Pink Floyd - Wish YouWere Here (ImmersionEdition)

Thu 5th Jan, 2012 in Music Reviews

Cold Chisel’s complete back-catalogue re-mastered and repackaged; Icehouse’s greatest hits, now available with bonus DVD; and the 20th Anniversary edition of Nevermind, available in three increasingly expensive formats.

With the possible exception of a twenty-something British girl, and an unshaven crooner who’s become something of a Christmas perennial, the Silly Season 2011 has been dominated by re-issues, re-packages and re-masters, limited, deluxe and super-deluxe editions. Partly a function of baby-boomer nostalgia (because they’re the only ones buying CDs any more) and partly because of music industry malaise, the conveniently timed re-release of albums seminal and mediocre alike has become as accurate an indicator of an incipient festive season as Christmas shopping centre carols and office Kris Kringles.

If that sounds like an overly harsh assessment, you might find Wish You Were Here a bitter pill to swallow. Though it’s a record more broadly known for the sweeping Shine On You Crazy Diamond, and the title track’s weary melancholy, Wish You Were Here is, at its heart, a cynical record. It is to Pink Floyd what In Utero was to Nirvana: a blunt indictment of the parasitic music industry that latched onto them in the wake of Dark Side of the Moon’s fantastic success. Roger Waters’ lyrics might have all the subtlety of a Two and a Half Men laugh track, but the bitterness of the Welcome to the Machine/Have A Cigar double-bill still feels relevant today, aided in no small part by bands like Nirvana and the Arctic Monkeys expressing the same frustrations twenty or thirty years later. Waters’ himself would revisit these same themes in a much more bombastic form on The Wall a few years later.

(The five-disc Immersion box set of Wish You Were Here wears this cynicism on its sleeve, trading the familiar cover of two men shaking hands as one burns for a Magritte-inspired image of a [quite literally] faceless man in a suit holding out a record.)

If Welcome to the Machine and Have a Cigar reflect the band’s frustration with the position they had found themselves in, Shine On You Crazy Diamond (all nine parts and twenty-five odd minutes of it) looks back to a happier time for Pink Floyd, back before founding member Syd Barrett became an acid casualty and parted ways with the group. Directed at Barrett, it recalls the naïve brilliance of his youth, harks back to the group’s first album (referring to Barrett as “you piper”, after Piper at the Gates of Dawn), and laments what he became (“now there’s a look in your eyes like black holes in the sky”). Such lamentation isn’t just for Barrett, though, but for Pink Floyd themselves, as they draw an analogy (intentionally or not) between Barrett’s decline and their own. That Barrett turned up to the recording sessions for Wish You Were Here would have only further highlighted how far the band had drifted from its beginnings.

The tension that inevitably arose from such frustration and dissatisfaction was directed not only outward, but also inward, damaging the already fraught relationship between Roger Waters and David Gilmour. Waters’ took all the lyric credits for Wish You Were Here, and a huge chunk of the publishing rights were exclusively his as well (for Welcome to the Machine, Have a Cigar and Shine On You Crazy Diamond Pt V), which wouldn’t have helped matters, but you don’t need to read the fine print in the booklet to see that there was plenty of strife between Pink Floyd’s two leading men.

The elegiac Wish You Were Here, co-written by Waters and Gilmour, is heavy with regret, not only for the Faustian deals they’d made in the name of success, but for the degrading state of their relationship. The final verse, which holds the song’s most powerful moment, describes the rut they’d fallen into and the growing distance between them that prevented one from saving the other. It’s tragic and sparse, and one that’s unusually touching from a band more known for their grand soundscapes than for their emotional depth. (That said, Wish You Were Here still contains some of the clunkiest lyrics in the pop canon – iconic they may be, but “so you think you can tell/heaven from hell/blue skies from pain” is an affront to rhyme schemes everywhere, and full of the sort of psuedo-profound junk that’s inscribed by stoned 19-years-olds on notebooks everywhere).

Compared to The Dark Side of the Moon’s bombast, or The Wall’s broad politicking, Wish You Were Here seems like the work of a wholly other band. It’s exhausted, both physically and emotionally, and given over to long instrumental passages whose aimlessness reflects the unstuck minds of the men behind it. That any band could produce something so vulnerable, so unedited is an impressive feat; that it is the product of a superstar group at the peak of their fame is even more so, not to mention such a diversion didn’t kill their critical or commercial momentum.

Imagine any such band doing the same today, and the absurdity of it is clear: could Muse (a band deeply in thrall to Pink Floyd’s grandiosity, and about as good lyrically) survive the inevitable backlash that would follow a slow, maudlin album without any stomping, over-produced singles? Granted, it’s not the late 70s any more, and the music industry now is a very different beast.

But then again…they’re still riding the gravy train.