The Fletcher Memorial Home

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“The Fletcher Memorial Home”

Song by Pink Floyd

Album

The Final Cut

Released

March 21, 1983 (UK)
April 2, 1983 (US)

Recorded

July-December 1982

Genre

Progressive rock
Symphonic rock

Length

~4:12

Label

Harvest Records (UK)
Capitol Records (US)

Writer

Roger Waters

Producer

Roger Waters, James Guthrie and Michael Kamen

The Final Cut track listing

Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert
(8)

“The Fletcher Memorial Home”
(9)

Southampton Dock
(10)

"The Fletcher Memorial Home" is a song by Roger Waters, performed by Pink Floyd. The song appears on their 1983 album, The Final Cut. It is the eighth track on the album, and is arranged between "Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert" and "Southampton Dock". It was performed live by Roger Waters for the first time in 2006. The song is also featured on the Pink Floyd compilation Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd.

The song deals with Roger Waters' personal views on the Falklands War, mentioning many world leaders by name, including Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, suggesting that these "colonial wasters of life and limb" be segregated into a specially-founded retirement home. It labels all the world leaders as "overgrown infants" and "incurable tyrants", and suggests that they are incapable of understanding anything other than violence, or their own visages on a television screen.

In its concluding lines, the narrator of the song gathers all of the "tyrants" inside the Fletcher Memorial Home and imagines applying "the Final Solution" to them (i.e. having them all gassed) presumably to keep them from causing any more chaos and death. This ties into the general theme of the album in its entirety, which concludes with a song describing nuclear armageddon as mankind's ultimate fate. As it is placed on the album, it is bracketed by songs that likewise deeply criticize the Falklands War. Waters perceived the conflict to sum up the betrayal of the British soldiers who fought and died in World War II, and that the lives of British and Argentine soldiers were being used as political pawns; for example, that Margaret Thatcher's decision to go to war was, in his eyes, designed to give her a much-needed boost in popularity. In the song he also briefly touches on fascism and the Red Baiting of the 1950s by mentioning Senator Joseph McCarthy ("the ghost of McCarthy") in connection with all the other tyrants. Waters also implies that the majority of the public did not respect the "tyrants" as he clearly states "did they expect us to treat them with any respect."

Fletcher in the name of the song is in honour and remembrance of Roger Waters' father, Eric Fletcher Waters, who died during the Second World War at Anzio.