Wish You Were Here is Pink Floyd’s warmest and most human album — and for many listeners, their finest. Released in 1975, in the shadow of The Dark Side of the Moon’s overwhelming success, it turns away from that record’s cool universality toward something far more personal: a record about absence, about the emptiness that came with fame, and above all about Syd Barrett, the friend and founder who was no longer there. Elegiac, tender and unbearably beautiful, it is one of the great albums of loss.

The short version

Wish You Were Here (1975) is Pink Floyd’s ninth album, recorded at Abbey Road over the course of a difficult year. Its theme is absence in every form. Most of it is taken up by Shine On You Crazy Diamond, a twenty-six-minute suite in nine parts, split in two so that it opens and closes the record — a tribute to Syd Barrett, who had left the band seven years earlier. Between its halves sit three shorter songs: two withering attacks on the music business, and the gentle, acoustic title track that has become one of the best-loved songs ever written. The folk singer Roy Harper sings lead on Have a Cigar; the violinist Stéphane Grappelli appears, almost inaudibly, at the very end of the title track. It went to number one in both Britain and America.

A record about absence

Pink Floyd came off The Dark Side of the Moon with everything they had ever wanted and, by their own account, very little left to give. The sessions began slowly, with the band drifting and disengaged, going through the motions while their minds were elsewhere. What pulled the record into focus was a small thing: a four-note phrase David Gilmour played almost by accident, mournful and searching, which Roger Waters immediately seized on. Around it grew Shine On You Crazy Diamond, and around that grew a whole album about not being there — about a band grown distant from one another, about an industry that treated musicians as product, and about the friend at the centre of it all. Waters chose to split the suite in half and build the record inside it; Gilmour disagreed and was outvoted. Two other songs from the sessions were set aside, later resurfacing on Animals. And then, extraordinarily, while the band were working on the very piece written for him, Syd Barrett walked unannounced into the studio — a visit none of them ever forgot, and one that has haunted the album’s story ever since.

The sound

Wish You Were Here is Pink Floyd at their most spacious and most emotionally direct. It moves slowly and breathes deeply: shimmering keyboard washes from Richard Wright, patient drumming from Nick Mason, and David Gilmour’s guitar — restrained, singing, aching — carrying much of the album’s feeling. Where The Dark Side of the Moon was crisp and universal, this is warmer and more wounded, its long instrumental passages given room to drift before the songs arrive. The two industry songs cut against that mood deliberately: one is cold and mechanical, the other sardonic and funky. But the album always returns to tenderness, closing on some of the most quietly devastating music the band ever made.

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The songs

Shine On You Crazy Diamond opens the album with one of the most famous introductions in rock: minutes of drifting synthesizer before Gilmour’s four-note phrase rings out, unforgettable and unbearably sad, and the band gradually assembles behind it. Welcome to the Machine follows, a cold, mechanical piece about an industry that swallows artists whole; Have a Cigar keeps up the attack with sardonic humour, taking aim at a record executive who has no idea who he is talking to — sung, wonderfully, by the visiting folk singer Roy Harper after Waters lost his voice and Gilmour declined the job. Then the radio dial turns and the title track begins: a simple, gorgeous acoustic song, sung by Gilmour, which Waters has described as being addressed to himself, while Gilmour has said he never plays it without thinking of Barrett. It is open enough to hold both. The album closes with the suite’s second half and one last, perfect touch — in the final seconds, Wright quietly plays a phrase from an old Barrett song, a farewell hidden in plain sight. The cover is equally pointed: two businessmen shaking hands, one of them engulfed in flames, and the original LP shipped wrapped in black plastic so that the artwork itself was absent until you opened it.

Reception and legacy

Reviews in 1975 were mixed — some critics found it slight beside its colossal predecessor — but the public had no doubts, sending it to number one on both sides of the Atlantic on its way to some twenty million copies. Time has been kinder still. It is now widely regarded as one of the greatest albums ever made, and among fans it is frequently ranked above The Dark Side of the Moon; more than one member of the band has named it their own favourite. The title track has taken on a life far beyond the album, endlessly covered and sung, one of the most beloved songs in the language. And Shine On You Crazy Diamond endures as rock’s great elegy: proof that a band at the height of its fame could stop, look back, and write something purely and unashamedly loving about an absent friend.

The verdict

Wish You Were Here is essential — and, alongside The Dark Side of the Moon, the ideal place to begin with Pink Floyd. It is shorter, warmer and more immediately moving than its famous sibling: five pieces, not a wasted moment among them, built around a guitar phrase that says more than words could and a title song of extraordinary simple beauty. It rewards a first listen and a five-hundredth. If Dark Side is the album that made Pink Floyd immortal, this is the one that shows what they were really made of — grief, warmth, friendship and enormous grace. A masterpiece, and for many the very best thing they ever did.

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