The Fletcher Memorial Home (4:11)

“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, making it the only song from The Final Cut to be included.

The song is about Waters’ frustration with the leadership of the world since World War II, mentioning many world leaders by name, (in chronological order: 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 a song describing nuclear armageddon as mankind’s ultimate fate.
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.