Wish You Were Here celebrates its 50th anniversary, and Pink Floyd has decided to please their fans with a special edition to commemorate such a pivotal album in rock history.
This special version, titled Wish You Were Here 50, kicks off with the original album, a masterpiece that showcases Pink Floyd at the height of their genius. It also includes a disc of studio rarities featuring alternate versions and previously unreleased demos. Furthermore, it contains a now-official bootleg recording of one of the band’s 1975 concerts in Los Angeles.
For those who have never heard the album, it was originally released in September 1975 and consists of five tracks where the band explores themes such as absence, isolation, and even a commentary on the insincerity of the music industry.
The tracks that bookend the record, Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Pts. 1-5) and Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Pts. 6-9), are really a single epic song split in two. For me, this is the musical highlight of the album and among the best work Pink Floyd ever created in their entire career. Lyrically, it is an elegy for Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd’s former bandmate, who was forced out of the group due to his mental health struggles.
The other three songs are equally excellent.
Welcome to the Machine is a slow, atmospheric track about the music industry, portraying the band members not as artists, but as cogs in a machine run by executives who couldn’t care less.
Have a Cigar is a more uptempo rock track with a funky edge. The lyrics are a satirical jab at record label executives who try to act “cool” but are clueless, driven only by hypocrisy and greed. It represents the demands of a record executive following the massive success of their previous album, The Dark Side of the Moon.
The song features the famous line: “The band is just fantastic, that is really what I think, oh, by the way, which one’s Pink?”
A curious fact is that Have a Cigar was sung by English musician Roy Harper, rather than a band member, as they were dissatisfied with their own vocal takes.
Finally, there is the title track, Wish You Were Here, an acoustic guitar-driven song with lyrics that connect the specific loss of Syd Barrett to a general sense of alienation felt by the band after the success of The Dark Side of the Moon. It remains one of Pink Floyd’s most enduringly popular songs.
The studio rarities on the second disc consist of initial and alternate versions of the songs from Wish You Were Here, which will primarily be of interest to die-hard fans of the album.
They offer a great glimpse into Pink Floyd’s creative process—for instance, Roger Waters’ original home demo for Welcome to the Machine, titled The Machine Song (Roger’s Demo), followed by a more advanced second demo, as well as a version of Have a Cigar featuring vocals by both Waters and David Gilmour.
There are three alternate versions of Wish You Were Here: the first take the band ever recorded; a take featuring a violin solo instead of the final acoustic guitar solo; and finally, one of the best additions to this collection, an instrumental version where Gilmour’s vocals are replaced by the main melody performed on pedal-steel guitar.
But for me, the most exciting part of this 50th-anniversary release is the new mix of Shine On You Crazy Diamond, which for the first time joins the two halves of the track. This allows us to hear the song continuously in its glorious 25-minute duration.
The music video shows artist Noel Fielding painting a portrait of Syd Barrett, who was known to be a painter himself.
The bootleg recording of the 1975 concert included here contains a wealth of material. It begins with Raving And Drooling and You’ve Got To Be Crazy, which were the original titles for Sheep and Dogs from the album Animals, which wouldn’t be released for another couple of years. Pink Floyd was known for performing unreleased material live as a way to develop their songs.
This is followed by Shine On You Crazy Diamond, with Have a Cigar performed between the two halves.
The band also treated the audience that night by performing The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. And as if that weren’t enough, they closed the set with Echoes, their 22-minute epic.
The story behind this concert recording is fascinating and well worth a read. Essentially, it is a bootleg recorded by a fan in the audience. It is an exceptionally high-quality recording considering it was made in quite a simple manner, in essence with just a pair of microphones positioned in front of the stage, connected to a tape machine.
This recording became so popular among fans that for this 50th-anniversary edition, the band decided to release it officially for the first time, as the band never professionally recorded any of the concerts from the Wish You Were Here tour.
To this end, they enlisted Steven Wilson (who also recently worked on Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII) to restore the original bootleg tape.
Regarding the process, Wilson said: “You still have all the hallmarks of a bootleg. There’s the ambience of the room, very little instrument separation, and all that stuff. But it’s of exceptional high quality for a bootleg. We’re very lucky to have it, and I really did what I could in terms of restoring. My job wasn’t to try and make it sound like anything other than what it was, which is a bootleg. But just to try and increase the stereo separation a bit, try to get a bit more tone in it, and try to even out some of the uglier frequencies that were there because of the sound of the auditorium on the night. And just to try to do my best to present a definitive version of this original cassette tape that’s been around for 50 years.”
While it is a shame the band never recorded any of those shows themselves, at least we have this bootleg, which sounds remarkably good for what it is.
Wish You Were Here 50 contains enough additional material to satisfy the band’s most devoted followers. Personally, the original album has always been my favorite from Pink Floyd, and I found it incredibly interesting to hear the demos and alternate versions of the songs, the new continuous mix of Shine On, and the restored concert. I highly recommend not missing out on this one.
