Columbia 33453
Engineer: Brian Humphries
Track listing: Shine on You Crazy Diamond (Part I-V) / Welcome to the Machine / Have a Cigar / Wish You Were Here / Shine on You Crazy Diamond (Part VI-IX)
October 4, 1975
2 weeks
Following the massive success of The Dark Side of the Moon, perhaps it was only appropriate for Pink Floyd to take a look back and pay tribute to Syd Barrett, their original guiding force. Barrett not only christened the band Pink Floyd Sound (after a blues record b Pink Anderson and Floyd Council). He also wrote much of the band’s early material, including the 1967 British hits “Arnold Layne” and “See Emily Play.” Barrett was also chiefly responsible for the band’s psychedelic sound, but by 1968 his drug use had gotten the best of him and he left the band. He later made two influential but commercially unsuccessful solo albums before vanishing into seclusion.
Nearly a decade later, Pink Floyd saluted its former leader with “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” which served as the opening and closing track to Wish You Were Here. The album’s title also suggested a tribute to Barrett. In fact, many Floyd fans suggested that the band had been thinking of Barrett on “Brain Damage” from Dark Side of the Moon, but Floyd singer/bassist Roger Waters has said that was not the case.
“‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’ was especially about Syd, because he had re-emerged at that point and had started coming to sessions again,” Waters once said. “But all that stuff in ‘Brain Damage’ about ‘if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes,’ I think this was more for me than Syd.”
While Waters said he was not “very conscious” of Barrett during the making of The Dark Side of the Moon, Barrett served as a definite inspiration for Wish You Were Here, which the band began recording in January 1975 at Abbey Road studios. In fact, one day while the band was putting the finishing touches on “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” Barrett appeared at the studio. The story of Barrett’s mysterious reappearance is detailed in Pink Floyd: Shine On, a book included with a boxed set containing seven of the band’s albums: “He just arrived unannounced, looking fat, bald and haunted. Some of the band didn’t immediately recognise him, others were close to tears. Roger confided later that he cried. Syd asked at one point if there was anything he could do and that he was available if needed. He hadn’t been seen for seven years. He wasn’t seen again.”
The period in which the album was made wasn’t a particular high point for Pink Floyd. “I definitely think that at the beginning of Wish You Were Here recording sessions most of us didn’t wish we were there at all, we wished we were somewhere else,” Waters told Nick Sedgewick. “I wasn’t happy being there because I got the feeling we weren’t together, the band wasn’t at all together.”
The band’s disillusionment was also expressed in “Have a Cigar? and “Welcome to the Machine,” which attacked the music industry.
With The Dark Side of the Moon having secured Pink Floyd’s reputation, Wish You Were Here shot to the pole position in only its second week on the chart. As Waters explained to Nick Sedgewick, the band’s name alone was enough to secure a hit. “The name ‘Pink Floyd,’ the name, not us, not the individuals in the band, but the name Pink Floyd is worth millions of pounds. The name is probably worth one million sales of an album, any album we put out. Even if we just coughed, a million people will have ordered it simply because of the name.”
THE TOP FIVE
Week of October 4, 1975
1. Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd
2. Windsong, John Denver
3. One of These Nights, The Eagles
4. Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen
5. Between the Lines, Janis Ian