Wish You Were Here Review

Follow up records to enormous successes usually fail from trying too hard. This one fails to try at all, in the best way. Shine On You Crazy Diamond is split across both sides, opens with several minutes of held synthesiser before a four note phrase arrives, and that phrase is the emotional argument of the whole album. The story that Barrett walked into the session unrecognised while they were mixing his elegy is true and it hangs over everything.

Welcome to the Machine is built from tape edits and a door, and it is genuinely cold. Have a Cigar hands the lead vocal to a visiting folk singer because neither of them could get through it, and the outsider's delivery is exactly right for a lyric about executives who do not know which one is Pink. The title track is two acoustic guitars, one made to sound like a car radio, and a lyric of plain unhappiness. Sparser than its predecessor and, on a lot of days, better company.