1. Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts I-V) – 13:32
2. Welcome To The Machine – 7:28
3. Have A Cigar – 5:08
4. Wish You Were Here – 5:35
5. Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts VI-IX) – 12:28
When you really think about it, this might be Pink Floyd’s greatest of many triumphs, and one of the most special artistic achievements of all time. It is obviously a well established and adored classic, but what is most impressive are that it came out of the most unlikely and impossible circumstances. For any creative type ever, being able to even keep any kind of handle on one’s own life and sanity after an earth-shattering breakout success invariably proves impossible, let alone to somehow make a worthy follow-up. Ultimately, the boys in Pink Floyd didn’t fundamentally keep said sanity after the behemoth 1973 masterpiece The Dark Side of the Moon. They were the worse for it, but this album is the better for it. To go from maybe the biggest album of all time in many ways, to twiddling thumbs in complete stalled ignominy a year later, to then churning out a wonder like Wish You Were Here the following year, is an astonishing journey. To many hardcore Floyd fans, Prog devotees, this is often thought of as the best of all Pink Floyd (or any?) albums. Gilmour and Wright themselves quote it as their best work. It perfectly combines the longer term mastery of long-form composition and arrangement they’d always displayed, with the crisp commercial professionalism of Dark Side’s recording quality, plus some newly explored and exposed darkness.
It may seem unnecessary to meander back through the whole Pink Floyd story once again. It has been covered before, here and elsewhere, and will be again, and this album is their ninth, a seeming whole world removed in sound and time from the early days. But the journey and context of formative years of the group are essential to fully appreciating and understanding Wish You Were Here in both musical and thematic terms. The earliest years of the Pink Floyd story are led and dominated by the mythological figure that is Syd Barrett, with all his psychedelic genius, as guitarist, writer and performer, and overall charismatic counter-cultural icon status. The madness into which he descended was both a tragic waste of but also the perverse making of such legend. Reflections on and the figurative ghost of Barrett constantly haunt and influence their work, but never like it did in this instance. Sonically and philosophically, the subsequent Floyd ethos was rooted in an experimental spirit, the pushing of technological or structural boundaries, and a sound characterised by its deep, spacey textures and patience.
The preceding masterpiece represented a peak of the Floyd sound and ethos rather than a fundamental change. But nevertheless, much of both the construction process and the final sound of Wish You Were Here gives the perception of having reached a summit, not just in success terms, but in the capacity and willingness the band had to wring maximum commerciality and slickness out of the sound, then turned around and descended back into a more purely textural approach. This is a slower, more brooding, more patient and definitely overall denser album than its predecessor, without the kind of profound immediacy of sound and universality of theme that Dark Side brought. But it is also another step cleaner, more direct and focused. The crisp production and dynamic balance between powerful full sounding rock ‘n’ roll and tender accessible melodies are stronger than ever, but the band allow all the melodies and themes to linger and breathe. The result, against all the odds, is that most-rare thing, a follow-up to a career-defining masterpiece which succeeds on a number of fronts. It is both a completely different sounding and paced album but still in its own way very accessible. It is both another new and unique step into the new and unknown, yet also a deeply reflective album that brings back so much of the past.
The 1967 to 1973 period, from Syd right through all manner of experiments to the triumph of Dark Side, saw eight albums within a six year period. As much as or more than most of their contemporaries, Pink Floyd always had a productivity about them. But it took a whole two years for the next album to emerge, after a difficult and turgid 1974. It was an unprecedented period of unproductivity following the big album. It really is rather inevitable. That deadly combination of overbearing schedule, overwhelming pressures and the sense that you’ve just done the best thing you could ever do are all a perfect storm for writer’s block. The personal turmoil attached tends to spiral further down the rabbit hole aswell invariably, which further still inhibits inspiration. The environment of such a time is the least suited for enthusiastic creative spontaneity and yet it is in those environments where the expectations, led by self, are highest. Because somehow you need to do something that’s not identical to what you just did, any self-respected artist is too proud for that (and besides, what you just did by that point is something you’re completely over and resentful of). But you’ve established a new standard. So somehow, in the worst of conditions, you’re also wanting to come up with something totally new and outside your natural mode of operation. But this should still somehow be as good as or better than something considered near-perfect by so many? It’s impossible.
This context rather helps to explain how the biggest band in the world at the time could have ended up so meandering through quaint directionless projects. Most famously, with inspiration low, the big idea which took hold throughout the initial sessions for this album was the Household Objects project. Getting back to some of their experimental roots, and some of the late 60s/early 70s avant-garde spirit that Floyd had dealt within, with mixed results, the idea was to make an album containing no traditional musical instruments. All sounds were to have been created by the various striking or some other kind of engagement with regular everyday items that would be found in the home. Whether the guys thought this project had any serious potential is unclear. Probably not and that was perhaps in the moment, the point. It’s hard to judge if the overwhelming blur of the time rendered them of unsound mind, or just resentful enough of the industry and the circus at the time inspired them to be as deliberately contrarian as possible. Certainly there were some merits to the concept, if harnessed at a smaller scale in some kind of moderation. There are bits and pieces of demos from this phase which have seen the light of day and they’re good fun. But at some point relative sanity prevailed.
With the invariable mental health battles at play, the madness of the time lent itself to some kind of recontextualised and perhaps more relatable reflection on the trevails that had befallen old Syd. Roger Waters in particular had already fixated so much on Syd specifically, and themes of madness, lunacy and depression generally through previous content. The circumstances of his life and mental state at the time meshed with this and he found himself inclined towards reflections on and tributes for Syd. As far as main lyrical and thematic inspiration goes, this became the driving force of the album’s central opus, and the whole atmosphere of the recording overall.
Then came the golden musical moment. It can sometimes take something so small to finally get everything moving. There is no limit to how brief and achingly simple a special moment can be that becomes a catalyst for so much. On this occasion, it was those four oh so sweet notes. They’re an iconic Pink Floyd moment, B flat, F, G, E. Syd’s theme as they call it. IT is remarkable how four simple single guitar notes can so define a whole mood and leave such an indelible mark. Gilmour’s soulfulness of style and sound just leaves those four notes lilting achingly, floating in the air. The chronology may not quite be this simple, as much of the depressed apathy that characterised the making of Wish You Were Here came in early 1975 as the band made abortive attempts to get anything going in their recording sessions at Abbey Road. In reality, the core structure of Shine On, as well as two other long-form pieces in Raving and Drooling and You Gotta Be Crazy, had been put together and performed live in 1974. But unquestionably, it was Shine On which was the focal point for everything, and as the one primary idea that seemed to offer something potentially fruitful musically and conceptually, it became the starting point from which eventual productivity flowed at the Abbey Road sessions.
As tends to be the deal with successful follow-ups, the misery that success breeds is so often the poisoned chalice that invariably inspires new success. Between Pink Floyd’s penchant for slow-burn extended workouts, and the eminently refillable reservoir of two main grim themes, a whole lot of nothing quickly became well over an album of material. Each song featured one or both of the two main inspirations, either some sort of musing on Syd specifically and/or madness generally, and/or sardonic snapshots of the music industry Waters in particular was clearly so bitter about. Raving and Drooling and You Gotta Be Crazy were both politically tinged acerbic takedowns of various elements of society, both through well-thought out title metaphors characterising the people in question as crazy. With not quite enough for a double album and a preference for a single LP effort, these two paired tracks were saved to become Sheep and Dogs on Animals. Instead, the band included a shorter, more direct and more sonically diverse trio of songs which would both balance better with the central tome already in place, and provide more variety. Welcome To The Machine is a unique studio experiment but forms an overall discomforting sound pallette that perfectly conveys feelings of anger, madness and disquiet, while presenting a representation, both literal in the lyrics and thematically in the chilling music, of the music industry ‘machine’. Have A Cigar is an even more transparent satire of industry absurdity, while Wish You Were Here is a straight up mournful elegy for Syd. Put together, these tracks formed a natural thematic continuity, abstractly tracing the Syd Barrett journey through industry pressures and building insanity, but without dipping into over-wrought conceptual excesses.
Once again, maybe even better and more directly than before, Pink Floyd are exploring simple but deep universal themes in a consistent and relatable manner. But there is such an elegaic pace to things, to the point where the album’s initial critical reception was decidedly lukewarm. I can see why to an extent. After the remarkable emotional and musical heights of Dark Side, this new effort could seem almost sleepy. It never exactly soars with any of the kind of grandiosity endemic both in popular critically loved Prog-leaning album music of the early 70s, and much of recent Floyd to a lesser extent. But nothing was ever going to satisfy critics after what had just come before. Furthermore, that patient pacing not only authentically reflects the mood of things around the band, but also lets things breathe and adds textural warmth. This allows an album recorded both in and about dark and harrowing times to still wash over the listener in an unexpectedly and satisfyingly relaxing way, which is why it is still so widely adored.
Shine On You Crazy Diamond is a mighty bulky behemoth. Gilmour’s iconic four-note theme was the jumping off point from which the band jammed their way to a series of core melodies and overall structure. As the piece grew and grew and took on a life of its own, it became clear it was going beyond even the confines of one side of vinyl. The great structural turning point which made the whole flow of the album fall into place and really work, was the decision to split Shine On in half, into a pair of tracks around the thirteen minute mark bookending the album. Parts 1-5 come first, with the final track of the album consisting of Parts 6-9.
Shine On You Crazy Diamond 1-5 is a slow building, melancholy but direct and melodic masterpiece. Part 1 is a typically Pink Floyd intro, with a quiet start and three minutes of long deep ambience. The uniquely gorgeous sound of Wright’s pad chords come from a combo of differeny keyboards overlayed, plus a rare holdover from the household objects project, with the sound of wine glasses being played at different pitches also layered on to deepen and create an ethereal buzz to the chords. A slow, deliberate, patient high-pitched bluesy guitar solo introduces Gilmour for the first time in what may be his best guitar opus. Everythiong then fades before the chills happen, as that moment, those four notes, launch Part 2. After four hypnotic repetitions of the figure, in come the whole band and Part 2 consists of the first full instrumental jam and another more dexterous solo.
The pause at the end of Part 2 seems like it will give way to the famous vocal intro, especially as if sometimes did live, but as before Gilmour’s recent solo, it is a false dawn that this time gives way to a Wright-dominated sequence, with a lovely melodic solo on the minimoog. Another brief Gilmour solo wraps up the song’s shortest part, before we finally get to the verses and grand, emotional, soulful choruses of Part 4. Part 5 is similar to Part 2, with more Gilmour soloing on the main theme, but also including a lovely wistful guitar arpeggio and the first warbling effort from regular guest Dick Parry on the saxophone.
A long distant saxophone and keyboard fade-out gives way seamlessly to the distant churning opening industrial noises of Welcome To The Machine. It is remarkable piece, totally divorced from time. A structurally simple but sonically frantic smorgasbord of proto-industrial electronic churning and whirring, it can be entirely disquieting in the wrong kind of mood. It is a Wright extraordinaire and so melodically impenetrable that I think I still underrate it. This methodically constructed piece represents the peak of Floyd’s mid 70s embracing of the studio as an instrument, with all manner of tape effects and processing layered on top of each other. Based on a single, sinister bass drone on the VCS3 Synthesizer that was so prominent in this Floyd era, from there it marches desolately through different time signatures and all manner of effects and noises, all grounded in reality by the organic yet still somehow soulless and robotic sounding precision acoustic guitar work of Gilmour. Gilmour’s vocal is pained, patient and processed, with Wright filling the space with huge booming, oscillating synth tones and solos.
Side B begins with the crisp opening riff of Have A Cigar. It is the album’s straight-laced fun rock song, and probably the least appreciated because of it, on what it a mightily consistent album. One reason this track perhaps never quite captures the adoration other tonally similar Floyd rock tracks too is because of the distance from the usual recognisable sound created by the unexpected guest vocal. The prolific and influential folk singer Roy Harper was drafted in to lay down a sassy sarcasm-drenched vocal when Waters felt he wasn’t quite nailing the performance and Gilmour neither suited nor, allegedly, was willing to sing lyrics he didn’t believe in. These lyrics, similar to its spiritual predecessor as sardonic, cynical, driving rock jam, Money, are a biting parody of the hacks and suits Waters considered rife and wrong with the music industry. Harper’s effort lays on the satire and cynicism, in a way that Waters later regretted, but he does a great job. It is a darkly comic song, funny but with a desperation to it. But most to its credit is just how straight up it rocks. Gilmour is rooted in a heavy kind of funk chugging, while the main riff which essentially serves as a kind of instrumental chorus provides a consistent wonderful, spidery, grandiose climax.
The transition between Have A Cigar and the title track is one of the more brilliantly creative and executed of all time. Gilmour’s fabulous repeating chorus riff serves as a long coda which appears ready to fade-out, but instead a dramatic effect comes in and ‘sweeps’ the music away, leaving it distant and distorted. It turns out to be the sound of the track being heard through the radio, as the dials suddenly change and whir before landing, so satisfyingly and recognisably to any casual Pink Floyd fan, on those first beautiful acoustic chords of Wish You Were Here. Gilmour’s overlapping lead line then cuts in at full volume and clarity over the grainy radio backing, before the whole track returns gorgeously upfront in time for the aching vocal. This great album’s iconic title track might just be the most common favourite Pink Floyd song of those kinds of casual but engaged classic rock listeners who only know a handful from the discography. It is everyone’s mother’s favourite Pink Floyd song. I never adore it to the extent its reputation and admitted quality suggests I should but again, it is pretty impossible to pick a ‘weak point’ on this even-handed album. Just like the album as a whole, its aptly representative title track kind of lacks delirious heights, but also doesn’t have a weak moment anywhere. Ultimately, relative to their capabilities, this track is a straight-forward acoustic ballad. But it is certainly an achingly gorgeous one that everyone knows to sing along with together.
Shine On Crazy Diamond 6-9 is a a bunch of satisfying recurrences of the main themes and more diverse explorations away from base. Part 6 segues naturally from the title track to the sounds of wind blowing, slowly overtaken by a slow, low, ominous staccato bass tone that looked forward to some of the sounds on Animals. Eventually the whole band break in, at a slow, drawn-out tempo, over which Wright solos remarkably on yet another unique and futuristic synth, confirming this album’s underrated status as one of the great and most diverse explorations of analogue and early digital synth technology of all time. Part 7 suddenly takes over and is a straight-up brief recapitulation of Part 4, with one final verse and chorus to conclude the song’s lyrics. For most Pink Floyd and attached solo tours over the years, this natural, poignant final verse tends to wrap up proceedings live. It is a lovely end point, but it means the forgotten final pair of parts don’t always get their due credit.
Part 8 is some of the most vibrant and atypical fun Floyd as ever occurred. It is the closest they would ever get to being ‘funky’ with Wright once again dominating a rocking jam with some spirited moog solos, anchord around a sexy funky Hohner clavinet base. The album’s typical temp and energy is raised, with Gilmour and Water’s paired and lilting lead guitars adding to the funk feel. A slow keyboard note overtakes all the sounds and fades the part away, into the melancholy finale. Part 9 is essentially a funeral mark, with Mason’s rhythm more glacial still than ever, and Wright laying down a final sad tribute to Gilmour with a series of warbling sad keyboard lines. It’s a reminder of the tragic circumstances behind the track’s inspiration, poignantly re-emphased by Wright’s closing quote from the Barrett hit See Emily Play in the fadeout.
The final moments of the album are representative of the whole record, with Pink Floyd masterfully combining their contemporary angst and growing polished production values with their traditional slow-burn mood music, technological innovation and an exploration of times and figures past.
Hoss Album Reviews 