Roger Waters on the “last” real Pink Floyd album
Every Pink Floyd fan usually has their own interpretation of when the band truly ended. Some may point to when Roger Waters left the fold, some cite the band’s final performance with Richard Wright as the moment when the magic really dried up, and there are still a few diehards who insist that any version of the band without Syd Barrett wasn’t nearly as good as when they started. If you were to ask Waters when everything ended fro good, it started right after Dark Side of the Moon on Wish You Were Here.
After the success of their biggest album and one of the greatest album covers of all time, there was always some question about how much higher they could go. When you have hits like ‘Money’ and ‘Time’ on one album, it’s a hard sell for anyone to ask you to pull off that kind of magic one more time.
Waters wasn’t looking to repeat the same formula, anyway, and the memory of Barrett was already starting to weigh heavy on his mind. Compared to Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here might actually be the better album, if only for different reasons. Whereas the last album was a grand concept album about what makes people mad, this odyssey is a touching tribute to Barrett and a cautionary tale about what the music industry has in store.
Although the band would continue to reach even greater heights both onstage and in the studio, Waters thought this was the last time that everything felt like a creative entity, telling Musician, “I think you could say that ‘Wish You Were Here’ was written, partially specifically about Syd, but largely about my sense of the absence of one from another, and from the band. So as far as I’m concerned, Wish You Were Here was the last Pink Floyd album. The Wall was my record, and so was The Final Cut, and who played or didn’t play on it”.
It’s not like Waters is necessarily wrong, either. The Wall may be one of the greatest albums of Pink Floyd’s career, but considering how much he was involved with it, it may as well be a Roger Waters solo album rather than a true Floyd project. Then again, saying everything stopped on Wish You Were Here leaves poor Animals out in the cold, considering that it features the best collaborations between everyone on songs like ‘Dogs’.
Choosing what the last Pink Floyd album was wasn’t really Waters’s choice to make. He may have left the band after The Final Cut, but seeing David Gilmour take the reins on albums like The Division Bell had its fair share of highlights, especially when Richard Wright came back behind the keyboards.
Still, it’s hard to listen to Wish You Were Here and feel like it’s the end of an era in a way. As much as it may have been a send-off to Barrett, the camaraderie of the band seemed to fall apart halfway through the production of the album, leading to Waters diving further into his own psyche rather than caring about his other bandmates like a normal person should.
The title track may have been a sad lament towards their fallen bandmate, but it also may as well be an epitaph for the group as well. Those four notes on ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ may encompass the spirit of Barrett, but that ghost from the past took the soul of the band with it when it left.
