March

Waters Wins BAFTA

Outside of music polls and top figures for touring box-office grosses, the members of Pink Floyd were not well-versed in winning prestigious awards. This changed in March 1983 when ‘Another Brick in The Wall (Part 2)’ won Roger Waters a BAFTA for Best Original Song, pipping ‘The Eye Of The Tiger’ from Rocky III to the post. The Wall also won a BAFTA for Best Sound, beating Blade Runner and E.T.

The Final Cut

Although it was Mason who owned a fleet of classic sports cars, it was Waters who was vengefully speeding around artistic corners on The Final Cut. The ghost of his dead father again haunted the emotive, resonant and downright compelling song that was ‘The Fletcher Memorial Home’ and other lyrics railed at the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher and the waste of young life in the Falklands War. Waters also drove the other Floyd members out of the studio, stripping Gilmour of production duties and not courting any musical ideas unless they agreed with his own. Session musicians, who would play what they were told, were also drafted in.

‘Your Possible Pasts’

The writing appeared to be on the wall for Pink Floyd when, although provisional dates were announced for November 1983, The Final Cut did not go out on tour. In fact, the album was a musical coda from The Wall project. ‘Your Possible Pasts’ may have charted strongly as a single in the US in March but one line of Waters’ lyrics seemed to be Floydian self-analysis: ‘Do you remember? How we used to be?’ ‘Certainly not recording glorified solo albums under the Floyd banner,’ Mason and Gilmour might have retorted. Although Waters had broken new ground with a video EP of some of The Final Cut tracks, both he and Gilmour were now working in different studios – on different projects.

June

Works

Although they remained with EMI in the UK for their entire career, in America Floyd switched labels from Capitol to CBS Records after The Dark Side Of The Moon. To coincide with the release of The Final Cut in 1983 Capitol issued Works, a compilation of early Floyd material, to cash in. With alternative mixes of well-known tracks, as well as the track ‘Embryo’, which had, at that time, only appeared on a UK various-artists’ compilation, this was an excellent snapshot of Floyd, especially as it contained Waters’ ‘Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict’.

Personalities | Introducing Pink Floyd
Personalities | Pink Floyd | The Waters-Led Era (1984) | Key Events