40 years after the publication of “The Final Cut”, by Pink Floyd | The album in which Roger Waters questioned Margaret Thatcher about the Malvinas War

The date could not be more symptomatic. On April 2, 1983, this Sunday forty years ago, it was barely a year since the landing of Argentine troops in the Malvinas Islands. From the beginning, therefore, of a brief but intense war that would end a little over two months later with an irremediable tragedy, to be measured in lives and interests for the country. It was then that first anniversary, the day chosen by Pink Floyd -all Roger Watershalf david gilmour and a quarter of Nick Masonat that time— to publish the beautiful and melancholic album in the United States.

The Final Cut, it was called. A name that derived from multiple senses. But two of them are central: the end -partial, apparently future- of the existence of the band, but also that of an infamous war that can be traced through the light of their songs, of their autonomy, because The Final Cut it was not, as Roger initially outlined, a conceptual appendage of its predecessor The Wall -in fact it was going to be called Spare Bricks (Leftover Bricks)– but rather a work with its own flight, holistic, in whose key it is possible to access an aesthetic look at Malvinas. Even from a place that is difficult to conceive of in English –that of Argentine pain– but much less from the English satisfaction for the victory.

Hence the timeless fruit of the work. A wake that starts from an equidistant, sensitive angle of gaze, which appeals to the value of human life beyond flags, and the indifference of losing it among splinters, screams and bombardments. “I am not a pacifist, but it makes me sick that innocent people are killed,” Waters said after his edition.who not only seemed to see his father’s face replicated in the victims of World War II, but also in that of each death in the Malvinas.

This is what most of the lyrics of The Final Cut, work unfairly shadowed by streetlights The Walland the irremediable fights within the band. It prevails then to take advantage of the round year and bring them to today. Reread them and name them in Spanish, through the light of the two connectors that string the work together. The one of “Maggie”, lto the ineffable Margaret Thatcher whom Roger accuses of the sinking of General Belgrano and to which, as an Englishman, he asks over and over again “what did we do?”, without getting the slightest answer (“Get your dirty hands out of my desert”). And the Eric Fletcher WatersRoger’s father killed in the battle of Anzio, when the child was three months old.

The emblematic song on the album pays homage to him. But not only. He also ignores temporal barriers and tempts a pedagogical utility. Any middle school student could be introduced to Ronald Reagan, Alexander Haig, Menachem Begin, Leonid Brezhnev, McCarthy’s “ghost,” Leopold Fortunato Galtieri, the memoirs of Richard Nixon and the “Latin American meat magnates”, in just one listen. “Fletcher’s Memorial Home” is indeed the ultimate, the best way the author imagined to counteract all the evils of that terrifying world he poetized: lock everyone -“Maggie” included– in a home for the insane, and apply a kind of final solution, in addition to making them see how the dreams of the soldiers who fought in the war were betrayed (“Post-War Dreams”).

The nuclear apocalypse that the brave British bard sees coming through the rear-view mirror of his car (“Two suns in the west”), added to the absurd English “party in the streets” that receives its heroes from Malvinas, or from any war ( “The return of the heroes”), complete a sense of organic and ideological work that is difficult to trace in the history of rock. A corpus of stories, visions, ideas, positions towards the world, and poetic gazes that would not have the same sensory effect if it were not for the best of music: music.

Entirely composed by Waters, co-produced by James Guthrie and arranged -also played– by Michael Kamen, The Final Cut implied, implies and will also imply a dream journey through the universe of sound. Crossed by a dense and tense atmosphere, also flown over by calm climates, the work also meant the world premiere of the holophonic system, designed by the Italian Hugo Zuccarelli. A technology that made possible a three-dimensional sound suitable for the special effects that make Floyd’s sonic world ontologically, but which unfortunately could not be replicated live, because the disc was never exposed in public.

The warm orchestrations in – now it is in English – “The post war dream” or “The Gunner`s Dream”–, not only fulfill the function of lulling the child who suffers, and the man who dies, but also that of abandoning the one who kills And the tact with which the National Philharmonic Orchestra understands and expresses Kamen’s arrangements to wrap up, together with Waters’ voice, and Gilmour’s infallible guitar, that artilleryman who thinks of himself while dying (“The Gunner’s Dream ”), is another of the factors that make the fate of the final cut.

Nor would the album have the present brilliance that defends it, without those two memorable solos by Gilmour: that of the eponymous theme –it has little to envy that of “Comfortably Numb”— and that of “Your possible Pasts”, both actions that balance the null incumbency of the guitarist in the conception of the themes, and the non-existence of the Wright’s keyboards, which had been a fundamental part of classic Floyd, in addition to Mason’s little participation, as the drummer would make clear, on page 200 of his book Inside Pink Floyd.. “I recorded some drum tracks and spent some time showing up at the studio to show my goodwill, and to remind everyone that I still existed.”