Barrett was considered the creative one behind early Floyd. Ferthuko on January 25, Link. Definatly not a biography, but inspired in some part by him or in some part about him? Wish You Were Here the song and the whole album is a tribute to syd barrett. Not sure if the wall was a biography of syd barrett though frantictan on January 30, You are correct. The song as well as "Shine On James55 on March 15, He didn't leave the band due to excessive drug use, they kicked him out because he lost his mind exacerbated by drug use ShakeZula7 on May 18, The Pink Floyd members have conferimed that this song and the whole album is a tribute to Sid Berrit who was kicked out of the band due to exessive drug use.
Wish you were here is a song about how they wish the old Sid Berrit was still with them and in saying that they agknowlage that he has changed into a monster that is not the Sid they know and love. Therefore this song is about Sid's transformation to insanity in his mind. The first verse is about how Sid has lost the ability to differentiate between good and evil, like heaven from hell or blue skies from pain. He exchanged all of the qualities that made up Sid for those suggested by the drugs.
Causing him to become a prisoner, and allowing the drugs to change him however they may. Third verse basally is the Pink Floyd members missing the old friend they used to know and they know that deep down they share "the same old fears" meaning that they still have a connection with him. This song makes scene to me because I had a battle with drugs over my personality and luckily I came out onto unlike Sid. This is a extremely meaningful song and once you understand the meaning I guarantee it will touch you in some way.
The Wall is Syd Barrett's biography? I thought it was Roger Waters' biography. At least it's way more about him than Syd. EnduringChill on January 30, Ferthuko Syd was a schizoph OsuzyQ on July 23, This album is also about, and criticises the phonographic industry.
The critic to the phonographic industry is notorious by the cover of the album 2 persons making a deal and one of them gets burned and the songs "Welcome to the machine" and "Have a Cigar". The song "Shine on you crazy diamond" both parts opening and closing of the album are dedicated to Syd Barrett, and it's obvious by the lyrics "Remember when you were young"; "Nobody knows where you are"; "Come on you painter" his job before pink floyd. About that song, Wish You Were Here what they say is that they play the song thinking about Syd, and they can't to it of other way, although this song is not like "Shine On", it's not specifically about Syd.
Roger the writer of the lyrics says: "Can you free yourself enough to be able to experience the reality of life as it goes on before and with you, and as you go on as part of it. Or not? Because if you can't you stand on square on, until you die.
It might sound like bullshit but that's what the song is about. All the songs are encouraging me, I imagine that I write them for me, it's to encourage myself not to accept a lead role in a cage, but to go on demanding to myself that I keep auditioning for a walk on part in the war, because that's where I want to be. I want to be in the trenchers, I don't want to be in the headquarters or sitting in a hotel somewhere, I want to be Probably, I might say, in a way that my father would approve of.
David Gilmour says: "Shine on is the one specifically about Syd, wish you were here as a broader remit". I hope I've helped with the interpretations. If you can, watch this documentary because it's really good and well done. Then he asks do you know what you have give up? And did you exchange A walk on part in the war For a lead role in a cage?
Then he goes on to say how I wish you were here mentally I might be way off but that's the way it reads to me. My Interpretation I think the first part of this song refers to growing up, maturing, and knowing how to discern between things that often fool us when we're young. When we're young we sometimes misconstrue the most straightforward signs in our lives. Someone smiles at us and we think its a veil. A beautiful blue sky doesn't seemingly have an obvious connection to pain; but these are the connections we sometimes mistakingly make mentally.
Growing out of this mindset is a sign of maturation or growth. As for the second part of this song Trading "hot ashes for trees" and "hot air for a cool breeze" can be interpreted again as maturing, getting more in sync with the world as opposed to your own selfishness. Literally, "how I wish you were here" would mean the narrator wants that other person to be where the narrator now is.
But given my interpretation of the first two verses, I'd like to and am inclined to think "how I wish you were here" is merely pointing out that the narrator would both him and the other person to be in the same place probably not physically. Moreover, to be as accurate as I can get, that line can be taken as simply being a feeling of 'longing to be I think the cover art, a man on fire shaking hands with a man that's not on fire perfectly symbolizes this song. I get the feeling that I'm overanalyzing -but I wouldn't have been able to make this interpretation had I not happened to think about something thats going on in my life while listening to it.
I am in love with this song and I have to say. This is one of the most insightful, clairvoyant and incredible interpretations that I have came across. I never even thought of it that way but it makes perfect sense.
Thank you Nowandnever on May 06, It's an interesting interpretation and of course if that's the meaning it has for you then no one can argue with that. But it is well established that the song was actually written about Syd Barrett's decline due to mental illness and drug abuse, as has been described in other comments. In the second verse, the narrator feels that as the subject has changed his values, he has lost something of himself in the process.
The implication is that it is better to be playing a minor part in real life, than to give up your freedom for a meaningless "lead role" in a limited world. The top 4 comments made me rethink my interpretation but its so relieving to read your version.
Now I can say I'm not the only one with such a perspective. General Comment The greatest thing about music is that it is totally up for individual interpretation. Just because the songwriter had some specifics in mind doesn't mean everyone else will see it that way. However the person takes it makes it special and unique for them. Screw everyone else, scholars and "experts" included.
This my initial and possibly last diatribe on this site. Markomatic on August 10, Link. No Replies Log in to reply. Both roger and dave have mentioned it clearly that the theme of this album is absence. Dave, in his interview, has claimed that after the success of DSOTM the band were confused as to whether they were musicians or businessmen.
They felt some sort of absence during WYWH period. We also know that roger and dave longed for their childhood innocence. And this song is pointing at the absence of the same innocence. Etc" simply put they wrote this song for their younger self. Where they did what they loved without thinking about the consequences. As opposed to the WYWH period where they had to think and work like businessmen and write hits as per the demands of the record labels.
No wonder they started writing anti music industry songs during the same period. It's a brilliant piece of work. If people realise the real meaning of this song, they'll fall in love with it all over again.
Happened with me. Pink Floyd is not easily picked apart as one would in a poetry class. General Comment I have always thought this song was about two people after a break up, two people who still love each other but have been living for many years apart. They shared dreams and ideals in life. The one who calls out wants to know where the other person is, is she still the same, or has she sold out to the world.
After so many years apart to achieve each their own dreams, he realizes that feelings haven't changed, the same problems exist, and he wishes to be with her. I think this song is about soulmates who get together but than part to do other things, but never forget eachother, and realize later on that nothing else matters, they should be together again. It's a song of loneliness, but it is a song that tells how nothing really matters but being with the person you belong with Is my idea of the song too cheesy?
Johnnyrose on October 10, Link. To chalk it up to his having done too much acid certainly does not pay tribute to one of the founding members of what became an amazing band.
Johnnyrose They had to take someones soul luckymag on May 27, My Interpretation I have always thought the song Wish You Were Here was about how people in relationships whatever kind: marriages, friendships, bandmates, partnerships,etc. Henceforth, the title "Wish You Were Here. It is possible to change to a degree that you really are not the same person you once were.
However, you stay in that relationship because it is comfortable all the while wishing that it could be as it once was. So, I think it is a song about loss and mourning that loss even if it is psychological in nature.
At least, that is what that song has always meant for me. Loss and mourning and wishing someone hadn't "gone away. I am replying to myself We're just two lost souls Swimming in a fish bowl Year after year, Running over the same old ground.
And how we found The same old fears. Wish you were here. You talk about the same things, you do the same things, you fear the same things, but at some point either you or they or both stepped out. But, it's comfortable and uncomfortable. Hence, the line "How I wish, how I wish you were here You can get as nostalgic as you want about the way it once was, but it won't ever be that way again. Then again, I may have it all wrong. Maybe I should be wishing I was here since I stepped out of my "normal" life about 12 years ago : It could be about oneself, too,I suppose, and wishing that things wouldn't change.
Who knows? It's Pink Floyd ADDGirl on May 04, The chances we don't take, the dreams we don't fulfill. The "cold comfort" we are familiar with that stops us from reaching out and taking risks that may have been better for us. But after recently losing my closest friend, i've fallen into the painful nostalgia. I came back to this song and I find my interpretation of it has changed all together.
You have explained it perfectly!! Herondale on November 15, ADDGirl I am sorry to hear of your friend. I am currently dealing with something similar. A very good and close friend of about 30 years is dying and has become very depressed.
He used to be the life of the party, but he is no longer. I do miss him a great deal; I just try to remember how he used to be and sometimes I do cry over the "loss" of one of my best friends.
It has always made me really think. The whole album makes me think about change and loss and trying to get through it the best you can. I am sorry to hear of your friend. It's hard to lose people you love. Namaste, ADDgirl morninglemon on November 15, You know, like those people that go on vacation to Bermuda and send a postcard back saying "Wish you were here". So he's in this miserable place and "hey wanna' join us?
If you look at the cover of the album titled "Wish You Were Here", you see a man on fire shaking hands with a man not on fire.
The upshot: Pink Floyd has sold more albums worldwide than the Beatles. Floyd recorded over a longer period, of course, but both groups have released about the same number of albums, and had about the same span of decades to sell their work to new generations — and in new configurations.
In its massive confusion, this accounting — which, whether we like it or not, hangs above our cultural world, as the band itself might have put it, motionless upon the air, like an albatross — is a testament to the good humor of the gods of rock, which now and again smile upon otherwise unemployable, gangly British nitwits.
The first was a goofy and absurdist pop-rock band, led by one Syd Barrett, whose contributions were limited basically to a couple of singles and one album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn ; more on him anon.
The second Pink Floyd had its origins before Barrett joined, and then reached full pretentious flower after his departure; this aggregation was one of the founders of progressive rock, a psychedelic, space-rock-y, quasi-improvisational ensemble; it proffered a whole bunch of those multipart suites and played around with atonal bashings and funny sound effects in soi-disant psychedelic happenings in Swinging London, most of it of little or no aesthetic interest this many years on.
You could make the argument that this phase soon evolved into a different, fourth version of the band, which saw a domineering Waters taking control and producing increasingly what were essentially Roger Waters solo albums, starting with Animals , going through The Wall and The Final Cut , and then proceeding into his solo career. Pink Floyd Phase 5 was the band that continued after Waters left, and would have been an enormous joke were it not for its record sales big and tour grosses even bigger.
The story is that Wright and Gilmour hashed out scores of instrumental tracks from which they picked promising tunes for their first Waters-less album. This made the cut? Right about then, the two remaining members, guitarist David Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason, realized that they controlled the name of one of the biggest entities in rock — and that, with that prick Waters gone, the conditions of actually being in that band had just improved remarkably.
Speaking of disasters, Rolling Stone gave this overwrought, self-important, and almost unlistenable album five stars. And the cow on the cover is a similar piece of absurdism. All that you can forgive. But this nonsense begins with faintly recorded horns as an intro into a six-part not-so-magnum opus. Are there passages that are vaguely interesting? Yes, but nothing to excuse the excessive length. King Crimson came along soon, too. There was even a time Fleetwood Mac, originally a blues band, was a considered a prog-rock outfit.
But truthfully, Pink Floyd guys never had the pure musicality, not to mention the vision, to pull anything like this together.
The rest of the album was divided between the four band members, each of whom was given about 15 minutes to play around in his own musical sandbox. I would like to dock it a dozen notches for the surpassingly stupid title. The Picts were an early British tribe. For their album of the same title, the band took their soundtrack music and added a few more songs.
Toc H. It seems to go on for an eternity, but when you check it seems only four-and-a-half minutes have passed — but they are trying ones indeed.
The band, thinking they were onto a hot groove, had to be persuaded to reduce its length in the studio. Wright and Gilmour really get into it — so much so that they forget to include an actual song. Nothing ever happens. If Stephen Bishop had come across Waters sitting on a frat-house stairway with an acoustic guitar serenading a couple of coeds , he would have grabbed the guitar and smashed it.
The story is about a rock star named Pink, raised in the damaged postwar period and forced through a pointlessly rigid schooling system. Here, we have a man returned from the previous war, becoming a schoolteacher, and watching the war cries begin for the Falklands.
That conflict, forgotten now, started when the dictator running Argentina occupied some British-held islands in the South Atlantic, mostly to ramp up patriotic fervor on the home front.
Margaret Thatcher dispatched some warships and the world watched for a week or so as they chugged their way down the globe. The absurd conflict that resulted included the senseless sinking of an Argentine ship, which cost more than lives. To Waters, this represented an enormous betrayal on the part of the British government, whose rabble-rousing for the war overlooked the terrible cost of the last one.
But this song is a puzzlement. Lie back and think of England. So occasionally you get songs like this one, where they need a piece of narrative-driving. A transition number, 30 seconds long. That was Meddle. This is the last song on the first side, a raggedy, kind of acoustic number, mumbled, with terrible sound.
Unfortunately it derives from a pretty lite guitar riff and some Deep Purple—y keyboard mewling. The band was never on the cover of Rolling Stone until a piece about the breakup … which was published in , years after it all happened. Who the hell cared that someone named Roger Waters left Pink Floyd? Pink Floyd had to hire outside drummers to play drums for its drummer.
Gilmour also brought in outside songwriters, a motley crew that extended even to former Madonna collaborator Patrick Leonard. And the record company still rejected the album! Back to the drawing board. The ultimate result was as lame a work as you can imagine. Bad guys! I saw it. It was awesome. Is he a dog? What this song is really about, however, is songwriting royalties. Waters probably took home 3 cents per album sold for each track he wrote, so he would have made a total of 6 cents per album just for these two basically identical little ditties.
That would have given Gilmour about a penny and a half per album sold. Waters, of course, might have argued and no doubt did that it was his songs that drove the record sales that kept the rest of the band in English manor houses. After all the bombast comes this soft little ditty. In the film it runs over the credits and its import is lost.
An interminable instrumental, almost devoid of ideas, unless you count letting some out-of-tune kids make funny noises for the last several minutes of this six-minute track an idea. The Second World War was a terrible event in world history, and took a devastating toll. This song is an acknowledgment that there were reasons for the war. But all of its victims deserve much better than this labored, clotted, and overwrought assault on the finer sensibilities of just about anyone who might actually listen to it.
Confidential to Roger W. This one comprises a comparatively restrained three parts, and includes the sounds of an actual breakfast being made, complete with dripping faucet, which turns out to be kinda irritating. Gilmour noodles guitars in the middle, with a poorly recorded bass interfering. The third part is mostly keyboard, mixed horribly. The band actually used to play this nonsense live. The argument for this junk, I suppose, is that the band, despite its space-rock leanings, was much more down to earth and organic, as opposed to the flights of high electronic fantasy offered by your King Crimsons and the other, more energetic progressive-rock outfits of the time.
The backing vocals are a parody of themselves. Doo-wop vocals, synthesized drum rolls, and melodramatic lyrics. Why did Pink let anyone take his soul? Boy, was he going to be surprised! If this were a scene in This Is Spinal Tap , the band would be assembling in a room to give Waters the bad news when … the phone would ring, informing the members that — due to incoherently planned and overambitious tours, a lack of tax planning, bad investments, and inadequate oversight of their accountants — they were basically broke.
At which point the members were all ears to hear what their resident genius had on tap for them next. Sounds intriguing! No other album close to that rarefied air has so many songwriting credits from one person. Again, given his stature, he should have been netting 3 cents per song, or about 75 cents in total, per record sold.
Foreign rates vary, of course, but he probably got more than that at least in Europe, where songwriters get 10 percent of the wholesale price. This feels aimless and uninventive. You might think it was unlikely that there were better tracks that were somehow overlooked; you would be right. I liked how Waters wrested the symbol away and tried to make a statement about personal isolation.
Anyway, here, Pink gets a groupie and proceeds to get a little weird. In the film it ends with the highly cinematic scene of Bob Geldof shaving his chest. He was portly and quiet, with his pants belted high over his stomach, his head and eyebrows shaved.
It took a while before his crushed friends recognized their former bandmate. Lots — way lots — of cutesy percussion, which passed for experimental back in those days. Syd Barrett grew up in Cambridge, which was relatively protected from the damage the war did to England. He knew both Gilmour and Waters from a young age.
His disarming off-kilter creativity early on was evidenced in things like a handcrafted book he titled Fart Enjoy.
This is one of his second-tier songs. All of his tricks are here; the lines stuffed full of words, the uneven rhythms and gay little asides, the marveling at the wondrous world around us. And then the pompous synthesized horns kick in. Repeat, for almost seven minutes. He was a pianist, and a keyboardist, there can be no doubt. But the difference between knowing how to play piano, even well, and crafting a minute solo work worth listening to and making people pay for is a very big leap.
You can laugh at Rick Wakeman or Keith Emerson, or even Tony Banks, from Genesis; but they were patently heavy, significant, even spectacular players. But he had no business writing minute on-record epics. And one of the Cambridge boys in the band should have told him how to spell Sisyphus. Way too much echo on his voice.
We can see from the start this will be a much less subtle! On record, though, it comes across just as six minutes of meandering. They were right there at the forefront of such stuff, so they deserve to get credit for the innovation.
It is perfect, however, in one regard. It gets really irritating when the song takes on a sort of prancing rhythm. I hate that. This was the only unreleased track on it. One of the most distinctive things about Floyd at the time was how haphazard their sound was.
In fairness, though, a lot of the experimental bands at the time would put out albums with oddly disparate tracks on them. Well-produced track, but its lackluster and sometimes overly literal melody and dopey and sometimes overly literal lyrics sink it.
Length: Again, we have the droney sounds with some Gilmourian ruminations up top, again going on for minutes. Docked ten notches for its excessively dreary !! These guys and their suites. Part two has some intoned vocalizings. Part three is a passable rock instrumental. Nothing holds these three horrid-to-mediocre pieces of music together. Waters would write a lot, in subsequent years, about the dehumanizing nature of the record industry, and persuasively so.
And in any case any such attempt would be fraud, because it was not that band anymore, as the outside songwriters attested. Most people will remember only the overdone echoes on the word closer. More was the first of two Barbet Schroeder films the band contributed a soundtrack to. The kind thing to say is that the band was still trying to find its voice. A percussion-y tack of incidental sounds.
More was the first film by Schroeder, a minor player in the French New Wave. He gets into some wild stuff and then runs off to Ibiza with a female friend. Schroeder went on to direct some U. This is basically just a Gilmour solo song on a Pink Floyd album. His co-writer contributed just lyrics. He did what he could with it for a long time, but at a certain point he just decided to go with its screechy essential nature. Around this point in The Wall , listeners could be forgiven for finding it trying.
Minus the four-octave range and ability to pitch. Where the band got the spelling the town is Saint-Tropez is the least of its problems.
A weird vocal, machine-y thing. At this point, the second side of Momentary Lapse was shaping up to be by far the least interesting side of music the band had offered up since the dreadful days of Ummagumma. I knew Syd Barrett. Syd Barrett was a friend of mine. It lasts for barely more than two minutes. The acoustic strumming at the beginning made it sound like what it was, a forced duty.
Reprised, without the question mark, on the fourth side. Supposedly about the fall of the Berlin Wall. Odd that during the recording process no one suggested they be improved.
More ominous backup singers. The electronic voice you hear is that of Stephen Hawking. Gilmour actually heard the words in a cell-phone commercial, and thought they were neat. Arma virumque cano , boys! Birds chirping, then some very serious sounding vocals and some simple organ chords. Two were enough. You can hear the band trying to figure out a sound and approach on the second album. You get everything here: pretty piano, intoned lyrics, some mild psychedelic freakout. The real issue was the tonal discrepancies.
If you really want to experience this, there are more convincing versions available, on video in the concert movie Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii highly recommended to anyone with a passing interest in the early band and on record as a live track on Ummagumma. There you get a sense of the band improvising within the different sections. As a studio recording it feels pointless.
At this point, after two discs of this stuff, you really want to put a sharp stick in your eye before listening to this Sondheim pastiche. The good news here is that Gilmour gets his hands on an actually singable five-note melody; the bad is that he takes those five notes and sings them over and over. And over and over and over again. Restating his thesis, Waters is telling us about the difficult life of the returning veteran.
This is a purty little ballad, sung delicately, with some actual bite in the lyrics. At the same time, these goofballs were working on The Dark Side of the Moon! Some lovely guitar sounds, though. Done after the release of Piper ; Barrett was already on his downward slide. It was almost his last contribution to the group, at the end of But there is something real and engaging about the chorus.
And Nick Mason hitting the skins in the background. Maybe some expert in improvised avant-garde jazz can disagree, but it seems a bit random and forced to me. So give it a listen if you want to take a step back into the past. This is a Barrett song, so it has more energy and melody than most Floyd excursions like this. This is not a dynamic player.
One more thing. Wear tight pants and prance around? The casually strummed acoustic guitar and his natural vocals contrast too sharply with the electronics that will follow. The memorial home in question is supposed to be for the ruling world leaders of the era — Reagan, Haig, Thatcher, Brezhnev, and so on.
The usual issues of tonal consistency for the band at this point, however, still apply. Could almost be a Neil Young composition, or even Carole King, though it would have a stronger melody. And better production. The energy picks up four or five minutes in though. I love how the amiable funk laid down by the band is overwhelmed by the impressive electronic washes of sound in the intro, just as our lonely artiste is swamped by the industry.
And docked another 20 for the fucking irony.
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