Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here

Wish You Were Here

Best song: Shine On You Crazy Diamond, part 1

Worst song: Welcome To The Machine

Overall grade: 5

Coming a full two and a half years after ‘Dark Side’, this marks the longest gap between two Pink Floyd albums so far, and they spent much of this lost time banging on tin cans. That’s not any kind of metaphor – no, they decided to resurrect an old project, ‘Household Objects’, which comprised music played on anything except for actual musical instruments. Now, nothing has ever been released (officially or otherwise) from these sessions, but it could be interesting, no? After all, all instruments have to be made by someone, from something, and all the band were essentially doing is cutting out the manufacturer and doing it themselves. Really just a step on from when they started getting involved in the production. However, that idea never really got off the ground, and so Roger Waters began to write some more songs to be played on more conventional instruments: six in all; and four would appear on this record with two being saved for the next one.

Which brings me to the big question: how can an album with five songs (since one is in two parts) which are all great, get the same or lower grade than an album which has serious weaknesses? Well – something I mention fairly often is songs that work in the context of an album, but not individually. Here, I see it as the other way round. Taken on their own, each of these songs are awesome, but if you put them together, they don’t quite work as a complete piece. The difference in style between ‘Crazy Diamond, pt. 1’ and ‘Welcome To The Machine’ is jarring and although the segue between ‘Have A Cigar’ and the title track is clever, where it becomes staticky, unclear radio music for a while, the two songs require a very different mindset and I can never get used to them next to each other. So, although I often play all these songs, it’s very rare for me to play them together as a set.

The three shorter tracks are very much overshadowed by the massive ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, which is both the longest song Floyd ever did (it just hits the 26 minute mark) and the one with the most parts (there are nine, count ‘em!) Parts 1-5 open the record and the slightly less essential Parts 6-9 close it, although these ones I do put together, since parts 1-9 in their entirety are actually a great experience that surprisingly few people have tried. Though I don’t enjoy the whole composition as much as ‘Echoes’, it’s probably a more sophisticated piece. As in most of this album, Rick Wright dominates, which is nice, and he’s very subtle and atmospheric, giving everything time to breathe and develop, with perfectly-timed solos by him and Gilmour appearing all over the place. The expertly constructed piece shows the mark of a band with experience at writing these epics, but who are certainly not complacent, and it feels lonely and isolated throughout, before ending on a few bars of the melody of ‘See Emily Play’, their 1967 top 10 single, which feels both familiar and out of place – an appropriately worrying ending to the song and album.

The title track is what all of Roger’s acoustic numbers from ‘More’, plus ‘If’, ‘Grantchester Meadows and ‘Pillow of Winds’, have been leading up to – the ultimate in heartrending and pure beauty, both musical and lyrical… it’s one of those songs that I can’t imagine myself ever not wanting to listen to. ‘Running over the same old ground; what have we found? The same old fears’ gets me every time.

But the two tracks before it are the very different ones… ‘Welcome To The Machine’ is a very good song that never quite seemed to justify its seven and a half minutes to me, but at five or so it wold be excellent. It’s very cold, harsh and mechanical, shutting people out with Wright’s keyboards giving it a very tense feel, and it is weird. I could believe it was recorded inside the machine it talks about. ‘Have a Cigar’ is different again, Roy Harper’s guest vocals combining the sarcasm of Roger’s and Dave’s ability to stay in tune, and he seems to have the confidence neither of them have. The rhythmic feel really suits the song and the attempt at a more straightforward rock style almost foreshadows the direction the band would take for some of the post-Waters era, interestingly, although the guitar solo doesn’t nearly match up to the one on ‘Wish You Were Here’.

In all seriousness, though, I’ve often heard it said that ‘The Final Cut’ is the most depressing Pink Floyd album, but I think I could make a strong case for this one. Though musically they’d survived, I can’t even imagine how they felt about the loss and breakdown of their early bandmate Syd Barrett, and hearing their thoughtful and sometimes harrowing playing on these songs shows how much it affected them – even without considering the story, now music folklore, of Syd himself turning up in the studio while they were recording ‘Shine On’ and asking when he needed to start playing.

Course, he later called the song ‘a bit old’. Like that’s ever going to be the case.