by It’s now 50 years since Pink Floyd unveiled their ruminative classic Wish You Were Here, a record where the space rock stalwarts touched the zenith of their collective alchemy and delivered the greatest album they’d ever dream up.
It must have felt like a lifetime, but eight short years earlier, Pink Floyd were in a very different place. Cutting interstellar garage rock doused in lysergic vats of psychedelia, Pink Floyd’s early work during 1967’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn was coloured by the playful surrealism of their frontman and creative captain, Syd Barrett.
While a fantastic debut, and building a lauded live reputation as one of the UFO Club’s resident acts, Barrett’s lyrical idiosyncrasies and foibled songcraft felt more planted to the Anglo-eccentricity imbued in the likes of Small Faces or The Beatles at their most kaleidoscopic.
Then, the slow ebb from the music scene he’d helped define. Whether genetic predisposition, too much LSD, or much of both, severe mental health issues began to take hold of Barrett. Erratic behaviour, diminishing studio session returns, and even initial efforts to keep Barrett in the songwriting fold à la Brian Wilson led nowhere; Pink Floyd eventually dismissing their visionary commander in 1968.
After limping half-heartedly with several bands, eking out two solo LPs, and a smattering of odd radio appearances and brief live sets, Barrett withdrew from the music world and settled permanently in Cambridge with his mother in the early 1980s.
Pink Floyd’s story could have ended there. But, after Barrett’s tentative contributions to A Saucerful of Secrets, the band soldiered on after his departure, releasing a string of mushy, unfocused, conceptual half-bakes that teased pearls of brilliance amid stodgy meanders concerned with their roadie’s breakfast.
Magic was within touching distance on 1971’s Meddle, but The Dark Side of the Moon two years later is where the heights of greatness were now being scaled, a cosmic wander along existential terror and the human condition’s fraught terrain, set with David Gilmour’s electrifying guitar solos, Richard Wright’s chromatic keys, Nick Mason’s jazzy percussion, and the emerging narrative steer of bassist Roger Waters.
It was a triumph, The Dark Side of the Moon, eventually selling over 45 million reported copies and still standing as the fourth biggest selling album of all time. Pink Floyd were now rich and famous. Yet, their old friend and musical comrade’s haunting presence was never far away, the years with Barrett and his sudden vanish clashing with stardom’s startling glitz triggered a strange air of contemplative disquiet among the Pink Floyd camp, especially Waters, who now sought inspiration as to what their ninth LP’s creative path should take.
Finally beyond their creative growing pains early in the decade, Pink Floyd were now equipped with a conceptual and compositional laser focus, further honing their thematic anchor with the progressive scope of their art rock ambitions. Touched on in their prior album effort, 1975’s Wish You Were Here further distils the subjects of alienation at the music industry’s, and capitalism more broadly, greedy maw, the psychological turmoil of achieving one’s material dreams at odds with the idealism of what forged the band together in the first place, an idyll inextricably symbolised by the Barrett’s of the world.
Where Pink Floyd reaches for the further peripheries of space on The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here turns inward toward the deepest recesses of the soul, excavating an inner sanctuary of teeming dimension every bit as expansive as the far-flung corner of the universe. With slow, apparitional engulfment, Wright’s haunting ambience that mirages into existence on the chilling opener ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts I–V)’ illustrates the troubled introspection beautifully, phantasmagorical synths swaddle Gilmour’s exquisite guitar licks before the stunning four-note chime ripples into the consciousness with electric charge. At barely four minutes in, Wish You Were Here is already a classic.
As Wish You Were Here unfolds, the emotional soar never wavers for a moment. The menacing Minimoog bite that spikes ‘Welcome to the Machine’ with its alien belligerence starkly befits the lambast of corporate crushing of innocence, ‘Have a Cigar’s strutting cynicism introducing the listener to the Cuban chomping irritance of the music industry’s label bosses and agent vultures, accelerating the quiet seethe that wealth and high-life can’t stave off forever. ‘Money’ may be more remembered, but ‘Have a Cigar’ lambasts the biz with a deeper fury, roping in folk rocker Roy Harper to play the role of the big cheese to further lend the character an air of foreign intrusion.
Which takes us to the album’s centrepiece. A wistful moment of folk balladry shorn of all noise and messy thoughts, ‘Wish You Were Here’ is a jaw-dropping moment of clarifying epiphany. While semi-disputed by Waters and Gilmour years later, it’s impossible to separate the title track’s gentle, heartfelt country meander without a sense of longing for their old friend Barrett. It stands as the record’s epiphany, the meditative summit of Pink Floyd’s clearing away the bullshit and wealth and remembering exactly why they started a band, if still leaving with more questions than answers.
“You were caught on the crossfire of childhood and stardom, blown on the steel breeze / Come on you target for faraway laughter, come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr / and shine!” Roger wails on Wish You Were Here’s ethereal open. During ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’s mix, Barrett turned up to the EMI Studio unannounced, bald and obese, in a moment of uncanny happenstance as the band were working on the song exploring their relationship with the band’s former leader. “…he’s just a symbol for all the extremes of absence some people have to indulge in because it’s the only way they can cope with how fucking sad it is, modern life, to withdraw completely,” Waters revealed. “I found that terribly sad”.
Further fantastic albums would follow, and alienation would rear its head in a more explosive fashion on Animals and The Wall, but Wish You Were Here stands as the pinnacle of Pink Floyd’s constant search for answers, a space rock marvel that mines madness, loneliness, and the scramble for peace set to the band’s most stunning musical synergy they’d ever conjure. Just as we know more about outer space than we do the bottom of the ocean, Wish You Were Here shines a light on the wilderness that hides in us all, revealing a deeper and darker chasm of the unknown.
