Why "Wish You Were Here" is Pink Floyd's Finest Hour
Pink Floyd's best album—yes, you heard that right—turns 50 (!).
This album review examines the finest hour from the world’s most famous prog rock band in honor of its 50th anniversary.
Genre: Prog Rock, Art-Rock
Label: Harvest
Release Date: September 12, 1975
Vibe: 🤖
👉 Click the GIF to stream the album on your favorite platform
Can you imagine being the band that has to try to top Dark Side of the Moon?
Even if you’re aware of the record and its influence on every corner and era of rock music, you may not grasp exactly how big a blockbuster it’s become since its release. As of this writing, the album has charted on the Billboard 200 for 990 non-consecutive weeks (I did the math for you: that’s a little over 19 years). It’s gone 15x Platinum in the U.S. and 14x Platinum in the U.K., selling over 59 million copies in the process. That makes it one of the 10 best-selling albums ever. Even before it became a classic rock brand unto itself, with the iconic prism cover art immortalized on countless t-shirts and dorm room walls, it was a widespread success. It made international superstars of a band that, up until that point, were still seen as somewhat of an acquired taste. After DSOTM exploded in popularity, the next logical question was, “What now?”
In 1974, Pink Floyd began sketching out ideas for the much-anticipated follow-up that would eventually be titled Wish You Were Here. But, as recording began in earnest in January 1975, the sessions were anything but easy-going. Guitarist David Gilmour was at odds with the rest of the group’s approach, initially adamant that they should refine their existing material instead of twisting themselves into new creative knots. "I had some criticisms of DSOTM," he noted later. "I thought we should try and work harder on marrying the idea and the vehicle that carried it, so that they both had an equal magic [...] It's something I was personally pushing when we made Wish You Were Here." Keyboardist Richard Wright said the sessions “[fell] within a difficult period,” while Roger Waters, the loudest voice in favor of another concept album, called them “torturous.” To say there was a creative impasse is putting it lightly.
“There were days when we didn’t do anything,” said engineer Brian Humphries in 2014. “I don’t think they knew what they wanted to do. We had a dartboard and an air rifle, and we’d play these word games, sit around, get drunk, go home, and return the next day. That’s all we were doing until suddenly everything started falling into place.” While all this was going on, a cohort of British music journalists began to publicly sour on Pink Floyd’s sound when they’d test out new ideas on the road. Nick Kent’s comments in a 1974 NME write-up stung the most: “The Floyd in fact seem so incredibly tired and seemingly bereft of true creative ideas, one wonders if they really care about their music anymore.” The more they struggled in the studio, the more they were tempted to agree with that general sentiment. Maybe DSOTM was it for them. Maybe they had reached their peak. Done their job. Maybe they had nothing else to say.
But then, four notes, played on an electric guitar with a trippy delay effect, served as their creative breakthrough by awakening the ghosts of their past. That otherworldly motif, piercing through the pillowly, elegiac synths that begin the two-part opus that is “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” originated from a David Gilmour guitar riff that was reworked several times before the Wish You Were Here sessions. The band even played it on their 1974 French tour. Crucially, the song was written as a tribute to Pink Floyd founder and Gilmour’s predecessor, Syd Barrett, a prog rock pioneer whose star tragically burned too brightly, too quickly. From 1968 to 1975, he’d become a recluse, refusing interviews and preferring to go by his first name, Roger. To hear Gilmour and Mason tell it, Barrett wandered into Abbey Road studios, head shaved and immensely overweight, and silently watched from the control room as the band worked. The word “shellshocked” is used multiple times in that clip.
“I couldn't believe it,” Wright added later. “He had shaven all his hair off. I mean, his eyebrows, everything. He was jumping up and down brushing his teeth, it was awful. Roger [Waters] was in tears, I think I was; we were both in tears. It was very shocking. Seven years of no contact, and then to walk in while we're actually working on that particular track. I don't know—coincidence, karma, fate, who knows? But it was very, very, very powerful." And, just as quickly as he appeared, he vanished again. Despite his complicated relationship with the band and its legacy, the remaining members ensured he got all of his royalties up until he died in 2006. The first two verses of “Shine On” carry such weight to them if you know anything about Barrett’s history of substance abuse that led to him becoming one of rock’s most famous “acid casualties.”
Remember when you were young?
You shone like the sun
Shine on, you crazy diamond
Now there's a look in your eyes
Like black holes in the sky
Shine on, you crazy diamond
After hundreds of listens, this two-part suite still mesmerizes me like few other creations from one of rock’s most fertile periods. It’s so light on its feet, especially compared to the material sandwiched between its two halves, but it cuts incredibly deep. Gilmour’s guitar has never sounded better or more assured, while those vocal harmonies from him, Waters, and Wright give the arrangement extra lift. If not the most impressive composition in the Floyd canon, which I understand would be a bold statement to make, it’s undoubtedly among their most emotionally stark. Every layer here, from those gorgeous synths that would help lay the groundwork for ambient electronica in the latter half of the 70s to the closing saxophone solo, it’s processing grief and remorse in real time. It’s the kind of sadness that sticks in your soul because there’s so much affection behind it. Perhaps it’s not about Syd for you or those close to you. Maybe it’s about someone you lost too soon and what it takes for you to keep showing up after they’re gone. Whichever way you slice it, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more affecting album opener in their entire discography.
Then, improbably, they hit you with the scariest track on the record in “Welcome to the Machine.” Cold, sequenced percussion clangs around hissing, throbbing synths, creating an atmosphere that’s as foreboding as they come. Gilmour’s acoustic guitar is the tiny, threatened human center of this industrial behemoth, trying and failing to escape the clutches of the machinery encasing it. Waters’ lyrics are as vitriolic as anything he’s ever written, pulling back the curtain and exposing the music industry as an assembly line that dangles the carrot expertly in front of artistic talent, only to pull the rug out from under them when it benefits them financially. The promises, the toys, the fancy dinners and expensive cars, they’re all leashes, put in place to prevent the talent from wandering too far off track. Those themes extend to “Have a Cigar,” a sardonic takedown of A&R types prone to passive-aggressive assessments of the band’s success, all before they remember to ask which one of them is “Pink.” By the way, that’s influential singer/songwriter Roy Harper on lead vocal, brought in after Gilmour and Waters couldn’t agree on who should sing the song internally.
All that brings us to the enormously popular title track, one of the most enduring anthems about alienation and loneliness ever written. A rare example of a Gilmour-Waters collaboration, the soft, warm acoustic guitar is in direct opposition to the despondent lyrics, which use simple comparatives to paint a devastating picture of the trade-offs that come with relating to other people. Certain one-liners will hit different based on where you’re at in your life—I know it’s changed and evolved as a vehicle for tough introspection for me over time. The sentence that’s stayed with me for nearly three decades is among its most ruthlessly honest: “Did you exchange/A walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?” Ask 10 different people and they’ll give you 10 other answers to that question.
Throughout Wish You Were Here, you can pick out strands of creative brilliance that predicted the DNA of countless acts that’ve flourished in the years since. Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, Radiohead, Foo Fighters, the Flaming Lips, the list goes on and on and on. Even synth-pop owes it a nod for its mechanical textures in particular, primarily for showing how you could convey absolute dread without using “recognizable” instruments in your arrangements. Statistically, it’s not the band’s most famous album, nor is it their most accessible from a rock radio perspective. However, when it’s all said and done, it may be their most complete statement. It’s angrier, more disillusioned, and arguably more emotionally literate than anything else they’ve ever done. It mostly strips away DSOTM’s grandeur for a more minimalist approach. In so doing, they created the most radical kind of record, one that doesn’t demand answers or closure.
It just asks you to listen, with an open heart and mind. For me, it remains their finest hour.
What’s your favorite track off Wish You Were Here? Where were you the first time you heard it? Sound off in the comments.