Pink Floyd’s ninth studio Wish You Were Here will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year. The album, which spawned the iconic title track, features a memorable intro played on a 12-string guitar, which Roger Waters has revealed was the catalyst that inspired the rest of the song and set a melancholic tone for the rest of the album.
“It’s one of those strange songs that came to me very easily, because David Gilmour had been playing the riff, and I’ve been listening to it and going, ‘What’s that?’ And he played it. I said, ‘Play that again,’” he says in an interview with AXS TV.
“So I learned it. And I said, ‘And then what happens?’ And he said, ‘No, that’s it.’ And I went, ‘I like it.’ I said, ‘So do you mind if I see what happens next?’”
Waters went on to write the rest of the song in just an hour. “It was one of those happy times when the stream of consciousness works, and words come out that have meter and meaning and fit a melody,” he recalls.
“I don’t try to investigate them too much. It would feel a little bit like investigating a butterfly, you end up with dust and a few broken bits.
“So it was when we were making the record Wish You Were Here, which was all about absence. And it was to some extent about the loss of [founding vocalist and guitarist] Syd Barrett, who would succumb to mental illness seven or eight years before.”
In a 1993 Guitar World interview, Gilmour opened up about the public and commercial pressure that weighed down on the band during the Wish You Were Here sessions.
“It’s about that feeling we were left with at the end of Dark Side – that feeling of ‘What do you do when you’ve done everything?’ But I think we got over that.
“For me, Wish You Were Here is the most satisfying album. I really love it. I mean, I’d rather listen to that than Dark Side of the Moon. Because I think we achieved a better balance of music and lyrics on Wish You Were Here.”
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