Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here: the story behind the song

Pink Floyd posing for a photograph in 1973 — (Image credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Rewind to January 1975, and Abbey Road hummed with bad vibes as Pink Floyd embarked on sessions for their ninth album, Wish You Were Here. With guitarist and co-vocalist David Gilmour admitting to NME that 1973’s The Dark Side Of The Moon had left them “creatively trapped”, bassist/co-vocalist Roger Waters explaining the Wish You Were Here concept as working “with people whom you know aren’t there anymore”, and drummer Nick Mason quipping on Capital Radio that “I really did wish that I wasn’t there”, this latest album was the signpost to the great Floyd fallout.

And yet, even on a record that Gilmour remembers “started quite painfully”, the title track brought a moment of easy serendipity and happy synergy between the members.

“I had bought a 12-string guitar,” Gilmour recalled in a video interview to promote the Immersion reissue of Wish You Were Here. “I was strumming it in the control room of Studio Three at Abbey Road, and that [opening riff] just started coming out. Roger’s ears pricked up and he said, ‘What’s that?’ I had a terrible habit of playing bits of songs by other people that were good. And I think Roger was a bit nervous asking, in case it came from something else, by someone else.”

While Gilmour became “mildly obsessed” as he developed the guitar part, the band’s brainwave was to open Wish You Were Here with the effect of a listener cycling through radio stations, alighting on Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, before finally settling on a distant-sounding 12-string riff, which is shortly joined by a warmer acoustic passage.

“The idea,” explained Gilmour, “was that it was like a guitar playing on the radio and someone in their room at home, in their bedroom or something, listening to it and joining in. So the other guitar was supposed to be a kid at home joining in with the guitar he’s listening to on the radio.

“And therefore,” Gilmour added, “it wasn’t supposed to be too slick – and it wasn’t. Every time I listen to the actual original recording, I think, ‘God, I should have really done that a little bit better.’”

While a cameo by the French jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli was largely edited out (some claim it’s just audible at the end), more significant was Roger Waters’s wistful lyric, with a standout couplet – ‘We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year’ – that could be read as a nod to the bassist’s unravelling marriage, but was principally a salute to the fallen Syd Barrett.

“Although [Wish You Were Here’s two-part opening and closing track] Shine On You Crazy Diamond is specifically about Syd, and Wish You Were Here has a broader remit,” noted Gilmour in one documentary, “I can’t sing it without thinking about Syd.”

Indeed, when the classic Pink Floyd line-up reunited in London at Live 8 in 2005, Waters and Gilmour made sure that the Hyde Park audience were in no doubt of Wish You Were Here’s subject matter as they performed the song on acoustic guitars. “We’re doing this for everyone who’s not here,” announced the bassist, pointedly. “And particularly, of course, for Syd.”

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Henry Yates has been a freelance journalist since 2002 and written about music for titles including The Guardian, The Telegraph, NME, Classic Rock, Guitarist, Total Guitar and Metal Hammer. He is the author of Walter Trout's official biography, Rescued From Reality, a music pundit on Times Radio and BBC TV, and an interviewer who has spoken to Brian May, Jimmy Page, Ozzy Osbourne, Ronnie Wood, Dave Grohl, Marilyn Manson, Kiefer Sutherland and many more.

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