by bill | Apr 11, 2026 | Dancing about architecture |
This week I’ve been listening, for the first time really, to Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut.It’s not a good album — most of it sounds like what it is: Leftovers from The Wall, which was not itself without filler.
For about half an hour it just drifts along, with Waters’ whining occasionally broken up by atmospheric passages that remind you who you’re listening to. Then, out of nowhere, it suddenly comes to life for four and a half minutes:
Gilmour sounds engaged for the first time on the album, Waters’ snarl finally finds a purpose, and for a little while it’s the glory days again. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to think of another Floyd song that crunches this hard; “Interstellar Overdrive” maybe?
Why couldn’t we have had a whole album of this? Why couldn’t Roger and Dave get along, instead of splitting off into increasingly futile solo careers that served as constant reminders of how much they needed each other? I know, I know; musicians and their egos. It’s the oldest story in the book.
Then The Final Cut, and Pink Floyd, end not with a bang but with a whimper — the resignedly apocalyptic “Two Suns in the Sunset.” Well, shit; nothing lasts forever.
by bill | Apr 7, 2026 | Read it in books |
Books Acquired:
The Intercom Conspiracy, Eric Ambler
Ashenden, or the British Agent, W. Somerset Maugham
Books Offloaded:
Epitaph for a Spy, Eric Ambler
The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
Progress Made:
David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God, Peter Ormerod
Books Finished:
The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
Ashenden, or the British Agent, W. Somerset Maugham
Bretherton, W.F. Morris
Ashenden was well aware that he would never know what happened then. Being no more than a tiny rivet in a vast and complicated machine, he never had the advantage of seeing a completed action. He was concerned with the beginning or the end of it, perhaps, or with some incident in the middle, but what his own doings led to he had seldom a chance of discovering. It was as unsatisfactory as those modern novels that give you a number of unrelated episodes and expect you by piecing them together to construct in your mind a connected narrative.
—W.S. Maugham, Ashenden
This vein of British espionage novels that I’ve hit is a rich one. These are the kinds of books that I find myself reading, not just to the exclusion of all other books, but to the exclusion of all other life activities. Possibly I have a wee bit of a problem, but I can quit anytime I want to, I swear.
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