Artwork by Anthony Galati
Syd Barrett was only a member of Pink Floyd for about three years of the band’s nearly thirty-year existence. Despite initially serving as their primary songwriter and vocalist, his behaviour began to change as Pink Floyd’s profile began to ascend, often attributed to his use of LSD and other drugs. Even as his mind and talent deteriorated, the rest of Pink Floyd did not want to fire him, initially bringing on David Gilmour as a fifth member of the band who could perform and tour in Barrett’s place while Barrett continued writing and performing as part of the band’s studio output. This approach also failed; in the only series of photographs featuring all five members, Barrett awkwardly looks away from the rest of the band, unwilling to even pretend he wants to be there or unsure of what is going on. Eventually, Gilmour, Roger Waters, Richard Wright, and Nick Mason left him behind to focus on their musical evolution.
This turn of events marked the abrupt end of bonds that had predated the band: in particular, Barrett, Waters, and Gilmour had known each other since childhood, having all grown up in Cambridge before Pink Floyd began in nearby London. After leaving the band, Barrett returned to Cambridge and supposedly retreated into near silence until his death in 2006. In reality, he released two solo albums during the early 1970s with contributions from the rest of Pink Floyd, along with a third compiled from unreleased recordings nearly twenty years later; despite no longer recording music and refusing to recall his time with one of the most successful bands of the 20th century, he nevertheless took up painting for much of his later life. Now, however, Barrett is predominantly remembered as the shadowy, tragic figure suffusing some of Pink Floyd’s most personal and renowned songs as the band rocketed to superstardom.
If anything, this utilization of Barrett aligned with Pink Floyd’s mounting uneasiness regarding their own collective situation. As the band wondered how to follow the enormously successful The Dark Side of the Moon, they looked to their departed bandmate and their own misgivings at the enormous level of fame they now supposedly enjoyed. Wish You Were Here echoes many of the themes of this previous album, now further adjusted to fame and the enhanced scrutiny that consumed Barrett and could just as easily engulf the rest of them. Barrett’s decline and disappearance proved to be the perfect story for their purposes, emerging most explicitly in the elegiac yet cathartic ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, split into two sections bookending the album and elevating the illusion and memory of Barrett to the same fabled heights that Barrett himself could have enjoyed had he remained an active participant. Barrett allegedly visited the rest of the band at Abbey Road Studios during the recording of this song. His brief reappearance unsettled yet galvanized them even more. The unassuming yet disquieting atmosphere and themes disguise a tension between memorializing a friend and consigning him to the impersonal status of myth, thereby ensuring one’s own fabled reputation in the process. No mention of the circumstances of Barrett’s exit is made in favour of committing his loss to a more abstract template, even if the underlying pathos is genuine. Instead, lines like “remember when you were young / you shone like the sun” allow for a subject open enough for listeners to imagine any person that comes to mind. Pink Floyd’s memorial to an earlier era of the band’s existence conveniently proves the strength of their own resurgence and allows fans to subconsciously manipulate that memorial as they see fit.
Pink Floyd has now released the expanded box set Wish You Were Here 50, including demos, outtakes, and concert recordings, to add to the panoply of remastered or remixed editions. While certain tracks, from ‘Wish You Were Here’ with Stéphane Grapelli’s mesmerizing, slightly country-tinged violin playing discernible to the early version of the song ‘Sheep’ (released on the band’s next album Animals) titled ‘Raving and Drooling’, have been released before, multiple ‘new’ offerings do emerge in abundance. A demo of ‘Welcome to the Machine’, here titled ‘The Machine Song’, features Roger Waters playing guitar over pulsing synthesizer effects and singing an octave lower than David Gilmour eventually would on the finished record; a subsequent demo substitutes these effects for a synthesizer part from Richard Wright, which swirls in and out throughout the mix. Elsewhere, the band play through the first take of the album’s title song as Gilmour searches for the right melody for his vocals, singing different notes, emphasizing different words from the final version, and softly chuckling after the phrase ‘a lead role in a cage’. Leaping from one note to another in real time as he spontaneously thinks of a better progression, his voice still sounds relaxed despite his tentative delivery, settling into the routine of meandering through rehearsals and the creative process in search of an ‘immortal’ or definitive performance. To those listening with no connection to the making of these songs, that routine simply sounds like the band trying things out, working to find their way through a soundscape they are constructing. These moments are the best ones to stumble upon, and while some artists occasionally scramble to recover any scraps they can find to justify putting out a new product, their efforts do at least prove successful when undertaken for already-excellent material.
Wish You Were Here 50 also reinforces the sheer peculiarity of this album and its monumental success. Despite coming out at the pinnacle of Pink Floyd’s fame, the material showcased here—from the demos to the completed album renditions—hardly sound intended for enormous stadiums. The conclusions of songs and their unresolved observations disappear into sounds of banal conversations over a background radio or howling wind and static; the intimate lurks just behind every complex instrumental arrangement and stereotypical rock god image. Various instrumental parts and arrangements are missing as Pink Floyd figures out just how that music should sound; with many of these outtakes, though, the band remains unconcerned with awkwardness or even failure. The band’s members comprise the sole audience for these renditions, even if those renditions have now been relinquished to a greater public not previously meant to hear them. Most pointedly, the title track seems addressed from one person to another as someone wistfully plays an acoustic guitar to another guitar emanating through a radio—perhaps even the small-scale direct address to Syd Barrett to complement the large-scale threnody of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’. Regardless of how elaborate these songs become, they all eventually descend into indeterminate noise and the silence of alienation, disenchantment, and rueful recollections.
Wish You Were Here ultimately serves as an unfortunate prediction: as their subsequent albums and tours became even more grandiose and successful, relations between Pink Floyd’s remaining members deteriorated. Wright was forced to quit the band just before the release of The Wall. Already rising before then due to disagreements surrounding the importance of songwriting versus technical prowess and musical ability, the acrimony between Gilmour and Waters only continued to worsen and even now has not been resolved. Pink Floyd was not immune from the adverse effects of fame even as they frankly and poignantly depicted its corrupting influence; perhaps they surmised as much as their thoughts returned to the consequences they had already witnessed surrounding Syd Barrett. The work they managed to summon from this mounting discord endures far beyond them, just as most great art does relative to its creators: a memorial to the time they enjoyed together before life intervened.
By John Colie
The Camera 