The arguments for and against streaming have and will rage for a lot longer than I’ll be bothered to partake of them. Noel Gallagher recently pointed out “someone tried to sell me Spotify once and I was like, ‘Why would I want the entire fucking catalogue of the Kaiser Chiefs?” – though his argument of ‘if I want music I’ll buy it’ doesn’t necessarily work when not everyone has sold 40 million albums (not to mention the presence of his own music on the platform and that I don’t really want / need access to Dig Out Yer Soul)
There’s also the argument that the availability of so much music in one place means that archival releases and collections are diminishing – everything is already there but you have to find it first.
I’m not even going to touch the money / artist’s pay issue.
Anyway, I digress. This was supposed to be a quick one. So let’s call this rant “Advantages of Spotify, Example 53.8”
- Pink Floyd’s complete* discography is now there for streaming
- This includes The Final Cut
- I haven’t had to fork over cash in order to hear this, now, for the first time in full
- It’s cost me nothing to discover that a) it’s almost** a complete turd of an album and b) it’s a bloody good thing Gilmour kept the band going and this wasn’t it’s final release
- I’ve now heard the sole exception to the above. Not Now John is the only track on the album to feature Gilmour’s vocals and obvious involvement. It’s no wonder it was the
leadonly single released from it. It’s also a worthy and bafflingly-overlooked addition to any Pink Floyd compilation and I can’t help but enjoy hearing Mr Gilmour sing, with obvious relish “fuck all that” and wonder if, to his mind, he wasn’t singing about all the tosh that had preceded this song’s placement at the arse end of an arse of an album. Arse.
Here it is:
* No Point Me At The Sky, unfortunately.
** The Flethcher Memorial Home is alright. Though only thanks to Gilmour’s guitar arriving to pull the turgid lump away from Waters’ unconvincing wailing and When The Tigers Broke Free isn’t too bad either but that’s about it. Yep. That’s about it.
Mumbling About... 
I listened to The Final Cut when i was researching my Floyd series. Agreed. It sucks. It sounds like Waters took all the desperate bits from ‘The Wall’ and made an album of them. I don’t think I even made it all the way through the album.
I tried to today. Too many tracks failed to grip me and had me hitting skip. This was the sole standout. I think it was supposed to be a sort of soundtrack to The Wall film called “spare bricks” or something similar but nobody had the ability then to to Roger Waters to give it a rest and stop harping on about something despite all involved saying it was the worst recording experience they’d endured. With all the tension and arguments it would’ve been better all round to say “right, let’s ditch this and take a long and well-deserved break”… who knows what might have happened had he not been such a despot.
Yeah. This is a chronic problem with highly successful bands that have been together maybe too long. Waters thought they had pretty much said all they had to say by the time they did Dark Side.
The other factor is that the labels are always pressuring bands to make albums (and they doubtless had a contract.) So more than one crappy album has been made by bands who have run creatively dry and pretty much couldn’t tolerate each other’s company.