“You can hear the tension”: the album Roger Waters believed he should have sang better

Getting a song right in the studio is usually one of the biggest hurdles for a fledgling band to get over. There are many opportunities where they can annihilate any venue they play, but when they have to worry about getting everything pitch-perfect behind the glass, it’s enough to strike fear in the hearts of even the most confident players. And since Roger Waters never claimed to be the most talented musician in Pink Floyd, he knew that some songs were always going to have a few rough edges.

By the time Waters had reached the late 1970s, though, he had become one of the biggest conceptualists for the band’s sound. There were some points where some songs didn’t work as well as others, but their run of records from Dark Side of the Moon up until The Wall were compelling dissections of fame and the perils of life. But there was still a reason why David Gilmour was singing most of the tunes.

Whereas Dark Side was far more democratic with vocal duties, it was always a bit strange hearing Waters’ voice on some of their classics. His voice isn’t bad by any means, but compared to the bluesy swagger in Gilmour’s voice, Waters’ does take some getting used to, especially when he starts playing into the theatrical elements of The Wall or hangs on one note for most of ‘Sheep’.

Since the band’s rock opera became one of their most revered albums, though, that at least gave Waters enough confidence to move on to something new in his solo career. He figured that Gilmour was no match for him as a writer, but when listening to The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking, it’s easy to see it as a huge downgrade from the band’s material, even if it had Eric Clapton playing solos up and down the record.

“You can hear the mad tension running through it all.”- Roger Waters

If fans didn’t understand what Waters was going for on his first solo album, it might be because it wasn’t his proper debut. His first true solo outfit had the Pink Floyd name behind it on The Final Cut, but that also comes with a caveat. There are many moments on the record where Gilmour has a chance to shine with a decent guitar solo, but listening to the record as a whole, it’s more or less a compilation of B-sides from The Wall that he thought fans needed to hear.

Although many parts of Waters’ solo career are hit and miss with fans, the main problem he had with The Final Cut came from how his vocals were done, saying, “The Final Cut was absolute misery to make, although I listened to it of late and I rather like a lot of it. But I don’t like my singing on it. You can hear the mad tension running through it all. If you’re trying to express something and being prevented from doing it because you’re so uptight…It was a horrible time.”

Granted, it’s hard to see the tension as anything other than Waters wanting to dictate things. He had already insisted on letting go of Richard Wright on the last album, so now that Gilmour was trying to fight for control of the band again, making a record that was nothing but songs that weren’t good enough for The Wall was not going to calm those waters behind the scenes.

But more than anything, The Final Cut’s biggest flaw is driving a wedge between Gilmour and Waters for good. Waters’ dictating had officially become too much for the rest of the band, and even if he had a singular vision for what he wanted his music to be, the band’s discography would have been far more consistent had he and Gilmour been able to keep themselves in check a little more.