“There was a sense of humour. We were taken very seriously by the world at large, but there was always an edge of fun”: The grimness of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here may have been overstated

Marking the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here in 2015, Prog looked back on the history of an album that remains popular among lifelong fans and new followers – and may have been far less a negative experience for the band than many have come to believe.

Released in September 1975, Pink Floyd's ninth album, Wish You Were Here, remains one of their most loved works, and sounds as contemporary now as then. But its torturous gestation, recorded in increasingly indolent sessions at Abbey Road across half a year, almost broke the band apart. As Roger Waters said in 1999, “The whole thing had fallen to pieces.”

It certainly paved the way for Floyd’s third era, when Waters set himself up as sole bandleader, sidelining David Gilmour, alienating Nick Mason and ultimately dismissing Richard Wright. As Nicholas Schaffner spelled out in his 1991 book Saucerful Of Secrets, “the Floyds, whether they realised it or not, were artistically at cross purposes. Gilmour and Wright were content that the music should keep transporting listeners into advanced states of REM. Waters was now determined to wake them up.”

“The grimness may have been overstated as years have gone by,” Mason chuckles down the line from California. “It wasn’t so much that it was truly grim; we were just having great difficulty in getting to work on it.”

In 2011 Gilmour said: “In this post-Dark Side Of The Moon period, we were having to assess what we were in this business for.” Suddenly having enough money to fulfil even their wildest teenage dreams proved problematic. Thanks to the all-conquering success of Dark Side, more and more people came to see their light show; and as a result, it became a period where people talked solely about how many tons of equipment and numbers of staff they had – rather than the music. Waters subsequently surmised, “The Dark Side Of The Moon finished the Pink Floyd off once and for all.”

Gilmour was later to state, “Roger has said that we may have been finished at that point, and he may have been right.”

But Waters knew why the band stayed together: “We were frightened of the great ‘out there’ beyond the umbrella of this extraordinarily powerful and valuable trade name.”

Pink Floyd will forever be seen in terms of the power struggle between Waters and Gilmour, and the period after Dark Side saw the dispute take root. All four members were coming to terms with their new-found success, and a dawning realisation – as in some of the marriages that were breaking up around them – that the individuals who made up the institution had little in common.

After the release of Dark Side in March 1973 the band had fulfilled a US tour, and for finally found themselves with a significant amount of time off. Their lack of direction was underlined by their next experiment – a strikingly out-there project called Household Objects, and one which represented the band’s last foray into the experimental approach of Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict and Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast.

With engineer Alan Parsons, they tried to make music using, um, household objects. Sessions continued until December, when the idea was finally abandoned as unworkable. “I remember spending an inordinately long time stretching rubber bands across matchboxes to get a bass sound – which just ended up sounding like a bass guitar!” Gilmour said in 2002. Asked whose idea it was, he replied, “Probably Roger’s – it certainly wasn’t mine. We spent an awful lot of hours of wasted studio time faffing around.”

The next 18 months of Pink Floyd’s career could be encapsulated in the phrase ‘faffing around.’ While Waters pondered the invisible world, the others grew their property portfolios, threw parties and bathed in the ennui of the newly rich. The Floyd brand was kept afloat with the release in early 1974 of A Nice Pair, a gathering of the group’s first two studio albums.

It was the long-arranged French tour in June that stirred the band, and as they decamped to the airless Unit Studios in London’s King’s Cross to rehearse, new material began to emerge. “It wasn’t really that oppressive,” Mason recalls. “Just because you’re making money you don’t necessarily have to hire the presidential suite at the Holiday Inn – rehearsal rooms can be rough. I don’t think that’s ever been a bother for us.”

It was here that Gilmour hit upon the four-note phrase that brought Waters to life. He thought of original leader Syd Barrett, who’d been dismissed six years previously, and wrote a lyric about him, initially titling the song Shine On. At that time Barrett’s myth had begun to grow disproportionately as Floyd achieved enormous success – partly via an augmented sound featuring saxophone and backing vocalists, which Barrett had suggested in 1967.

His growing mythology received a further boost in an era when journalists were only marginally less famous than the artists they wrote about. Nick Kent had written a lengthy feature, The Cracked Ballad of Syd Barrett, for the NME in April 1974. By the end of the year, Harvest issued a set of Barrett’s two studio albums. It was to give him his only US chart placing.

Meanwhile, Floyd had worked up the song Raving And Drooling in time for the French tour. There were new members in the camp: The Blackberries, Venetta Fields and Carlena Williams, who’d come to Gilmour’s attention singing with Humble Pie. Fields, who had no prior knowledge of Floyd, noted the difference between the two groups. “The ’Pie were really rock and the audience would leave raging with lots of gusto,” she says today. “The Floyd’s audience would glide out of the venue, because the music mesmerised them.” Dick Parry returned on saxophone. All three would make an invaluable contribution to what would become Wish You Were Here.

Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Pts. 1-5) - YouTube

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The main focus of the year was the UK tour in November and December. By this time another new song had been written, You’ve Got To Be Crazy. The show opened with the three new numbers, followed by Dark Side. The group spent three weeks in Elstree and a further week in King’s Cross getting to grips with the new projections that formed their now-famous film backdrops.

The 20-date road trip ran from November 4 until December 14, marking the last time they visited provincial cities such as Cardiff, Stoke-On-Trent and Bristol; and they played three key gigs at Wembley in mid-November. The Blackberries served to lighten the mood on the tour. “20 Feet From Stardom [a 2013 documentary about backing singers] is so typical,” Mason laughs. “They were so good at riding the storm; if there was uproar, they were the ones who could sleep through it in the band room.”

The singers’ ability to rise above it all was hard-earned; after all, Fields had worked with the Stones and had been an Ikette. “I was not into their politics,” Fields says. “I was so excited to be with a group with their music and popularity. I was used to singing with groups that sold out 15,000-seaters. Pink Floyd filled football stadiums throughout the world.”

Reviews of the tour were mixed; including, most notably, Nick Kent’s scathing NME report, which poured scorn on the band and called the three new songs “a dubious triumvirate.” Spirits in the Floyd camp going into the Christmas season were not seasonal.

Recording sessions for Wish You Were Here began on Monday, January 6, 1975 in the new Studio Three at Abbey Road. Brian Humphries – who’d first worked with the band on their 1969 soundtrack album More and later looked after the sound on their 1974 UK tour – was to be the album’s engineer. It was one of the first times EMI had worked with a freelancer. But because it was Pink Floyd, anything was allowed.

“At first I felt uncomfortable,” Humphries says. “I and the band were guinea pigs in the new studio. We probably knew more about their desk than the boffins did – plus I wasn’t trying to outdo Alan Parsons, their blue-eyed boy.” Humphries had worked with bands such as Free and Traffic. “I’ve always said that Traffic were my favourite band. But for professionalism the Floyd were the best – the music was always going to be memorable when you heard the finished article.”

The problem was delivering such a finished article. There were days when little happened at all. Mason was not happy about the isolation that multi-track recording offered, and how it drew out the process. Wright, whose sound was so central to the band, seemed away in his own world. All four would take it in turns to arrive late. “I don’t think they knew what they wanted to do,” Humphries told Sound On Sound. “We had a dartboard and an air rifle and we’d play these word games, sit around, get drunk, go home and return the next day.”

“It got a little desperate,” Mason recalls. “There were a few other issues with our personal lives.”

“Roger was taking on more of the way he wanted the band to go,” Humphries adds, “but David did have a lot of input in the decisions that were made.”

“It was clear to me that Dave and Roger were in charge,” Fields recalls. “I loved Rick! He was quiet but very friendly. I loved the way he played piano. Nick was quiet as well.”

Gilmour wanted the three songs they’d already worked on – now known as Shine On You Crazy Diamond – to be a whole side of the album. Waters thought it would sound cobbled together, and felt it could be more coherent. “Dave wanted to make a completely different record, so we had a struggle about that, which I won eventually,” Waters told Prog Editor Jerry Ewing for Classic Rock in 1999

A band meeting, where Waters took notes, found him victorious – new material was to be written, and Raving And Drooling and You’ve Got To Be Crazy were mothballed, to be resurrected as Sheep and Dogs on 1977’s Animals). Shine On was to bookend the album with new material added in between. Referencing Barrett and the current state of the band, the theme was to be absence. Storm Thorgerson, a frequent face at Abbey Road (“Argumentative, grumpy but a great ally when things got heated and a great sleeve designer” – Humphries) set to work on the designs that would so define the album.

It was once Shine On You Crazy Diamond got fully underway that the band began to coalesce. Just like all four Beatles had got together to demonstrate their professionalism to Billy Preston in the Get Back sessions, so Floyd gathered around Barrett as a fifth member – although he wasn’t actually there. The new material matched the pre-written song. Welcome To The Machine, Waters’ scathing attack on the industry around him, was written in the studio. Have A Cigar, another swipe at music business fat cats, was added. Frequent studio guest Roy Harper sang vocals after Gilmour and Waters failed to nail it – much to Waters’ later chagrin.

The title track, a bluesy confection that conveying feelings of longing, added humanity to the record. Waters’ failing marriage to Judy Trim fed into the lyrics, as did the state of the group and the now-legendary apparition of Barrett in the studio. Venetta Fields was thrilled with what she heard. “I was impressed and amazed. Their music was mostly in minor keys, which made it dark and eerie.”

There were also some laughs to be had. The group-sanctioned visual gags that ran through their sleeves and projections, and also the cartoon programme for the 1974 UK tour, proved Floyd had a not-always-obvious funny bone. “There always was a sense of humour,” Mason says. “Although we were taken very seriously by the world at large, there was always an edge of fun. We were never known as a comedy quartet – ‘the Crazy Gang make records’ – but within the band I think we had a lot of laughs.”

“Roger was the alpha male, but we all joined in quite heartily with the teasing,” Gilmour told Mojo in 2011. “I don’t think we realised that some people took it to heart a little more than others.”

There was a great deal of banter, often directed at outsiders such as Humphries. “It was always me versus them!” he laughs. Jill Furmanovsky’s pictures from the sessions alternate between jollity (Waters eating her fairy cakes) and ennui (everyone looking a bit bloody miserable).

Amid the laughs and the tears of the sessions, the band departed for an American tour in April 1975, and recording recommenced the following month. Barrett’s unexpected appearance provided, in some ways, the ultimate affirmation that Waters had taken the right course with the album’s chosen theme. So troubled an individual was he by this juncture – five years after the band had last seen him – that he was there, but not there. His appearance at Abbey Road on June 5, 1975, allegedly during the playback of Shine On You Crazy Diamond, is the single event that defines the recording of Wish You Were Here.

As Mason said in his personal account of his time in Pink Floyd, Inside Out: “It is very easy to draw parallels with Peter Pan returning to find the house still there and the people changed. Did he expect to find us as we had been seven years earlier, ready to start to work with him again?”

“They never told me about Syd,” Fields, present on that day, says. “I read everything I know about him. Nobody really recognised him. I didn’t know who he was. They spoke to him for a while, and we got on with the session. I could see the impact he had on them that day. They were shocked to see him there, and really shocked at the way he looked and acted.”

Mason says: “Everyone’s story is fractionally different. Whether he came once, or twice, what he said, all the rest of it. All I can say is that he was definitely there, and it was weird.”

With most of the album finished, the band headed off on tour again, culminating in their fabled Knebworth appearance in July 1975. On the following Monday they returned to Abbey Road, added the final touches, and mixed the results. Wish You Were Here was finally released in September 1975. Remarkably, Floyd did no touring to support the release. “We did two tours during its recording,” Brian Humphries concludes. “So perhaps they thought they needed a break. I know I did.”

Reviews were infamously unkind. Ben Edmonds in Rolling Stone said of Shine On: “The potential of the idea goes unrealised; they give such a matter-of-fact reading of the goddamn thing that they might as well be singing about Roger Waters’ brother-in-law getting a parking ticket.” Phonograph Record said that the album was “well-crafted, pleasant, and utterly without challenge; it’s mood music for a new age.”

Melody Maker said “the Floyd amble somnambulantly along their star-struck avenues, arm-in-arm with some pallid ghost of creativity.” But it mattered little what reviewers said. It went to Number One on both sides of the Atlantic and remains an enormous favourite.

So, can Wish You Were Here be seen as the album that ripped Pink Floyd apart? The real rip may have happened a decade later, but it was here the first tears were made. “There was a power struggle all the way through. It had been going on for years,” Gilmour said in 1999. “Roger wanted to be the leader and the boss and in charge – which he, de facto, was.

“But that didn’t prevent me, who did not want to be the leader, from thinking that I had a better knowledge or sense in musical terms than he did. A better musical judgement. So my side of the supposed power struggle was to stubbornly try to cling on to certain musical values through. That obviously presented difficulties all the way through – but it certainly didn’t become an unworkable relationship.”

Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Pts. 6-9) - YouTube

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With the benefit of hindsight, Mason knows the solution: “We should have done more touring of Dark Side Of The Moon – which I don’t think we did enough of – and then gone in much later, rather than going in soon afterwards and trying too hard at the time.”

The inter-band tension and self-mythologising of the period was tremendously good for business; and today, the appeal of Wish You Were Here simply grows and grows – It’s the second album new Floyd listeners tend to pick. Gilmour has called it the band’s “most complete album in some ways”, and Waters has said, “It’s full of grief and anger, but also full of love.”

Mason – the only band member who was there from the beginning to the end – concludes with this thought: “I think it’s a lovely record. It’s so spread out after the intensity of Dark Side Of The Moon. It’s very of its time, and interesting that it remains one of our most popular records.”