In 1974 Pink Floyd were finished. Or at least that was the consensus in the year after The Dark Side of the Moon had transformed them from avant-garde psychedelic rockers into one of the world’s best-selling bands. There was a feeling that they’d achieved all they could. “We could have easily split up then,” Roger Waters said many years later.
The gnawing sense of inertia and self-doubt soon began to infect their live shows. One performance at Wembley Arena in London was so leaden that it prompted the NME’s Nick Kent to pen this withering assessment: “The Floyd in fact seem so incredibly tired and seemingly bereft of true creative ideas one wonders if they really care about their music anymore.”
Things didn’t get better when they returned to Abbey Road Studios to start working on new material. At least not until they realised that malaise and disillusionment were, after all, apt themes for a Pink Floyd album. From their torpor emerged Wish You Were Here, an outstanding record (and the song of the same name) about being an indifferent bystander in one’s own life.
For a song so introspective, “Wish You Were Here” is one of Pink Floyd’s most accessible tracks and the closest they had come at the time to singalong pop. Although we can trace the beginnings of the ultimately irreconcilable creative gulf between David Gilmour and Waters to this album, both have hailed the composition as one of their most complete, owing, no doubt, to its masterly simplicity. Gilmour came up with the beautifully unassumingcountry-influenced riff on a newly purchased 12-string, while Waters wrote three gently aching verses about his desire to exchange compromise and stasis for action. Recently unearthed early tapes reveal that the legendary violinist Stéphane Grappelli originally provided accompaniment but the band decided, rightly, that less was more (though his solo is still faintly audible as the track fades out; his original solo can be heard here). Of course, this being a Pink Floyd track, it’s still full of idiosyncrasies: it opens with snippets from a radio play and Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, while the guitar intro was recorded by Gilmour on an AM radio to give it a crackling, homespun sound; at the end, a gust of swirling wind leads us out into the final parts of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”.
That 25-minute epic was famously written as an elegy for founding member Syd Barrett — who had suffered a drug-induced breakdown in the late 1960s — but his descent into mental illness also haunts “Wish You Were Here”. Having disappeared for several years, Barrett arrived unannounced one day in June 1975 as the band were recording the song. Once a charismatic livewire, he was now unrecognisably dazed and overweight. The shock of seeing their friend in such a dead-eyed state would never leave the group; “We’re doing this for everyone who’s not here, and particularly of course for Syd,” said Waters, introducing the song 30 years later at the almost unbearably bittersweet Live 8 reunion performance.
Despite being Pink Floyd’s most covered song, there has been a paucity of memorable renditions over the years. One exception is singer-songwriter Sparklehorse’s excellent, spare, piano-led version from 2005, which also features backing vocals by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. Sparklehorse’s whispery, tortured voice creates an altogether more sombre, distressed mood than that evoked by Gilmour’s warmer, nostalgia-laden delivery.
Rapper Wyclef Jean reimagined “Wish You Were Here” as a soulful hip-hop track built around Gilmour’s melody. “Don’t mistake this for just any cover tune”, he sings towards the end, before touchingly explaining the formative role Pink Floyd played in his musical upbringing.
The most famous recent cover is undoubtedly the remarkably bland version performed by Ed Sheeran at the closing ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics. However, it did spark an amusingly unlikely Twitter feud between some haughty middle-age Pink Floyd fans and Sheeran’s teenage devotees who thought it was an original by the pop star.
The internet has, more constructively, provided a platform for two noteworthy covers by hobbying musicians. Classic rock and conservative piety may not be exactly synonymous, but a video of two Hasidic Jews playing a charmingly enthusiastic, heavily accented take on the song in Jerusalem went viral a few years ago. Elsewhere, a US Army band uploaded an extremely adept bluegrassy version in 2017, dedicating the track to their fallen comrades.
These last two covers in particular are a testament to how a piece of personal self-scrutiny became an anthem with universal resonance. Indeed, its enduring popularity saw it named the greatest Pink Floyd song in a poll conducted by Rolling Stone in 2011. Not bad going for a track written by a band supposedly “bereft of creative ideas”.
What are your memories of ‘Wish You Were Here’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Pink Floyd Records; Capitol Catalogue; Columbia
Picture credit: Waring Abbott/Getty Images