| "The Fletcher Memorial Home" | ||||||||||
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| Song by Pink Floyd from the album The Final Cut | ||||||||||
| Released | 21 March 1983 (UK) April 2, 1983 (US) |
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| Recorded | July–December 1982 | |||||||||
| Genre | Progressive rock, symphonic rock | |||||||||
| Length | 4:12 | |||||||||
| Label | Harvest Records (UK) Capitol Records (US) |
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| Writer | Roger Waters | |||||||||
| Producer | Roger Waters, James Guthrie and Michael Kamen | |||||||||
| The Final Cut track listing | ||||||||||
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"The Fletcher Memorial Home" is a song by Roger Waters, performed by Pink Floyd.[1] The song appears on their 1983 album, The Final Cut.[2] 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.[3]
The song is about Waters' frustration with the leadership of the world since World War II,[4] mentioning many world leaders by name (Ronald Reagan, Alexander Haig, Menachem Begin, Margaret Thatcher, Ian Paisley, Leonid Brezhnev, Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon), 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. This ties into the general theme of the album in its entirety, which concludes with "Two Suns in the Sunset", a song describing nuclear armageddon as mankind's ultimate fate.
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.[4] Fletcher was the maiden name of Eric Waters' mother.
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