WISH YOU WERE HERE

After Dark side Of The Moon, Pink Floyd were in trouble. They simply HAD TO deliver, and yet it was nearly impossible to follow up their unequalled masterpiece. No wonder then that they failed, and quite miserably.

There's not one single song on this album that would reach the levels of the weakest song (difficult to name!) on DSOTM. If ever progressive rock earned the description "pretentious", it was here.

It is not that they wouldn't have tried. However, instead of trying to go forwards, they turned back to the past, and wallowed in the longing of their admittedly remarkable friend, Syd Barrett, and in the terrible pain of having become immensely rich.

The biggest problem to me is that the songs don't form a cohesive whole. WYWH tries to be a theme album, but fails again. On the positive side I have to say that they play strongly as a unit, but that is to be expected after almost a decade of training and gigging. In my opinion, WYWH is a stage that Pink Floyd just had to pass quickly to get over the success of DSOTM.