Wish you were here album – Remember when you were young…

Now what

The year is 1973. The now legendary album Dark Side of the Moon has been released, and it is a phenomenal success. The band is recognized as one of the great bands of their time, and their album as their best work. But what now?

Overwhelmed by their success, and in the midst of artistic conflicts between the band’s members, especially between David Gilmour and Roger Waters, Pink Floyd doesn’t manage to find a direction for their next album. They try and experiment with a project called “Household objects”, where everyday objects would be transformed into new instruments, but they end up abandoning the unachievable idea.

An idea

The idea of their next album is born out of 4 essential guitar notes. Four iconic notes played on Gilmour’s guitar, which sound at the same time both sad and haunting. While the lead guitarist was only playing around with the guitar, this little riff played by accident becomes the hook of one of Pink Floyd’s greatest songs: Shine On You Crazy Diamond.

The song is then composed and experimented with on live gigs, and becomes the core of the album. It is mostly instrumental, with Gilmour’s guitar and Richard’s Wright keyboard resonating for most of the song’s 26 minutes. A bit of saxophone also answers to the guitar towards the end, and a verse is written which brings us back to the haunting of the original riff: Syd’s absence.

Syd Barrett

When the band was founded on 1965, it was with the vision and leadership of Syd Barrett, guitarist and lead vocalist on the first album. But after only a few years, while Pink Floyd revolved around the charisma and creativity of its founder, Syd began to lose control of his life and music, in parts due to daily drug use and mental health deterioration. And soon after Gilmour joined the band in 1967, the band parted with their friend Syd.

The song Shine On You Crazy Diamond, both beginning and end of the album, and soon after the song Wish You Were which gave its title to the album, are mostly an hommage to Syd’s debuts, and the loss of a friend.

A barely recognizable Syd actually came to visit the band during the mixing of this album, and it is the last time they saw him alive.

Lyrics:

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.
You were caught in 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!

You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the moon.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Threatened by shadows at night, and exposed in the light.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Well you wore out your welcome with random precision, rode on the steel breeze.
Come on you raver, you seer of visions, come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!

Live version:

Wish you were here is to this day one of the most learnt songs on guitar, as it is not only accessible to beginners, but also filled with emotional lyrics, written out of a poem by Roger Waters at the time of Syd’s departure. The acoustic guitar differs from most Pink Floyd songs which use a lot of effects and modulations of tones to achieve their iconic sound. The opening of the song is the finale of Tchaikovsky’s fourth symphony on the radio.

The two remaining songs, Welcome to the Machine, and Have a Cigar, were more political. They are about the money-grubbing record producers and managers controlling the band, which coincidentally also contributed to Syd’s mental collapse, as well as their hypocrisy.

One memorable sentence from Have a Cigar’s lyrics is “By the way, which one of you is Pink?”. A question they got a lot from greedy producers which shows how little they knew about the band they wanted to sign.

To close the album, on the very end of the last part of Shine on you crazy diamond, a little melody is played by Wright on his synthesizer. It is from See Emily Play, one of the band’s first songs, composed by their beloved friend, Syd Barrett.

Symbol of a simpler time, before the dream was gone and the child was gone.