Review of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here

Released 1975

"We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year,
running over the same old ground. What have you found?
The same old fears. Wish you were here."

Most of my prog rock encounters to date had been happy accidents rather than planned ventures. I was usually attracted in these early days by either recognising the name of the band, the album or the sleeve as being 'prog-like'. That wasn't the case with my next purchase.

The Dark Side of The Moon had triggered my interest in the genre and I was still utterly under it's (softly spoken magic) spell. I had read anything and everything I could about Pink Floyd and was not far short of obsessive about my desire to learn more. I wanted to be sure that I wasn't setting myself up for a fall. It would have been easy; I held TDSOMT in such high esteem that it was almost inevitable that anything else would be a let down. I wasn't sufficiently intrigued by the earlier albums at that point and I didn't have the £20+ that a new copy of The Wall would have demanded. It seemed to make sense therefore to go for the next chronological release after TDSOTM. This was even though I knew that before the ultimate concept for Wish You Were Here was agreed, the band spent six months experimenting with music made bashing and strumming kitchen utensils.

It was with some trepidation that I entered the record store. I was lucky enough to find an original black cellophane wrapped copy with hardly a crease and with the robot hand-shake sticker in perfect condition. As with my previous Pink Floyd purchase, I was immediately impressed by the sense of drama created by the unstated mystery inherent in this 12" package. On the way home, I held the bag containing the album in the same way I now hold my baby son. I invested an inappropriate amount of significance in simply buying the record, looking furtively over my shoulder lest I needed to explain my shortness of breath.

Peeling away the layers at home, I noted that more care and consideration has gone into the concept of the packaging than would often be applied to the music by other bands. All of the images implied absence and duplicity: the clear record and blank face of the top-hatted gentleman showed an absence of sincerity, there was the diver entering the lake without raising a ripple and the incongruity of the transparent red scarf blowing through a copse. The main image - of one man aflame shaking hands with another - is both pregnant with symbolism and yet devoid of any tangible meaning. In its entirety it combined to a evoke a compellingly impersonal distancing aura.

From the very first notes this was an album characterised by a unique keyboard sound which was both crystal clear and mechanical in its execution, perfectly complementing a sound which felt as though it belonged to a distant future time, cold, inhuman and industrial.

There is a huge feeling of space, of incredible emptiness across the whole record. The deliriously slow stoned pace of Shine On You Crazy Diamond is so precisely and cautiously executed that there the anticipation between each note of the lengthy guitar introduction is almost too much to bear.

Carefully and sparingly used sound effects pulled me in on the very first listen. This instantly became one of my favourite headphone albums, especially with the lead into the title track, where a radio is tuned through several stations before an acoustic guitar takes over, first in mono before exploding with clarity in stereo. The best moment for me on the album is during this intro, where the 'squeaking' sound of David Gilmour's left hand moving between chords on the fretboard is the most tangibly non-mechanical element of the piece, and is so perfectly clear in the headphones, contextualising the desperate pleading sentiment of the lyrics that follow.

I hurriedly reached for one of my many Pink Floyd books during this first listen, remembering from somewhere that Stephane Grapelli had contributed violin to the beginning of the second section of Shine On You Crazy Diamond. To this day, I have only detected the vaguest grasp of his work on that day. Ever since it has been forever lost in the rolling winds and rising keyboards. I have searched for it time and time again, always glad that I can't quite find it.