WISH YOU WERE HERE

Wish You Were Here is one of those seminar albums that pop up once in a while. While all the fuss was over Dark Side Of The Moon, two years previously, i always found this album to be musically more adventurous, and therefore more Prog. The album kicks off with Shine On You Crazy Diamond with Richard Wright really outdoing the last piano note on A Day In The Life by The Beatles. Wrights piano note must last for minutes and minutes before he changes it a bit to remind Gilmour that he has to come in soon. How Wright is getting the sustain on that piano note, God only knows.....But i digress. When Gilmour does come in, it gives me a real shiver of satisfaction. Robert Walters then enters the fray with his plaintive vocal about remembering when he was young and shining like the sun, which would suggest that this song is about Robert Walters rather than Nick Barrett. "Welcome To The Machine" is drearily beautiful. In my opinion you can make dreary beautiful, like Floyd skilfully do or just simply be dreary like Radiohead. Good old analogue synths are the tops in this track, with Richard Wright reminding us just how fat and solid those old synths were, as compared to the clean as a whistle digital clean ness of today. Vocally the song appears to be about Robert and Dave telling their Mums that they are going out to buy a guitar to punish them with. ( Maybe the Mums hated Prog )

"Have A Cigar" takes a pretty rocking Nobby approach with some fine grooves going on with the whole band. For reasons known only to myself, every time i hear this song i picture the year 1975 lit up in neon for some reason. We then move onto the title track which is a beautiful acoustic number with Dave Gilmour telling us of how he is a lost soul and swims in a fish bowl year after year.......Maybe if he had got out of the habit we would have had more Pink Floyd albums.....Less of the swimming David. "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" part 2 is simply mindblowing, from the opening wind sounds, giving way to the throbbing Bass of Robin Waters, right through to the bluesy middle section, and on to the beautiful ending, which again is exclusively Richard Wright. Not one solitary note is to be missed on this beautiful album.