Pink Floyd

"Wish you were here." For fifty years, for rock fans, the wish expressed in these four words has been linked, by mental association, to one of the most unmistakable acoustic guitar riffs of all time. Words and music combine to form the song that probably every guitar student has put first, or among the first, in their repertoire. "Wish You Were Here," however, is not just the title of the famous song everyone knows, but also of the album that contains it, an equally era-defining record released by Pink Floyd half a century ago: on September 12, 1975.

The record is the ninth studio album by the English band and, in their discography, follows two years after its hugely celebrated predecessor, "The Dark Side Of The Moon," a work that in some ways was awkward to follow, being impossible to replicate in musical, aesthetic and cultural impact. And indeed David Gilmour, Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Richard Wright would distance themselves from it, releasing a work musically less immediate than "The Dark Side Of The Moon" but no less rich and sophisticated, even if purged of certain experimental quirks typical of their earlier output too. And indeed, at first the band's intent was to make an album centered on sound - but on "strange" sounds, starting from those obtained with everyday objects like glasses, knives and assorted junk. There was even a working title for this latest Floydian oddity, "Household Objects," but the project was eventually shelved. Among the reasons for the change of course was also the departure of Alan Parsons, the sound engineer on "The Dark Side Of The Moon," for whom the role of technical collaborator had begun to feel too confining - so much so that within a few months he would launch his own solo recording career under the name Alan Parsons Project with the concept album "Tales Of Mystery And Imagination Edgar Allan Poe."

So when the four of them, after a year's break from releasing new music (though not from live activity, nor from composing, nor indeed from the various members' collaborations on other people's work), went back into the studio in January 1975, they had no clear idea of which musical direction to take. The aforementioned album with the famous prism on the cover, and the success that followed, had left them completely drained creatively and in terms of motivation, even straining the personal relationships between them. "When 'The Dark Side Of The Moon' became so successful, that was the end. It was the end of the road. We'd reached the point we'd all been aiming for since we were teenagers, and there was really nothing left to do in terms of rock'n'roll," Waters would later say. In short, when the time came to follow up the 1973 bestseller, the fab four struggled to pick up the thread again - not even among themselves as human beings, friends and protagonists of an exhilarating, multi-stage journey.

The only certainty, which would go on to become the backbone of the work taking shape, was a track that already existed and had been performed live in the preceding months: a suite titled "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," of extravagant length - around 26 minutes - made up of several "pieces" assembled together. At first the idea was to give it the entire first side, then "filling" side B with two songs that were likewise already written, "Raving And Drooling" and "Gotta Be Crazy." These, however, would ultimately be set aside (both would appear on the band's next studio album, "Animals": the first as "Sheep," the second as "Dogs") in favor of three new compositions, which meant splitting the aforementioned "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" into two parts, one placed on each side, opening the first and closing the second.

The first of these two parts opens the album, and as if by magic, we're immediately catapulted into a world beyond the world. The majestic intro, identified as Part 1 out of a total of five that together cover almost nine minutes of pure music before Gilmour's vocals break in (though he didn't write the lyrics, that task having long been Waters' alone), is something magical, seductive. An ethereal, nocturnal, post-psychedelic crescendo, impossible to put into words for its sheer evocative power. Unforgettable from the very first listen is that eerie intro, with the slow, hypnotic notes of Gilmour's Fender Stratocaster which, combined with the ethereal tones of Wright's synthesizer, create a sense of spatial immensity, made even more disorienting by the smooth chord progression running underneath, produced by the band members running their fingers around the rims of wine glasses. Then comes the track's four-note theme, known as "Syd's Theme," played on electric guitar, soon joined by drums and bass. From here on it's a succession of striking developments, in which every instrument has its own space and no element overpowers another, even if Gilmour's masterful riffs take center stage. Waters' bass moves with discretion, while Mason provides measured drumming that supports the sheer scale of the sound, and Dick Parry's saxophone parts lend the track an even more reflective, almost jazzy quality. Pure ecstasy in musical form, immortal.

Given these premises, "Wish You Were Here" comes across as anything but the record of a band in crisis - if anything, it takes shape as a concept album on the themes of absence, of purity and innocence now lost, of the band's disillusionment with the cynical record industry, and of the mental and nervous decline - due in part to his own drug addiction - of the group's former frontman and principal songwriter, Syd Barrett, forced to leave the band in 1968. The elegy for their friend who had fallen into ruin is embodied, besides the aforementioned "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," by the poignant title track, a true anthem, a timeless ballad dedicated to Barrett in particular through eloquent, yet tender and regret-laden lines such as "Remember when you were young/ you shone like the sun" and "You reached for the secret too soon/ you cried for the moon."

Syd's absence becomes presence the moment the band's former member unexpectedly reappears to his old bandmates at Abbey Road Studios, where they are putting the finishing touches on the record. It was an apparition almost like seeing a ghost, as Mason would later recall: "I was wandering between the control room and the studio, and I noticed a big, heavy man with a shaved head, wearing a decrepit reddish-brown raincoat. He was carrying a plastic shopping bag, and his face had a benevolent but absent expression. After a while David also asked me if I knew who he was; I still couldn't place him, and they had to tell me. It was Syd. I was shocked by how much he'd changed physically. I still had in my mind the image of the person I'd last seen seven years earlier, nearly ninety pounds lighter, with dark curly hair and an exuberant personality. Now he didn't seem like the kind of man who'd have any friends at all. His speech was disjointed and not entirely coherent, though, to be fair, I don't think any of us were particularly articulate that day. Suddenly and unexpectedly, his arrival brought back an entire chapter of the band's life. Among other things, we also felt guilty. We had all contributed to reducing Syd to that state, by rejecting him, by shirking our responsibilities, whether out of insensitivity or outright selfishness." Accounts from the time report that Barrett also listened to an unfinished version of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" without being particularly impressed.

The former leader returned a couple more times, deepening the torment and melancholy of his old bandmates. They never saw him again: only once did Waters spot him from a distance in the crowd at Harrod's, before Barrett's death in 2006.

But, as mentioned, an integral part of the album is also its j'accuse against the "machine" of the music business, which devours everything in the name of profit. At least two tracks – "Welcome To The Machine" and "Have A Cigar" – are clearly inspired by this theme. The first is an excursion, with distinctly Waters-esque echoes, into that apocalyptic/dystopian territory that would become even more familiar on the monumental "The Wall", while at the same time it's also one of the band's proverbial, unsettling quantum leaps into that "cosmic" imagery so beloved by the band behind "Interstellar Overdrive", "Astronomy Domine" and "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun" (in this sense, part one of the aforementioned opening track doesn't hold back either, with its fifth section featuring the sax of Dick Parry, whom the Floyd had already come to appreciate for his memorable performances on "Money" and "Us And Them"). It opens with the sound of an automatic door, described by Waters as a "symbol of musical discovery and of progress betrayed by the music world, which is more interested in success and proves itself greedy". A sinister moog heralds the quintessential dystopian prophecy: becoming mere cogs in an alienating, ruthless machine that will progressively render us inept and empty out every trace of our dreams. This is exactly what happens to the young singer at the heart of the song: through his dialogue with a callous, brutish record executive, his fate as a puppet of the music business is sealed, at the expense of quality and passion. The track dissolves in a quick fade out, with party noises symbolizing "the lack of real contact and real feelings between people", again in the author's own words. The slow, inexorable procession of synthesizers (including the VCS3 vibrations at the start) and Gilmour's almost "shouted" vocal lend the track a dark, futuristic atmosphere, one entirely devoid of drums. An organized chaos that seals one of the most experimental moments on the album Gilmour and Wright consider their favorite.

"Have A Cigar" is a more blues-driven episode, truth be told not quite as well-aimed, so much so that it can be considered the one relatively weak spot in the batch, even though Gilmour's solo is superb, serving as an outlet for the adrenaline the track has built up to that point. Worth noting: the song is sung by Roy Harper, a friend of Gilmour's and, like him, signed to EMI, who happened by pure coincidence to be in another Abbey Road studio at the time, recording an album of his own.

The theme of the record industry's greed running through the album is also given tangible form on the cover, because when it comes to "Wish You Were Here", and to Pink Floyd in general, one can't leave the visual side out of the picture. The image gracing the album would become one of the most iconic in rock history. Two men shake hands in the middle of a walkway between factory buildings, but one of them, his features hidden in shadow, is on fire. That man was Ronnie Rondell Jr., the Hollywood stuntman who took on the job, an idea dreamed up by Storm Thorgerson and carried out by the celebrated London design studio Hipgnosis. Just a few days ago, Rondell passed away at 88 in a retirement home in Osage Beach, Missouri. To capture that iconic shot, taken at Warner Bros Studios in Burbank, Rondell wore a fireproof suit under a suit coated in flammable gel, onto which gasoline was poured before being set alight, with wind effects added to make it all the more realistic. The stunt was repeated fifteen times, since Rondell could only withstand a few seconds before the crew had to step in with fire extinguishers and blankets. On the fifteenth attempt, a sudden shift in the wind hit his face, burning off an eyebrow and part of his moustache. "I'd say that's enough, I'm done for today!", Rondell quipped, leaving behind one of the most famous images in rock history.

However, the work on the imagery, again overseen by the Hipgnosis collective, doesn't stop at the cover alone but extends to the inner parts of the packaging as well. It's a substantial body of work, made up of striking images such as that of the businessman – he too faceless, almost evoking the classic figures of Magritte – who, in the middle of the desert, appears to be handing a platinum disc to the viewer; or that of the man diving into a lake without causing so much as a ripple. What's more, every copy of the record sold was wrapped in a special opaque black plastic so buyers couldn't see the contents until the wrapping was opened, with a sticker on the cellophane itself depicting two stylized robotic hands shaking against the backdrop of a circle divided into colored segments representing the four natural elements.

As mentioned, the album closes with the remaining "parts" (6 through 9) of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", a 12-minute reprise presented from a different angle that, tying back to the opening track, gives the record that sense of circularity typical of concept albums. The piece takes on a darker, more reflective tone, closing the circle with a recurring instrumental theme that recalls the suite's opening section, as if to underline the end of the journey, steeped in melancholy. In the background lies Syd's descent into an oblivion of alienation and madness, with that desperate plea captured in a single line: ⟦Q1⟧. Not just a tribute to a lost friend, but a universal meditation on the fleeting nature of existence and of the artistic condition.

Taken as a whole, "Wish You Were Here" is a tortured, deliberate, painstakingly crafted album, one steeped in all the apathy and mechanical numbness hanging over a band that, as they began work on it, felt they'd reached a dead end in their artistic trajectory. But fortunately, no feeling was ever more deceptive, since Pink Floyd would once again produce a magnificent work and still had plenty left to say, at least until "The Final Cut", which would sever the English band's magical harmony for good.

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