Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here

January 20th 2017,

Outer Cover As Found In Stores

Record Cover Under Polythene Sleeve

The packaging is unique amongst albums initially wrapped in black cover with only a print of the record Center on display to give you a clue as to what's inside. Once removed is shows a burning man shaking hands which is how the band were feeling about the record industry and seeing out their current contract.

Pink Floyds ninth studio album and their last recorded under their deal with harvest records EMI. Under their record deal Pink Floyd had unlimited recording time in EMI studios and Abby Road was the home for this album.

Using the same techniques as their last album Dark Side Of The Moon this recording is a further refinement of the Pink Floyd sound. It was decided to write a song for their former member Syd Barret who had been kicked out of the band seven years before to that end the band recorded Shine On You Crazy Diamond which book ends this album and is classic Floyd through and through. Syd had formed the band many years before and this was the band and Walters the bands writer trying to get closure. Syd visited the band at Abby Road during the recording a shadow of his younger self and struggling for inspiration for his own record. 

The three middle tracks of the album are of a different theme. 

Welcome To The Machine, is a critique of the music industry as a whole and the demands it places on artists but it's done in a very Floyd way and is a for shadow of their next album Animals. 

Have A Cigar, again another anti establishment song poking its finger at the English middle class system and how having the correct background and schooling gets you through the right doors. 

Wish You Were Here, I have to clam this as one of my favourites. Walters trying to deal with isolation and an increasing alienation that will grow over the years to breaking point is all in here. The hope that someone else will see the world as you do and the lack of communication and the environment in which they were working together sometimes in different studios.