Ask a random person on the street to name a Pink Floyd album and it's a safe bet they'll say 'The Dark Side Of The Moon'. Considering it is one of the biggest selling albums in history, a cast-iron classic and owner of one of the iconic sleeves in rock, that's hardly a surprise. But it isn't the band's creative zenith. That honour belongs to 1975’s 'Wish You Were Here', a record that recently celebrated its 40th birthday and one that flawlessly encapsulates each element that made the legendary group tick.
Over the course of their 50 year career, Floyd's aesthetic was shaped by three very different leaders in Syd Barrett, Roger Waters and David Gilmour. In terms of stylistic, thematic and musical cohesion, the period Waters grew to dominate throughout the ‘70s – alongside Gilmour, Richard Wright and Nick Mason - delivered their most consistent and indelible work.
'Wish You Were Here' is Pink Floyd's definitive statement because it's a perfectly balanced record. Unlike other efforts, it doesn't lean too heavily towards the progressive end of the spectrum, nor is it too commercial, arty, experimental or instrumentally indulgent. Most importantly, the conceptual side never overshadows the music, or vice versa.
Instead, it distills those stylistic traits into the perfect sonic equation, aided by the fact that, in contrast to future releases, one guy wasn't calling all the shots. Key to achieving this equilibrium of content and creative input was a thematic drive that resonated with the whole band.
Post 'Dark Side...' the young Floyds were struggling with their new found fame and fortune, as well as feeling uncomfortable at being part of the merciless corporate beast the music industry had become. Apathy infected the group and their relationships with each other began to dissolve.
Waters latched onto that sense of ‘absence’. It tied in nicely with a melancholy eulogy they'd already written - provisionally titled Shine On - about the breakdown that forced Barrett out of the group in 1968. His plight had been touched on before, but here it took centre stage and dovetailed with their own feelings of detachment.
Given its personal resonance the album is unsurprisingly the most heartfelt of Floyd's career, but 'Wish….' wasn't quite a wholly democratic collaboration. The contributory balance was far from equal and didn't need to be, because everyone did exactly what was required to create this masterpiece of musical and emotional harmony, whether they liked it at the time or not.
After his thematic direction on 'The Dark Side...' Waters took the reins again on album number nine, because Gilmour's idea for its tracklisting was perhaps typical of a man for whom narrative focus can seem at times like a bothersome afterthought.
The guitarist wanted the project to feature three new songs: Shine On, Raving And Drooling and You've Got To Be Crazy. Waters protested that patchwork quilt notion, insisting they ditch the latter pair (which reappeared on 1977’s 'Animals' as Sheep and Dogs) and split what became known as Shine On You Crazy Diamond into two parts to bookend the record.
On subsequent releases the bassist became more of a dictator, his conceptually minded approach increasingly relegating the musical content – and his bandmates - to supporting status. But here the symmetry betwixt music and message was seamless thanks to a counterbalance provided by Gilmour's fretwork and the band's secret weapon: keyboard wizard Richard Wright.
In his 1991 book Saucerful Of Secrets, Nicholas Schaffner claimed: “The Floyds, whether they realised it or not, were artistically at cross purposes. Gilmour and Wright were content that Pink Floyd’s music should keep transporting listeners into advanced states of REM. Waters was now determined…to wake them up.”
Those contradictory traits are what fuelled Pink Floyd's perfect musical storm; the juxtaposition between beautiful soundscapes and unsettling narratives producing intelligent, heartfelt and accessible compositions. Such important storytelling required a strong lyrical platform, and Waters delivered. Where 'The Dark Side...' aimed for – and occasionally stoked - profundity with broad, hippy like sentiments, real life made his writing more intense, sincere and intimate. 'Wish You Were Here’ was the result of active participation in everything the previous record alluded to.
On Welcome To The Machine and Have A Cigar – suitably sneered by folk maverick Roy Harper - Waters is a master of his medium, eviscerating the record industry through seething vitriol one minute and biting satire the next. The musical interplay on the bleak sci-fi sound picture of the former is astonishing.
Suspended acoustic chords menace as Gilmour and Waters share lead vocal duties, singing an octave apart to imbue an eerie mixture of forceful indoctrination and robotic subservience. Wright, meanwhile, dazzles as his orchestra of synths spawn an ominous air of dystopian drama, something he repeated over the syncopated gargling blues riff on Have A Cigar, his recurring arsenal of then revolutionary sounds acting as a personification of parasitic record executives.
The trio of comparatively shorter songs at the centre of this sonic sandwich showcased the band's growing mastery for crafting more conventionally structured pieces. The country-flavoured lullaby of a title track sees Waters deploying a moving series of metaphorical questions about being active and alive, or passive and comatose, in one's own reality. His words are delicately echoed by Gilmour's thoughtful acoustic licks and a memorably uplifting chorus that, unbelievably, is only sung once.
Although not a key part of the creative triumvirate, Nick Mason's drumming is vital to the album's meditative spell. He rides the back of the beat with an unhurried gait, always allowing the compositional flourishes to breathe, while pristine tempo changes on Shine On You Crazy Diamond typify his role as the band's quietly propulsive engine.
It's on that dissected five-act symphony that Floyd burn brightest, its well-defined thematic heart acting as a magnet that prevents the band from losing focus throughout its 26 minute duration. From the moment Gilmour's mesmerising four note lick chimes over Wright's mournful synths their progressive pizazz is in full flow, elegantly building around cyclical motifs without wasting a single note. Elements that were triumphant on 'The Dark Side of the Moon' reappear masterfully, with gospel backing vocals and the sumptuous saxophone of Dick Parry icing the cake.
If that opening is a slow burning bijou, Part Two represents musical mad scientists brewing up the sound of insanity, its cinematic instrumental passages haunting and explosive one minute, funky and psychedelic the next. Wright's synaptic screams and Gilmour's whining slide howl like neurological pathways failing to make logical connections, segueing into a climactic ambient abyss as the victim stays adrift in his own isolation.
When this epic number was being mixed at Abbey Road in June of ‘75, a paunchy, bald man with his eyebrows shaved off was loitering around the studio. It took the group a good while before they realised the 'stranger' was Barrett. After his departure there were tears for the decline of a man who set their journey in motion.
'Wish You Were Here' was largely born out of love for their brother. His spirit was an eternal influence on everything they did, and appropriately fed back into a magnum opus that was both a fitting tribute to the man who co-founded their band, and a final farewell to Pink Floyd as a fully functioning group.
Although they released two more classic albums before Waters ran riot, the well documented problems that eventually blew this line-up apart had begun to take hold, meaning that the majestic musical balance displayed on these five imperious tracks was absent for the rest of the band's career.
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