleshed out the rerecorded songs and retold the story of The Wall from a different perspective.

There are plenty of allusions to The Wall in the lyrics. In the first verse he alludes to Goodbye Blue Sky when he sings "and far from flying high in clear blue skies", with blue skies in both cases representing a memory of simpler, more innocent times. There's the long description of the barriers the narrator has constructed, ending with the line (later obscured), "and if I'm in I'll tell you what's behind the wall". The line about "making love to girls in magazines" has already been mentioned. A big giveaway is the line "Would you sell your story to Rolling Stone?" Who else would be worried about that other than a paranoid rock star like Pink? To me this is very much the stuff of The Wall, in particular side 3, and would fit in extremely well alongside "Nobody Home" where Pink just sits in his hotel room feeling sorry for himself. And then the final line where he's distracted from his final act by the ringing phone. Plenty of people were trying to reach Pink, they ended up having to break down his hotel room door. You could see it as an optimistic ending, but it could equally apply to Pink just before he slips into the coma that leads to "Comfortably Numb".

So I think it absolutely fits in with the Wall, even though it was almost certainly written after the original album was completed. I think it was written along with songs like One Of The Few and Paranoid Eyes as part of the expanded, alternative telling of the Wall story that would have been the Spare Bricks soundtrack.

It's also worth noting what the song isn't about. It's not about Margaret Thatcher or the Falklands or betrayed war veterans or the decline of British industry and the associated loss of jobs to Japan or impending nuclear war. It's about a guy who's cut himself off from the world around him, who sits in sorrow looking back at his broken marriage and sexually awkward adolescence, all the while contemplating suicide. "The Final Cut" has more in common with The Wall than the album which shares its name.

[pastchristmas]

Bravo, crowman, excellent read that last post was!

I agree that songs like The Final Cut definitely allude to themes in The Wall, but those themes are pretty loose fitting. There could have been a certain amount of lyrical revision at some point. That's the missing piece of the puzzle that we don't have. If we knew for sure that the lyrics in their final form were those that were originally written, then we could make a better guess as to whether or not they would really fit into The Wall.

[crowman]

I don't think there's a missing piece to the puzzle as such, it's simply that the decision to explore the Wall from a different perspective led Roger down a different path which ultimately led to the Final Cut album. What you get in the song The Final Cut, and the teacher songs, and Fletcher Memorial Home is a sense of empathy. You care about the singer of the song, you start to understand why the teacher is a bastard and you feel sorry for him. You never felt sorry for Pink, he was just a prick. But I think once this empathy was out of the box that would have made it harder and harder to keep The Final Cut as a Wall project.

[stryder]

You never felt sorry for Pink, he was just a prick.

You have to be slightly heartless not to care what happens to Pink. Sure, he has his flaws and he has a hightened sense of self-victimisation, but after going on his journey and following his mental decline, I think most people feel some kind of empathy in wishing that he turns out all right in the end.

There's the long description of the barriers the narrator has constructed, ending with the line (later obscured), "and if I'm in I'll tell you what's behind the wall".

That's why I thought that the song The Final Cut was originally going to be on The Wall but I'm willing to be corrected. I took it to mean that that particular portion of the lyric was removed to hide the fact that the song was originally meant for The Wall.

[everton1690]

It's an album that can drive you to suicide as it is with those extra downers on it...

I love The Wall but I do agree that including those tracks would have been too much and would have def spoiled it.

exactley what roger is doing now with that bit added into the show after abitw pt 2

spoiling the concept of it

[moom]

You might as well call me a prick, then.

[Beowulf]

Allegedly, some of the songs on About Face were being composed by Gilmour when Roger Waters began production of the Pink Floyd album, The Final Cut.

That is, these Gilmour songs weren't also leftovers from The Wall but simply composed around the time of TFC.

Hmmm, yes, that's probably my take on it too ...

[mosespa]

But here's where I'd disagree. It may not ever have been part of the original Wall album, but it was clearly part of the Wall soundtrack back in the Spare Bricks phase. At one point the working title of the album was even given as The Final Cut: Spare Bricks From the Wall, before Roger's focus fully shifted to Maggie and the Falklands. I think it was one of the songs written to fill out a soundtrack album for the movie, one that fleshed out the rerecorded songs and retold the story of The Wall from a different perspective.

The problem with this line of thinking is that when The Final Cut was initially conceived as a soundtrack album to the film, it wasn't conceived as a means of "telling the story from another angle."

It was meant to be a soundtrack album to the film.

[Beowulf]

You might as well call me a prick, then.

It sounds like you're giving us permission to Moom

[moom]

Yup. As if some certain persons would ever ask

[crowman]

The problem with this line of thinking is that when The Final Cut was initially conceived as a soundtrack album to the film, it wasn't conceived as a means of "telling the story from another angle."

It was meant to be a soundtrack album to the film.

It was initially conceived as a soundtrack to the film with rerecorded songs, but it soon grew when they realised there wasn't enough music from the film to fill out an album. But before it became a "requiem for the post-war dream" there was an intermediate stage where it was still seen as an offshoot of The Wall.

A September 1982 article in Billboard (which includes quotes from David Gilmour) states that at that point the plan was for an album that still "tied in" with the film and featured:

...three or four new songs by chief writer Roger Waters which are 'pertinent to' the story of the film (although they're not in it).

http://books.google.com.au/books?id=OyQ ... &q&f=false

It must have been very soon after this that the Falklands narrative took over, but clearly at this stage The Final Cut was still considered an extension of The Wall, and the new songs still part of that story. And in One Of The Few, Hero's Return and Paranoid Eyes you get an expanded view of one of the characters for The Wall; the shell-shocked veteran turned teacher, whose own personal Wall explains his vicious attitude to his students. These songs might have ended up as something else, but they started off very much part of an extended Wall story.

[J Ed]

verrrrryyy interesting
the very title certainly suggests a film tie-in