(Credits: Anton_Corbijn)
Fri 28 November 2025 18:00, UK
Was anyone looking to a band like Pink Floyd to have top ten singles back in the day?
Sure, they were one of the biggest bands in the world, but being one of the leading figures in progressive music doesn’t always lend itself well to being the most radio-friendly group that had ever touched the charts. Even if not all of their songs were meant to be famous in that respect, David Gilmour still knew when some great tunes got forgotten along the way.
Granted, this is also coming from someone who knows that there are some pieces of Floyd that are best left forgotten as well. As much as Gilmour was proud of the work that the band created together, he was the first to say that not everything was perfect, and looking at what they went through to create an album like Atom Heart Mother, it wasn’t like all of them were exactly thrilled with the end result when they were finished.
But from Meddle onward, all of their albums with the classic lineup were bound to be some degree of good. Even if Roger Waters’s vision for The Wall could get more than a little bit bloated, Gilmour was more than happy to bring the album to life as long as it had the right ideas behind it. Once Richard Wright was fired midway through production, though, those cracks in the ice that Waters talked about in the lyrics tended to be a lot more noticeable when they got offstage.
Which probably explains why The Final Cut sounds like a musical fracture in a way. The band were being held together as best as they could, but there was no way that the leftovers from The Wall were suddenly going to become legendary. A lot of the lyricism works perfectly well, but aside from tracks like ‘The Gunner’s Dream’, there was never that much separating the record from every other band trying to be Pink Floyd. That is, if you had the standard version of the album.
Even though a lot of the tracks that were holdovers from their rock opera didn’t cut it, ‘When the Tigers Broke Free’ is one of the most overlooked tracks of this era, it was already abandoned from The Wall for being too long, and even when they featured it prominently in the film adaptation of the album, throwing it into the middle of the record as a bonus track wasn’t the kind of fate that Gilmour wanted for it.
As much as he wasn’t enjoying himself at the time, the guitarist knew that ‘When the Tigers Broke Free’ deserved to be treated a little better, saying, “The whole period of the post-The Wall period and The Final Cut period are all such a nightmare in my mind that I tended to blank all of that out of my thought process. It would be a good idea. It’s a very nice track, actually. Maybe Roger should put it out on his greatest hits.”
Not only does the song provide a great bit of character development in the film, but it also helps flesh out the album a bit more. We don’t know a lot about ‘Pink’ outside of the fact that he wasn’t treated well in school and how his mother was a helicopter parent, and since his father died in war, this song would at least show his mixed feelings about stepping into his old man’s shoes for the first time and the alienation that comes with not having one of your parents in your life.
This makes the inclusion of it on The Final Cut even more egregious in many respects. This could have been one of the cornerstone tracks on the album, but after going through an entire follow-up album of odds and ends, throwing a stone-cold classic in the middle of everything feels like a spit in the face to the song.
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