Music
Pink Floyd’s iconic album Wish You Were Here – which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year – remains a classic expression of modern alienation. By John Kinsella.
Revisiting Pink Floyd’s classic album Wish You Were Here
It’s 50 years since Pink Floyd’s highly anticipated Wish You Were Here was released. After the massive commercial and critical success of The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), the follow-up album, which has since become a staple of “best of” and “greatest of all time” lists, had a more complex road.
Like The Dark Side of the Moon, which received the same treatment in 2023, a 50th anniversary edition will be released in December. It features the original album plus bonus discs of previously unreleased versions and demos in multiple formats.
Pink Floyd will always be associated with the university town of Cambridge, but the band members were “town” rather than “gown”. After its early iterations, Pink Floyd as formed in 1965 was a melding of blues, folk and rock that fed the psychedelic music sub-revolution. Throw in the innovative light shows, a mix of weird pop sensibilities with jam-like meandering progressions such as on the radical “Interstellar Overdrive” and acid culture. A legend was created just as it was broken by the fate of the band’s co-founder, Syd Barrett.
After Barrett left the group in 1968, Pink Floyd became an arts band par excellence, writing film scores, working with avant-garde sound-making melded with rock sensibility and searching out the themes that would define them in their middle period. Roger Waters, who lost his father in World War II and had unresolved anger about this, wanted to write issues-based material. This was often in tension with the other members, David Gilmour (who replaced Barrett on guitar and vocals), Nick Mason and Richard Wright. They became one of the primary progressive rock bands of the ’70s, along with King Crimson, Rush, Yes, and others.
Wish You Were Here came out when they had transitioned from art crowds to mega fame. It was particularly interesting for me because I heard the whole album before I heard Dark Side of the Moon – I was 10 when that came out, and 12 when Wish You Were Here was released. I heard both in full when I was almost 17.
It was at a schoolfriend’s house on his family’s large stereo, and the records belonged to his brother. There I was exposed to John Lennon’s Shaved Fish, Country Joe and the Fish, The Alan Parsons Project albums Tales of Mystery and Imagination, I Robot and Pyramid (Parsons was engineer on Dark Side of the Moon), and then, really loud, Wish You Were Here and Dark Side of the Moon. At that stage of my life I was an alcoholic, worked part-time in a lab and was obsessed with investigating chemiluminescence, writing and reading poetry and science fiction, and Thomas Hardy. I also had an increasingly sceptical view of the universe.
Wish You Were Here zapped me – it launched from the vacuum. From the opening synth-rendering of emerging presence into a continuum of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”, I felt as if I had entered the speculative. It was ominous, threatening and soothing, alienating and inviting. Each instrument was traceable, determinable, fused by the electronic hum of the background. Wright’s keyboards were wide-ranging, Gilmour’s guitar as defined as electrical circuits. I chose to fall into the experience – and when those drums and bass came in I was transported.
Within 10 months of this first experience, I was already reinterpreting the long, multi-part “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”, which folds around the whole album with the opening, parts 1-5, and its concluding parts 6-9. I wasn’t told that Barrett – founding member and creative spirit behind the first, brilliant Pink Floyd album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn – was its symbolic and likely literal inspiration: I reasoned it out after hearing both that original album and the two Barrett solo albums released in 1970. I was infuriated with what I considered to be the violation of Barrett’s privacy: the accusations of madness and dysphoria.
Later, when I heard that Barrett had shown up during one of the recording sessions for Wish You Were Here, apparently inducing tears in some because of his physical and mental changes, my annoyance increased. He was “the piper”, after all. But because of the definition and clarity against the hum of, say, a sax solo, I could never shake the essence of that album. As someone who managed to hear early Floyd and pre-Floyd “rarity” tracks before they became widely available, and many snippets of solo Barrett that took years to “get out there” – my sources in the late ’90s remain confidential! – I tried to create a larger mosaic of the band’s processes and musicology.
This time, I had to reinstate Wish You Were Here. It compelled. It was a slowmo whirlwind that gathered pace and dragged you into its influence.
For me, the prophetic predictions of the second track of the album, “Welcome to the Machine”, had been realised. Pink Floyd were consumed by the machine they were resisting but still found a way out via their creativity. Even years later, after all the acrimony of the split between Waters and Gilmour, or Waters and the rest of the band – for a period of time after The Wall, Wright was not an official member but a sessional/performing employee – they still tried to resist the machine.
It’s not surprising that the conceptual driving force behind the album was Waters, who gained control over the direction of the band: he had the vision and the lyrical gift. This manifested in my favourite album of that period of Floyd, Animals. Interestingly, before its release, tracks from the Animals-to-be and Wish You Were Here were juxtaposed in touring set lists. That was characteristic of Floyd, but the links between the albums are more than idealistic: they were stylistic and conceptual, too.
By the time the blockbuster double album The Wall came along, I felt that Floyd had said what they had to say about rigidity and control. This was in 1979, so I was exposed to it in real time. I didn’t by any means reject The Wall but turned back again to Wish You Were Here, listening to its alienation afresh, unsurprised that my own journey was taking me to dismal and surprising places.
Pink Floyd didn’t speak for me, but their speaking still affected me. The music was steady and streamlined, a fusion of individual parts into mesmeric statements. But it did not have the idiosyncratic Blakean and John Clare-like insight into life and nature that Barrett possessed, and it was not the weird wildness of, say, Hawkwind’s space rock. From psychedelia to absolute control over a medium mimics the alienation of modernity. That’s where it was at and where it still remains.
“Wish You Were Here” (track four) was picked up by strummers and buskers all over the world. Memorable lyrics – “Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail” – seem to emphasise the loss of Barrett’s neo-pastoral psychedelic folk sensibility, even if the song is not entirely about him.
We all feel like that when we’re alone – but this album also says that some things can never be the same. Barrett never did come back again in any way we might understand as being related to who Pink Floyd were as a band and what they became, and what they became again... and again. They’ll never escape the alienation of both losing and leaving the brilliant Barrett behind in April 1968.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 26, 2025 as "Shining on".
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