Pink Floyd entered Abbey Road Studio

When Pink Floyd Dark shirt entered Abbey Road Studios during the first week of 1975 to begin work on their ninth album, Wish You Werethe guys were exhausted. Their previous release, The Dark Side Of The Moon, had become one of the decade’s biggest hits, transforming the cult musicians into mainstream art rockers.

Pink Floyd cemented their new audience by touring heavily for three years, but the time had come to do something new. Recording a follow-up to Dark Side wasn’t going to be easy, especially with that album still clinging to the upper reaches of the Billboard charts, its success hanging over the band like a cloud. Wish You Were Here was going to be tough.

Meanwhile, former Pink Floyd frontman Syd Barrett was suffering a mental breakdown. His crippling addiction to LSD had forced him out of the band in 1968, and a pair of solo albums had done little to resurrect his career in the intervening years. Peter Jenner, Pink Floyd’s original manager, even convinced Barrett to book some studio time at Abbey Road in August 1974, but the sessions petered out after three fruitless days. Barrett seemed to have lost his spark for good.

Pink Floyd the free encyclopedia Wish You Were Here, like the record that precedes it, is a concept album. Revolving around the central theme of absence, Waters’ lyrics illustrate the difference between the group’s early years – when Pink Floyd was a band of brothers, making music for a small but devoted audience – and the present. The guys had become multi-millionaires in the wake of Dark Side’s success, but they’d also become cash cows for a corporate label, and the camaraderie that once existed between them had grown strained. Tying the song cycle together are two compositions about Syd Barrett: the nine-part opus “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” and the short, haunting title track.