Knowing this was coming was like seeing an oasis of familiarity ahead. I recall that I commented on Dark Side Of The Moon that I saw the two albums as a pair, and also that I thought that I preferred this one more.
I think I’ll revise that – listening again, Dark Side is the better album, it’s more varied and also richer in sound (thanks in part due to Clare Torry and the backing singers). This felt… oddly slight. The richness of the opening to Shine On You Crazy Diamond that I remembered just wasn’t as lush. Yes, David Gilmour’s opening plaintive single guitar note, when it finally arrives, is as evocative as ever, but like visiting an old school and thinking how everything looks smaller than you recall, this wasn’t as powerful as when I first heard it.
Partly, I think, because even in the course of this 1001 Albums endeavour I’ve heard other tracks that are deeper in sound, and partly perhaps because when I first heard it, the album was only slightly over ten years old, and not the fifty years old that it now is. Yikes. Maybe the difference is also that Alan Parsons wasn’t the producer for this one.
The album is basically only five tracks – the epic Shine On You Crazy Diamond, which starts and finishes the album, and the acoustic guitar loveliness of Wish You Were Here are songs specifically about Syd Barrett (“threatened by shadows at night, and exposed in the light”), but also loosely about loss and absence in general. The other two tracks – Welcome To The Machine and Have A Cigar – are about the music industry, how it chews up and spits out musicians at the mercy of clueless executives who claim to be big fans but then ask ludicrously misguided questions such as “By the way, which one’s Pink?” because they’re only pretending to care about the band and the music for their own profit. It always feels a little disingenuous to complain about a business that allows you the money to e.g. collect performance sports cars (Nick Mason), but I guess those that make it that far are few and far between.
This is very much Rick Wright’s album, with the synth not only forming the backbone for most of Shine On, but also providing the pounding industrial beat for Welcome To The Machine – probably my favourite track on the album these days. The Pink Floyd propensity to play with sound effects is also in evidence, with Gilmour’s solo at the end of Have A Cigar getting whisked away to the right speaker where it becomes a track on a radio, which is tuned through a burst of classical music and a talk show before becoming the rhythm guitar to Wish You Were Here, over which Gilmour accompanies himself.
It was nice to revisit, even if somewhat disappointing. Still a good album, but I can now say that I prefer Dark Side more.
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