The Emigration Playlist - 64 years of songs: #13 Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd (1975)

Instalment #13 of 64 brings us to one of the greatest albums of all time. It was that good 51 years ago, and it still is now. I was 13 when Wish You Were Here was released by Pink Floyd, the follow up, as if I need to even tell you, to the legendary Dark Side of the Moon. It's here, with its title track, instead of Dark Side (which some might, with justification call the best album of all time) perhaps because this is the album that introduced the band to me. In 1975 I'd just gone up from junior to senior at the anonymous boarding school to which I was sent when I was 10, in Somerset, England. In the era before anything was digital, we had one way of listening to music (radios - apart from the clandestine, contraband ones we smuggled in) were banned; a Dansette bakelite record player located in our Common Room (a kind of communal room where we could hang out during free time). Even by 1975 this thing

was long in the tooth - probably over a decade old - but in a time before people thought much about sound quality and were just largely grateful to have anything that could play records, it did the job. 

On to that Dansette went Wish You Were Here, and in the decades since its release I can honestly say that not once have I ever listened to this album without something of the thrill that I had the very first time. This is a record that never, ever grows old. 

And the track I have chosen is the title track. It could, of course have been Shine on You Crazy Diamond, the band's lament for the loss of their founding and inspirational leading light, Syd Barrett, and it nearly was, but in the end I plumped for this beautiful David Gilmour acoustic guitar song - on which he sings too. The simplicity of the title track is its strength - emerging form the mix and the preceding track, Have a Cigar (with its acid biting-the-hand take on the cynicism of the record industry), as the latter is compressed down in its final few bars to the tinny sound of car radio. The dial is then retuned, as it were, there's a moment of speech, an incongruous orchestral riff, before the plain chords on Gilmour's 12 string guitar emerge, at first as if it too were coming from a cheap radio. Then another guitar, a 6 string, joins the song, notes picked with precision and the song opens up. 

Roger Waters' lyrics are spare and sad and rinsed in regret. Full of abandoned hope and a longing for dreams not fulfilled, beckoning someone - wishing they were here. But who? An often cited view is that Waters was writing about Barrett here too - the band missed him deeply (and the story goes that he randomly wandered in to the studio during the recording of the album, a broken and disorientated man - he went unrecognised by his old band mates when he suddenly appeared in the control room).  Another is that this is Waters taking to himself - berating himself as a sell-out, wondering where the idealism had gone - a bleak take indeed considering that he was only 32 and had stunning work ahead of him yet (for all his bizarre-old-man views these days). 

That fits too, considering Have a Cigar is on the album too. It was clearly on his mind. 

The album's cover art has passed into legend as well. I remember buying it - black cellophane with an iconic logo, ripped open (ripped? I wish I'd carefully sliced it now), to reveal that photo. The businessman burned in the deal - and this guy, a stunt man, was literally on fire, surrounded out of shot by a crew armed with fire extinguishers. Inside, postcards (Wish You Were Here, you see) - the Magritte-inspired record company exec, the stunning shot of Mono Lake in the Sierra Nevada by Storm Thorgerson, with that diver perfectly positioned. Hipgnosis made their name with this project. This wasn't a gatefold album, but it still produced plenty of hidden secrets. 

I know every note of this record. Not one moment of it has aged and generations after me have come to it to discover its power for themselves. There's not a false step anywhere and I can't think of an album, with its emblematic title track, that has been by my side all my teen and adult life more than this one. Not even, heresy coming...Dark Side of the Moon...

Wish You Were Here will be with me till the end, still being played, still getting inside me, still beautiful and haunting. To be honest, as a death bed album...I'd have no complaints. It's the kind of album you could quietly even die to. 

For 1975 there could only ever have been a song from this album. But if Pink Floyd hadn't released it that year, what else? I might be writing here about The Prophet's Song from Queen's A Day At The Races (with fond memories of my first girlfriend and my first (long) kiss), Led Zeppelin's Kashmir from Physical Graffiti (I'll admit to finding this track later, though it appeared in 1975 - a song for lying on the carpet to, in the very small hours, with a good friend, after way too much of some substance or other, as I have indeed done), or Wing's Venus and Mars, from the album of the same name, which is ethereal and haunting.

All fantastic, all with me still, but none ultimately in the same league as Wish You Were Here. As Roger Waters might have written, they came close but no cigar...

Readying myself for emigration, I am putting together the soundtrack of a whole life spent in England. You can read more about why I am doing this here: https://kierkegaardslunch.blogspot.com/2026/08/mourning-england-in-song-part-1.html