Pink Floyd were working on a twenty-minute-plus lament for Syd Barrett at Abbey Road when a heavyset man with a shaved head and no eyebrows walked into the control room carrying a plastic bag. Nobody recognised him. It took the band some time to realise that the subject of Wish You Were Here had turned up, unannounced, to hear it.
That collision of song and subject is why the record still feels haunted. Wish You Were Here was made by four men who had just sold millions with The Dark Side of the Moon and could not think what to do next, so they wrote about absence: the friend they had lost, and the business they now felt lost inside. Five tracks, 44 minutes, a burning man on the sleeve, and a guest singer on the song that sums it all up.
Wish You Were Here: Album Facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Pink Floyd |
| Album | Wish You Were Here (ninth studio album) |
| Release Date | 12 September 1975 (UK), 13 September 1975 (US) |
| Label | Harvest (UK and Europe), Columbia (US) |
| Producer(s) | Pink Floyd |
| Studio(s) | EMI Studios (Abbey Road), London |
| Genre / Subgenre | Progressive rock, art rock |
| Track Count | 5 |
| Total Runtime | 44:05 |
| Billboard 200 Peak | 1 |
| UK Albums Chart Peak | 1 |
| Other Notable Chart Peaks | No. 1 in Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Italy and Finland |
| Certifications | 7x Platinum (US), 3x Platinum (UK), Diamond (France) |
| Estimated Sales | About 13 million worldwide by 2004 |
| Key Singles | Have a Cigar / Welcome to the Machine |
Pink Floyd Before Wish You Were Here
Barrett had been Pink Floyd's singer, guitarist and chief songwriter until 1968, when deteriorating mental health forced him out. His former school friend David Gilmour, brought in as a second guitarist, took his place. The others felt guilty about removing him.
Five years later, The Dark Side of the Moon changed everything. It went to number one in America, stayed on the Billboard chart for more than fourteen years and sold more than 45 million copies. Waters and Wright bought large country houses; Mason started collecting expensive cars. Disenchanted with Capitol, the band and manager Steve O'Rourke signed with Columbia in the US for a reported advance of $1 million, while Harvest kept them in Europe.
Success came with a hangover. Gilmour later said the band had to "reassess what [they] were in it for thereafter", calling it "a pretty confusing and sort of empty time". Pink Floyd had never employed a publicist, their relationship with the press was souring, and Nick Mason later suggested that a hostile review of their 1974 shows by Nick Kent in the NME helped push them back into the studio in the first week of 1975. Mason has since admitted that was a mistake.
"Compared to the records we'd made before and since, it was like hitting a brick wall. To start with, we didn't have an idea between us."
Nick Mason, MOJO, 2025
In the same interview he reckoned they should have toured Dark Side for longer, and that their old deal with EMI, swapping a smaller royalty rate for unlimited studio time, had been a bad idea. With a clock ticking, he said, they might have stopped messing about.
Pre-production: Shine On and the 1974 Tours
Three new songs existed before a note was recorded: "Raving and Drooling", "You Gotta Be Crazy" and "Shine On You Crazy Diamond". The last of them grew from a four-note guitar phrase Gilmour came up with while improvising at a studio in King's Cross in 1974. Waters heard Barrett in it, and Gilmour, encouraged, made it the focus of the piece. It is known informally as "Syd's theme".
The band road-tested "Shine On" and "Raving and Drooling" in France in June 1974, then added "You Gotta Be Crazy" for the British tour that November, when the long piece first went out under its full title. Early versions opened with samples of Barrett's solo song "Dark Globe". "Shine On" was meant to fill a whole side of vinyl, like "Atom Heart Mother" or "Echoes" before it.
Mason told MOJO the band agreed early on that they did not want to make "Return To The Dark Side Of The Moon". Waters wanted a record about what he called their "absent mindset", and wanted to get, in his words, "as close as possible to what I felt ... that sort of indefinable, inevitable melancholy about the disappearance of Syd".
Creating the Album at Abbey Road
Alan Parsons, who had engineered Dark Side, was busy launching the Alan Parsons Project, so the band hired Brian Humphries, who had worked on their More soundtrack and had taken over their live sound on the 1974 tour. He arrived at EMI's Studio Three to find new equipment nobody understood.
"Studio Three had just installed a Studer A80 24-track tape machine as well as an EMI-modified Neve that nobody knew how to operate," Humphries told Sound On Sound. "We were like guinea pigs and I was the main guinea pig."
The band booked four days a week, from 2.30pm until late, and started with "Shine On", the first song begun and the last finished. After days on the backing track they scrapped it, recut it in a single day, then discovered that echo had been printed onto the tape. Gilmour told the Wish You Were Here songbook that "someone had switched the echo returns from monitors to tracks one and two", wrecking the tom-toms, guitars and keyboards. Humphries took the blame and spent a weekend expecting to be sacked on Monday. He maintains "a certain guitarist with sticky fingers" was responsible. The band simply recorded it again.
"I don't think they knew what they wanted to do. We had a dartboard and an air rifle and we'd play these word games, sit around, get drunk, go home and return the next day."
Brian Humphries, Sound On Sound, 2014
Wright called it "a difficult period". Waters found it "torturous". Mason, whose failing marriage was sapping his drumming, found multi-tracking "tedious", and Gilmour grew frustrated with him. Humphries remembered a studio where, when Waters had an idea, "it was a case of if you don't like it, tough".
Weeks in, Waters found the shape. "Shine On" would be cut in two and used to bookend the album, with two new songs about the music business in between. Gilmour disagreed and was outvoted three to one. "Raving and Drooling" and "You Gotta Be Crazy" no longer fitted, and were shelved until they became "Sheep" and "Dogs" on 1977's Animals.
A few production details from the sessions:
- Gilmour's big opening solo was cut in the larger Studio 1, his amps miked from a distance.
- He played it on a Fender Stratocaster, heavily compressed and soaked in reverb.
- The opening chord is wet fingers circling wine glasses, left over from abandoned household-objects experiments.
- Two North American tour legs, in April and June, interrupted the sessions.
Humphries reckoned those interruptions helped, giving the band "more impetus to write whatever came next". The vocals did not come easily. After the Knebworth show in July, Waters, his voice strained from singing "Shine On", could not nail "Have a Cigar". Gilmour declined to sing it; biographer Mark Blake writes that he did not share the song's view of the industry. Roy Harper, recording his album HQ elsewhere in the building and owing Gilmour a favour for some guitar licks, stepped up. Mason told MOJO the alternative was an endless round of "You sing it", "No, you sing it", and that Harper's "good shouty voice" made him "the perfect solution". Waters later regretted it.
The day Syd came back
On Thursday 5 June 1975, the day of Gilmour's wedding to Ginger Hasenbein, the band were mixing "Shine On" when the stranger appeared. Gilmour assumed he worked for EMI. Wright took him for a friend of Waters, and watched him get up repeatedly to brush his teeth. Then Gilmour turned to Mason: "It's Syd."
Barrett, now heavily overweight, said he had been eating pork chops. He had brought a guitar and offered to play. Waters was reduced to tears. Asked about the song written for him, Barrett said it sounded "a bit old". Storm Thorgerson recalled that "two or three people cried. He sat round and talked for a bit but he wasn't really there." Barrett drifted through Gilmour's reception in the EMI canteen and left without saying goodbye.
Personnel and Credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Core band | ||
| Bass, vocals, VCS3 | Roger Waters | Lead vocals on both halves of "Shine On" |
| Guitars, vocals | David Gilmour | Lead vocals on "Welcome to the Machine" and title track; steel guitar |
| Keyboards, vocals | Richard Wright | Minimoog, Steinway, VCS3, vibraphone, harmonies |
| Drums | Nick Mason | Timpani and cymbals on "Welcome to the Machine" |
| Guest and session musicians | ||
| Lead vocals | Roy Harper | "Have a Cigar" |
| Saxophones | Dick Parry | Baritone and tenor on "Shine On" |
| Backing vocals | Venetta Fields, Carlena Williams | "Shine On"; toured with the band as the Blackberries |
| Violin | Stéphane Grappelli | Title track; mixed almost inaudible and uncredited |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Producer | Pink Floyd | |
| Engineer | Brian Humphries | Replaced Alan Parsons |
| Assistant engineer | Peter James | EMI staffer who miked the drums |
| Artwork | ||
| Design and photography | Hipgnosis | Storm Thorgerson concept, Aubrey Powell photographs |
| Graphics | George Hardie | Mechanical handshake logo |
| Design assistants | Peter Christopherson, Jeff Smith, Howard Bartrop, Richard Manning | |
The most famous uncredited player on the record is a jazz legend. Stéphane Grappelli and Yehudi Menuhin were recording elsewhere in Abbey Road, and Gilmour fancied a little "country fiddle" at the end of the title track. Menuhin, less comfortable improvising, declined. Grappelli played for a £300 fee, and the band then mixed him so low (he surfaces faintly around 5:21) that Waters felt crediting him would be insulting.
Harper had his own grievance. In a 2011 interview he said he went uncredited for years and never received the payment he asked for, lifetime tickets to Lord's cricket ground, getting "a few hundred quid" instead and hiring a lawyer. Mason told MOJO he was "sorry Roger never gave him his lifetime season ticket for Lord's".
The Songs on Wish You Were Here
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts I-V) | Wright, Waters, Gilmour | 13:33 | Opens with wine glasses; Dick Parry sax solo | |
| 2 | Welcome to the Machine | Waters | 7:25 | US B-side | Built from a throbbing VCS3; Gilmour sings |
| 3 | Have a Cigar | Waters | 5:08 | Yes (US, 1975) | Roy Harper sings lead |
| 4 | Wish You Were Here | Waters, Gilmour | 5:35 | Intro taped from Gilmour's car radio | |
| 5 | Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts VI-IX) | Wright, Waters, Gilmour | 12:24 | Ends on a fragment of "See Emily Play" |
Shine On You Crazy Diamond
Part I fades in on the wine-glass chord, then Wright's Minimoog hands over to Gilmour's G minor blues solo. Part II introduces the four notes, Mason and Waters fall in after the fourth repetition, and the vocals arrive in Part IV with Fields and Williams harmonising. Part V ends with Parry switching from baritone to tenor sax as the tempo seems to double. The second half brings Gilmour's ascending lap steel solo, a funk workout in Part VIII that was cut from eight minutes to about three, and Part IX, which Gilmour called "a slow 4/4 funeral march ... the parting musical eulogy to Syd". The last notes quote Barrett's "See Emily Play". It was Wright's final solo writing credit in the band during his lifetime.
Welcome to the Machine
No backing track, no conventional band structure: Gilmour described it as "just a studio proposition where we're using tape for its own ends". It grew from a single VCS3 throb with a one-repeat echo, opens with a door Waters saw as a symbol of musical discovery betrayed by greed, and closes with a party Waters meant to epitomise "the lack of contact and real feelings between people". One line beat Gilmour's range.
"It was a line I just couldn't reach so we dropped the tape down half a semitone and then dropped the line in on the track."
David Gilmour, Wish You Were Here songbook, 1975
Have a Cigar
The only track that starts abruptly rather than fading or segueing in, and the bluntest. Waters strung together the clichés a rising band hears from executives, and the killer line, "By the way, which one's Pink?", came from an agent who really did ask the band. The song ends with its own sound shrinking to a tinny radio, then a dial spinning off-station.
Wish You Were Here
That dial lands on the title track. The radio was Gilmour's own car radio, passing a radio play and the finale of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony before his twelve-string, processed to sound like AM radio, takes over and a fuller acoustic guitar plays along. Gilmour has called it "a very simple country song" and "one of our best songs". Waters has said the lyrics were directed at himself, while Gilmour says he never plays it without thinking of Barrett. The cough in the intro has long been blamed on smoking; Gilmour says he never smoked.
Outtakes, Demos and Lost Versions
The biggest casualties were "Raving and Drooling" and "You Gotta Be Crazy", which reached record two years later as "Sheep" and "Dogs". Beyond those, the vaults have given up a surprising amount:
- The Grappelli take of "Wish You Were Here", rediscovered in EMI's vaults for the 2011 reissues.
- A Waters and Gilmour duet of "Have a Cigar", with Harper only on the bridge, issued in 2011.
- "The Machine Song (Roger's Demo)", with an extra acoustic guitar and a riff later used in "Have a Cigar".
- An unedited Part VIII, circulating on the bootleg The Extraction Tapes.
- An 18-minute early instrumental "Shine On", issued on the 2025 box.
Album Artwork: The Burning Man
Storm Thorgerson had followed the band on their 1974 tour and decided the songs were about "unfulfilled presence", so absence became the design. Borrowing an idea from Roxy Music's Country Life, he sealed the whole sleeve in opaque black shrink-wrap, making the artwork itself absent. All buyers saw was George Hardie's sticker of two mechanical hands shaking.
Columbia insisted the wrap be changed and was overruled. When Thorgerson showed the band the sketches at Abbey Road, they gave him a round of applause. Under the plastic, Aubrey Powell's photograph illustrated a phrase common in the music industry: getting burned.
"I'd said to Storm, 'How are we going to do that?' as it wasn't the days of digital retouching. He said, 'I guess you're going to have to burn a man for real.'"
Aubrey Powell, Amateur Photographer, 2021
Powell shot it during the band's 1975 American tour on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, with stuntmen Ronnie Rondell Jr. and Danny Rogers. Rondell wore a fireproof suit under his business suit, a hood under a fireproof wig and fire-resistant gel, and objected that he never stood still for a fire stunt. Three cameras ran, Powell on a Hasselblad, each burn lasting about 20 seconds, until a gust wrapped the flames round Rondell's face and singed his moustache. The men had swapped places, so the final image was reversed.
The rest of the package completed a set of four elements. The back cover is earth: a faceless "Floyd salesman" in the Yuma Desert, with no wrists or ankles, an empty suit "selling his soul" in Thorgerson's words. Inside are air, a red veil hiding a nude woman in a windswept Norfolk grove, and water, a diver entering Mono Lake without a splash. The sticker's four quarters echo the same scheme.
Release and Reception
Paul Stump later called it "(at the time) the most eagerly anticipated rock album ever released", and the orders bore that out. Britain had 250,000 advance sales and EMI warned shops it could fill only half their orders. The album entered at number three and hit number one a week later. In America, 900,000 advance orders, the largest for any Columbia release, took it to the top of the Billboard chart in its second week. It became Pink Floyd's fastest-selling album, went gold in the US on 17 September 1975, and reached seven-times platinum there in December 2025.
Critics were far cooler. Ben Edmonds in Rolling Stone complained the band sounded so detached that "they might as well be singing about Roger Waters's brother-in-law getting a parking ticket". Melody Maker found it "unconvincing in its ponderous sincerity". Robert Christgau gave it an A-minus in The Village Voice.
"the music is not only simple and attractive, with the synthesizer used mostly for texture and the guitar breaks for comment, but it actually achieves some of the symphonic dignity (and cross-referencing) that The Dark Side of the Moon simulated so ponderously."
Robert Christgau, The Village Voice, 1975
Time has sided with Christgau. Rolling Stone placed it at 209 in its 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums, and in 2015 named it the fourth-greatest progressive rock album. Q put it at 43 in its 100 Greatest British Albums in 2000, and in 2007 listeners of Germany's WDR 2 voted it the best album of all time.
Singles and Music Videos
Mason remembers the band "issuing directives from the bunker" that they were not doing singles any more, and says there was never a conversation about the title track as a single. Columbia chose "Have a Cigar" instead.
| Single | Released | B-side | Chart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Have a Cigar | November 1975 (US) | Welcome to the Machine (US); Shine On Part I (Europe) | No. 119, Cash Box Looking Ahead |
| Wish You Were Here (live, from Pulse) | 20 July 1995 (UK and Europe) | Coming Back to Life (live) | No. 13, US Album Rock Tracks |
| The Machine Song (Demo #2, Revisited) | 12 September 2025 | ||
| Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts 1-9) | 18 November 2025 |
Gerald Scarfe's nightmarish animation for "Welcome to the Machine" began life as a backdrop film for the 1977 In the Flesh tour, and the title track had no official video until 2025.
Touring and Live
The songs were tested on stage before they were finished. The 1975 North American tour opened at Vancouver's Pacific Coliseum on 8 April and ran to 29 shows, with Parry, Fields and Williams added to the line-up. The first set ran "Raving and Drooling", "You've Got to Be Crazy", "Shine On" Parts I-V, the brand-new "Have a Cigar" and "Shine On" Parts VI-IX; the second was the whole of Dark Side, with "Echoes" as the encore. The title track and "Welcome to the Machine" were not played live until 1977.
The tour ended at Knebworth on 5 July, headlining over the Steve Miller Band, Captain Beefheart, Linda Lewis and Harper, who joined them for "Have a Cigar". Harper, finding his stage costume missing, wrecked one of the band's vans and hurt himself, delaying the setup, and with two Spitfires booked to fly over the crowd the set could not be pushed back. A power problem knocked Wright's keyboards out of tune.
At Live 8 in London in 2005, Waters rejoined his old bandmates and shared lead vocals with Gilmour on it.
Covers and Tributes
- Foo Fighters cut "Have a Cigar" twice, once with Brian May on guitar for the Mission: Impossible 2 soundtrack, both sung by Taylor Hawkins.
- Primus closed their 1992 Miscellaneous Debris EP with it.
- Rosebud, a studio group led by Gabriel Yared, took a disco "Have a Cigar" to No. 4 on Billboard's Disco Top 80 in 1979.
- Dream Theater worked its riff into "Peruvian Skies" on Once in a LIVEtime.
- Wyclef Jean's "Wish You Were Here" reached No. 28 in the UK in 2001.
Reissues and the 50th Anniversary
The album has been reissued in almost every format going: an SQ quadraphonic LP in 1976, a half-speed master in 1981, CD from 1982, a remastered CD in 1994, a 25th-anniversary edition in 2000 and the 2011 Immersion box with James Guthrie's 5.1 mix, the Grappelli version and a 1974 live "Shine On".
Wish You Were Here 50, released by Sony on 12 December 2025, finally assembled "Shine On" as one continuous 25-minute piece, as first intended, in a new Guthrie mix. It added "Wine Glasses", demos, a Dolby Atmos mix and the band's 26 April 1975 Los Angeles Sports Arena show, remastered by Steven Wilson. Powell and Peter Curzon designed new cover art.
A week later it was the UK's Official Christmas Number 1 album, Pink Floyd's first, fifty years after the original first topped the chart. That gave them the longest span between a first and last number one album, more than 50 years (2,620 weeks), beating the 49 years and 252 days of The Beatles' Abbey Road.
The Legacy of Wish You Were Here
Gilmour, Wright and Mason have all named it their favourite Pink Floyd album. Waters, who called Wish You Were Here and Dark Side the band's "most complete" records, also said it and Animals "signalled the end of the band as it had been before".
"It's an album I can listen to for pleasure, and there aren't many Floyd albums that I can."
Richard Wright, The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story (BBC), 2003
Mason took longer to come round. Because it was so hard to make, he told MOJO, it "always had a slightly bad taste", though he has since "absolutely come round to it". Rolling Stone ranked the title track at 316 in its 2004 list of the 500 greatest songs, and in 2014 Gilmour played it at Earls Court with Bombay Bicycle Club at the last event before the arena was demolished.
Things You Might Not Know About Wish You Were Here
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| The second fire | At 4am after the cover shoot, the Cadillac Powell was driving home from a party caught fire; he and Peter Christopherson jumped out and it burnt to the ground. |
| The burning man's CV | Ronnie Rondell Jr. also did stunts in Blazing Saddles, Diamonds Are Forever, Lethal Weapon and The Matrix Reloaded, his final film. |
| The splashless diver | The Mono Lake diver could hold his breath for two minutes, so he never had to surface and disturb the ripples. |
| Powell's favourite | Despite the cover's fame, Powell says his favourite photograph from the package is the diver. |
| Directions to Abbey Road | Barrett had dropped into the Hipgnosis office earlier that day, and it was Powell who told him where the band were recording. |
| More than one visit | Mason told MOJO in 2025 that session photos show Barrett in different clothes, proving he came back more than once. |
| Pyro too far | At the second tour leg's final show in Hamilton, Ontario, the crew's extra pyrotechnics damaged the stadium scoreboard and blew out windows in nearby houses. |
| Knebworth's last | The July 1975 Knebworth show was the last time Pink Floyd played "Echoes" and the whole of Dark Side with Waters. |
| Christmas double | The 2025 reissue was Pink Floyd's first Christmas number one album, 46 years after "Another Brick in the Wall" was the Christmas number one single. |
| Two number ones in a year | Following Pink Floyd at Pompeii, it gave the band two UK number one albums in a single year for the first time. |
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