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By the admission of all involved, the making of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here was a challenging, tortuous and frustrating experience. "Compared to the records we’d made before and since, it was like hitting a brick wall," drummer Nick Mason told British music magazine MOJO last year. "To start with, we didn’t have an idea between us."
David Gilmour has very clear memories of the day that the band started working on the title track, however, as he shared with director John Edginton in his documentary The Story of Wish You Were Here.
"I remember the moment of creating it quite often," Gilmour told the director, during an interview at his home studio in West Sussex, revealing that the song's unforgettable opening motif was written on a 12-string guitar. "I played that in the control room of number 3 studio at Abbey Road. It was just something I'd been strumming at home, and Roger [Waters] immediately said, 'What's that? What's that?' and we had to immediately get on with that and work it up."
"Some [riffs] have a little bit of magic to them, and some don't," he added, "and the ones that do have that bit of magic to them, it's obvious to people around."
"I said to him, What's that you're playing? That's really nice, that's really good. Maybe I should try and do something with it," Waters recalled in a 2012 BBC interview.
"I think Roger and I then working on writing the verses, and putting those chords into the whole thing," Gilmour recalled on the same programme. "And then Roger did those brilliant words, and there we were."
"It still resonates, it still has has its meaning," Gilmour told John Edginton. "It means that to me every time I sing it. It's a very very good combination of music and words that seems to capture something."
Wish You Were Here, the album, was released on September 12, 1975. It received somewhat mixed reviews at the time, with Melody Maker's take on the record, written by Allan Jones, being particularly savage.
"From whichever direction one approaches Wish You Were Here, it still sounds unconvincing in its ponderous sincerity, and displays a critical lack of imagination in all departments," Jones wrote. "It's really all quite predictable, and forces one to the conclusion that for the last two years (possibly longer) the Floyd have existed in a state of suspended animation... Wish You Were Here sucks. It's as simple as that."
Record buyers took a rather different view. The album went to number 1 in the both the UK and US, and has now sold around 20 million copies worldwide.
