University of Surrey Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Department of Music and Media BMus Music (3 year) Final-Year Individual Project MUS3078 ‘To What Extent Did Roger Waters’ 1967-1969 Songwriting Style Shape 1983’s The Final Cut?’ Daniel Peeke Supervised By Dr. Christopher Wiley May 2019 2 Acknowledgements Since hearing The Wall at a friend’s house when I was twelve, Pink Floyd led me towards all the music I’m passionate about today, whether it’s Ben Folds, Cannibal Corpse or Dr Dre. Since Roger Waters composed much of their best work, I felt it appropriate to explore the way in which his style grew their sound from innocent, underground psychedelia into genius conceptual art. I’d like to thank Dr Chris Wiley in particular for his countless pointers in the right direction and for giving up so much of his time to help refine all 12,000 of these words. Also, my parents for reading this repeatedly despite not understanding what a single word of it means, Joe and Stelios for letting me obsessively play prog 24 hours a day at home, and Shan for pretending to care about metric irregularity, modal interchange and melodic contour. Contents Abstract................................................................................................................3 Introduction..........................................................................................................4 Part One: Roger Waters’ Early Style And The Introduction Of Later Songwriting Staples..................................................................................................................7 Part Two: Roger Waters’ Late Style And The Impact Of His Early Songwriting On The Final Cut................................................................................................26 Conclusions.........................................................................................................45 References...........................................................................................................47 3 To What Extent Did Roger Waters’ 1967-1969 Songwriting Style Shape 1983’s The Final Cut? Abstract This dissertation offers an analysis of the solo-credited, studio-album released songs Roger Waters contributed to Pink Floyd’s first four albums between 1967-1969 (with focus on ‘Corporal Clegg’), and their final album featuring Waters, 1983’s The Final Cut (with focus on ‘The Fletcher Memorial Home’). Allan Moore and Remy Martin’s ‘Elements Of An Analytic Musicology Of Rock’ (2017) provided a framework for my popular music analysis, while Dai Griffiths (2003) and Deena Weinstein (2002) provided valuable starting points for my discussion of lyrics. The purpose of this analysis is to determine the extent to which the features of these earlier writing contributions shaped Waters’ approach to songwriting on The Final Cut. I will explore the ways in which songwriting threads persist throughout Waters’ Pink Floyd career via three ‘thread types’ I have determined: ‘unchanged’, ‘developed’ and ‘expanded’. I have chosen to focus on Roger Waters due to the large changes in sound Pink Floyd experienced across their career, with much of this change stemming from Waters’ rise from bassist/backing vocalist to sole songwriter. As the change in Pink Floyd’s sound is so clear between the periods I am focusing on, I expect some features of his early songwriting to be phased out entirely by 1983, but for many consistent features to manifest themselves with subtlety, rather than simply be reused in the same way throughout his career. This would suggest that the consistencies between Waters’ 1960s and 1980s Pink Floyd songwriting were present and important, but require the close analysis provided by this dissertation in order to be located. 4 Introduction Roger Waters was born in Surrey on 6 September 1943. His father, a Second Lieutenant in the Territorial Army, died one year later in the Battle Of Anzio at Aprilia. Around twenty years later, Waters joined an early version of a band which soon became Pink Floyd. When their debut album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, was released on 4 August 1967, Syd Barrett was the band’s centrepiece. His songwriting, voice, guitar playing and lyrics defined their earliest sound. By 1969, Barrett’s mental deterioration saw him phased out of the band, leaving Waters’ songwriting to gradually dominate, culminating in the release of The Final Cut (referred to as TFC from this point onwards) on 21 March 1983, which was “essentially a Roger Waters solo album.”1 On the face of it, finding threads between the early and late output of a songwriter is rarely a difficult practice. Most songwriters have defining features that maintain throughout their career, though it is the way and extent to which these features are used which makes them interesting to investigate. In order to do this, I have determined three main ways (which I’ll term ‘thread types’) in which consistency can be examined across a songwriter’s early and late work. • Unchanged’: Clear links between a songwriter’s early and late output that go mostly unchanged whether appearing early on or later. • ‘Developed’: Links between early and late songwriting that show clear similarity, but have been developed upon, making their consistent presence less clear. • ‘Expanded’: Features that were once small and non-defining that have expanded into large scale songwriting focuses. My intentions with this dissertation are to focus on Roger Waters and determine the extent to which the features of his 1967-1969 songwriting maintained into TFC. His particular influences will not impact my discussion, with my focus being his idiolect, regardless of its origin. I will do this through analysis of his structure & timbre; metre & hypermetre; vocal melodies; harmony & tonality; and lyrics in his 1960s and 1 Blake, M (2008) Comfortably Numb – The Inside Story Of Pink Floyd. Da Capo Press. p299. 5 1980s songwriting. From this analysis, I’ll be able to ascertain the similarities/differences in each feature across eras, discovering the thread types present in Waters’ work. How these thread types appear will show the ways in which Waters’ early songwriting impacted his later work, while how often they appear will determine the extent to which 1967-1969 shaped TFC. My primary approach will be via Allan Moore’s Rock The Primary Text, using chapter two (‘Elements Of An Analytic Musicology Of Rock’) as the backbone of my analysis of Waters’ take on popular music construction. Lyrically, Dai Griffiths and Deena Weinstein have proved valuable in determining the threads in his words, something Waters acknowledged as “central to his works.”2 In terms of the literature surrounding Pink Floyd/Roger Waters, both Bill Kopp and Phil Rose have provided illuminating insights into their early/late output respectively. However, little musical analysis-focused material exists about the band, with almost none regarding the eras I will be focusing on, allowing this dissertation to offer a rare and original insight into the configuration of Roger Waters’ songwriting, while introducing a new way of categorising the threads that run through any songwriter’s career. [Figure 1] lists the eleven pre-1970 studio-released tracks which Waters is credited as sole songwriter (working under the assumption that should individual embellishment from performers have been large enough, tracks would be co-credited, suggesting that Waters retained primary creative control over these pieces), alongside the twelve tracks found on 1983’s TFC that will form the basis of my comparison. Part one of this dissertation will determine the defining elements of Waters’ 1967-1969 songwriting style while pointing out those with importance to TFC. Part two will take a similar approach in analysing TFC’s defining features, but with additional focus on their ‘thread type’. 2 Weinstein, D (2002) Progressive Rock As Text: The Lyrics Of Roger Waters in Holm-Hudson, K (2002) Progressive Rock Reconsidered. 1st Edition. Routledge, New York/London. p95. 6 ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk’ The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn (1967) ‘Let There Be More Light’ A Saucerful Of Secrets (1968) ‘Corporal Clegg’ ‘Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun’ ‘Cirrus Minor More (1969) ‘Nile Song’ ‘Crying Song’ ‘Green Is The Colour’ ‘Cymbaline’ ‘Grantchester Meadows’ Ummagumma (1969) ‘Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict’ (Atom Heart Mother, Meddle, Obscured By Clouds, The Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Wall) ‘The Post War Dream’ The Final Cut (1983) ‘Your Possible Pasts’ ‘One Of The Few’ ‘The Hero’s Return’ ‘The Gunner’s Dream’ ‘Paranoid Eyes’ ‘Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert’ ‘The Fletcher Memorial Home’ ‘Southampton Dock’ ‘The Final Cut’ ‘Not Now John’ ‘Two Suns In The Sunset’ [Figure 1] A List Of Each Waters Composition Detailed In This Essay 7 Part One: Roger Waters’ Early Style And The Introduction Of Later Songwriting Staples When The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn was released in 1967, Roger Waters’ songwriting style had a lot in common with Syd Barrett’s unusual, unique sound, but within a year this began to be balanced out by contrasting simplicity. A combination of these approaches defined Waters’ early style, while providing the starting point for ‘unchanged’, ‘developed’ and ‘expanded’ thread types to take many of these features into TFC. With this chapter, I will analyse Waters’ early use of structure & timbre, metre & hypermetre, vocal melodies, harmony & tonality, and lyrics,