By almost every measure, from commercial reward to creative reach, Pink Floyd scaled its peak on Dark Side of the Moon. But, when I asked drummer Nick Mason how he would rank the album in their catalogue, he slotted it below the set that came next, Wish You Were Here. Speaking of Dark Side, he said, “the idea of it is almost more attractive than the individual songs on it. I feel slightly the same about Sgt. Pepper. It’s an amazing album that taught us a hell of a lot, but the individual parts are not quite as exciting, or as good, as some of the other Beatles’ albums.”
By contrast, he says of Wish You Were Here, “there’s something in the general atmosphere it generates – the space of it, the air around it, that’s really special,” he said. “It’s one of the reasons I view it so affectionately.”
It’s hardly the only one. As Mason spoke by Zoom from his office in London – a crowded space he jauntily refers to as “more a toy shop than an office” – he talked about everything that went into making an album that became a classic of its own, making it fully worthy of a new box set elaboration for this, its 50th anniversary. The set not only features the obligatory remixed versions of all the songs from original album but also revealing demos, significantly altered versions of key tracks, and formative live recordings from the tour that led up to its creation.
For Mason, the best part of the set is the chance to listen to it from front to back in its vinyl version. “I had lost that thing of sitting down and listening to an entire album properly,” he said. “It’s always streaming. The big take away for me from the vinyl is the quality of the recording, which is a credit to Abbey Road and the technical people there. I remember how meticulous they were, and by God, that paid off 50 years later!”
The way the album as a whole pays off strikes Mason as particularly surprising given the fact that, for a protracted period, they didn’t think it would come off at all. “We had major false starts,” he said. “Several, in fact.”
The cushion provided by Dark Side’s gargantuan popularity gave the band the time to indulge that throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach. Small wonder Mason laughingly described their mood at the time as one of “relaxed desperation.”
After all, as much good will as Dark Side had bought them, its outsized success put them in the position of having to create an equally momentous chaser. This, at a time when everything about the band was in the process of change, from their working relationship to who they were as people. “We weren’t the lovable mop tops anymore,” Mason said. “We were around 30 then. Some of us had kids. We began to have lives outside of making records and going on tour. And that’s going to make a difference.”
In fact, it affected the entire recording process. “When we did Dark Side, there were four of us in the studio most of the time,” he said. “With Wish You Were Here, we came and went. If it got a bit boring, you’d go away for the weekend and leave Dave to carry on with the guitar parts.”
That explains why Wish You Were Here is the first Pink Floyd album in which Mason had no co-writing credits. By then the writing had become less collaborative in general. “It was more a case of Roger bringing in something that’s ready to go,” Mason said.
Proof can be found on the new set by a demo Waters made of Welcome to the Machine, here simply titled Machine Song. The bulk of the final song is already apparent from what Waters created himself, though the demo also features some eerie/cool sound effects that didn’t make the official cut. Way before such songs were even formed, the group went down a daft, but fascinating, rabbit hole. The original idea was to construct the music entirely from random objects, like rubber bands, wine glasses and brooms – no formal instruments allowed, a notion inspired by the work of artists like John Cage. It wouldn’t be the first time Pink Floyd banished conventional instruments. On their 1969 album Ummagumma, one track was constructed entirely from manipulated mouth noises provided by Waters, designed to imitate the sounds of various animals. They called their later attempt in that direction The Household Objects Project, an idea that “went absolutely nowhere”, Mason said.
Even so, two of its tracks eventually found their way out. One, titled Wine Glasses, appears again on the new set. Some glassy sounds from those sessions also made their way to the final mix of Shine on You Crazy Diamond. After the Household Objects idea went south, the band had another wacky notion. “We were individually left in the studio to put down some sounds, then the others would come in and put down some sounds on the same tape without reference to the original thing put down,” Mason said. “Frankly, it was madness.”
A far better approach he now thinks, would have been to continue touring with Dark Side for some time rather than rushing back to the studio. It wasn’t until months into the recording process that formal songs finally began to emerge. At that point, by April 1975, the band returned to the road, performing the best parts they’d developed so far. The new set features sixteen tracks from that tour, including two songs that ended up on the final album, including Shine on and Have a Cigar, along with formative runs at the songs Raving and Drooling and You’ve Got to be Crazy, which didn’t find a studio home until their Animals album in 1977 under the titles Sheep and Dogs, respectively. To Mason, playing untested material before an audience has “an enormous benefit. The problem with recording is that the tendency is to record it to the point where you’ve got it right and then you stop,” he said, “What works far better is to not only get it right, but to develop it. Only paranoia about bootlegging stopped us from doing that later.” (Ironically, the 1975 live parts of the set comes from a bootleg).
Another rare track on the set unearths a take on the title song that features an extended jazz violin solo from Stephane Grappelli, barely a bit of which made the official version. Initially, the band also tried to use the esteemed classical violinist Yehudi Menuhin on the track but backed off because, as Mason explains, “Yehudi absolutely could not improvise, even when pushed by Stephane. It was hard to understand why.”
All told, the formal recording process of Wish You Were Here, following those false starts, took six months. Regardless of the mess they’d started with, the final work wasn’t only highly focused, it also became their most personal statement ever. While Dark Side explored the mysteries of the inner life, this album dealt with the real world the band now found themselves in. Two of its songs – Welcome to the Machine and Have a Cigar – railed against the greed and manipulations of the music business, using that as a metaphor for the individual crushed at the hands of the system. Those tracks were matched to a pair that found the band confronting their own past (Shine On and the title song). The latter reflected the oft told, and bizarre, story of their estranged, mentally unwell original leader, Syd Barrett, showing up unannounced in the studio at one of the sessions looking disheveled and disoriented. “No one had the slightest idea that was going to happen, or how he even knew we were working there that day,” Mason said. “It was so odd.”
The emotional fall-out from that resulted in Waters refocusing lyrics he had already begun writing on Barrett’s lost promise. Mason believes the reason those songs, as well as the two about the music business, wound up resonating so deeply with listeners is because their true subject is “distance and absence”.
To Mason, those themes offered “a kind of prelude to the thinking on The Wall,” a classic expression of alienation that became another mega-blockbuster for the band. It’s interesting that songs which complain about the treatment of artists in the music industry arose just then, given that the band had just experienced an astounding windfall of success with Dark Side. Mason credits a key part of Dark Side’s commercial impact to the marketing savvy of EMI’s label chief, Bhasker Menon – ironic since, by the time of its breakthrough, the band had already signed a new contract with CBS, thus leaving their greatest benefactor in the lurch. “In many ways we behaved far worse than the record company,” Mason said with a laugh.
The album the band finally delivered to CBS matched those highly emotional lyrics to songs dominated by explorative instrumental sections. “In that aspect, this really is a musician’s record,” Mason said. He thinks that may be why guitarist David Gilmour and the late keyboardist Rick Wright have called Wish their favorite Floyd album. Mason loves that it showcases so much of Wright’s visionary keyboard work. “If ever there was someone who was underrated and under-sung,” its Wright, Mason said.
Matching the impact of the music was the album’s cover, which famously featured a man on fire. The idea, according to Aubrey “Po” Powell, co-creator of the design company behind it, Hipgnosis, was to provide a visual corollary to Waters’ incendiary lyrics. “George Hardie, one of our collaborators, said at a company meeting, ‘people get burned in deals in the industry all the time,” Powell said. “Then Storm (Thorgerson, his partner in Hipgnosis) said, ‘I got it! It will be two businessmen shaking hands with one being burnt in the deal.”
Because Photoshop was years from being invented, however, that meant they would have to hire a stuntman and set him on fire for real. The one they found, Ronnie Rondell Jr, told Powell it was an insanely dangerous stunt since he would have to stand still, and the slightest breeze would turn him into a human blowtorch. Luckily, on the day of the shoot, the air was dead still so, after enduring 15 takes with Powell shooting as fast as he could, he got the shot, leaving only a singe of Rondell’s eyebrows and moustache as a consequence. When Rondell died last year, the headlines all identified him as the man from the Wish You Were Here cover. “Ronnie always told me, ‘I’ve done thousands of stunts but the one thing everybody remembers is that damn cover,’” Powell said, with a laugh.
The flaming image was one of several striking pieces in the package. Another, featuring a red scarf wafting through the air, extends the album’s theme of absence. “That was a nod to Syd Barrett’s mental state,” Powell said. “How much is he present or not present?”
The notion to offer fans multiple images in the package was to “add to the joy” of it, said Powell. That’s also why they got the impish idea to shield the cover in black plastic, a move that was also meant to underscore the theme of absence. At the same time, the packaging was “supposed to be like a Christmas present where you don’t know what’s inside”, Powell said. “Of course, the record company hated it because we were covering up all these expensive images. But the band had total creative control, so they had to back off.”
For the band, such images perfectly suited the music and words they’d taken such trouble to create. “Wish You Were Here was harder work than almost any album we ever did,” Mason said. “But, at the end of the day, we came out with something that we’re still talking about today.”
Wish You Were Here 50th Anniversary Deluxe Box Set is out now
