“I regret it”: the song that derails Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here’
Even a masterpiece might carry the signs of a brush stroke out of place. Achieving perfection is a difficult task. But in the eyes of the artist, it might just be impossible. Even if they think they’d pulled it off at the moment, years down the line, they might start to see the flaws. When it comes to one of their masterpiece records, Pink Floyd certainly did.
Pink Floyd have always been perfectionists. The band thrived on that lethal combination of being experimental and determined to get everything right. Even when the band were pushing boundaries, both in their earlier psychedelic work with Syd Barrett and then in their later rock epics, the mission to be innovative came hand-in-hand with a dedication to skill, craft and a perfectly polished finish.
That’s partly why the band themselves did their production. Between David Gilmour and Roger Waters’ inputs, the thought of adding more people and bringing more chefs into the kitchen seemed like it would just mess up the whole recipe. So, instead, they remained insular to remain focused on their own vision.
No one could ever get in the way of that. If the band wanted to share a long, spanning opus stretching well into the ten-minute mark, they would do it. If they wanted to share an instrumental-only track, they’d do it. If they wanted to create an 80-minute-long concept album, they made it happen. And if they wanted to release a record with only five songs, they made that too—Wish You Were Here.
That 1975 album is a masterpiece, no doubt. Housing the title track ‘Wish You Were Here’ and the opus ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, those two songs alone make it a masterpiece without even considering the rest of the tracklist. Actually, Waters would rather you didn’t because even though the album includes some of their best work, he also sees it as featuring their worst.
‘Have a Cigar’ falls into the latter category. “I never liked it, I regret it,” Waters said plainly about the song. Sitting just before the beautiful title track, this one was never really going to get a look in. But then, when it was also plagued by the frustration brewing between Waters and Gilmour, it got even worse.
It was a song they simply couldn’t figure out. Waters and Gilmour both tried their hand at singing it individually, and they tried doing it as a duet—nothing worked. So, in a last-ditch effort, they called in Roy Harper, the folk singer, to do the vocals instead.
On reflection, Waters felt that didn’t work either. “He was singing a sort of parody, which I don’t like,” he said. After giving up on doing his own vocals, he ended up regretting it, as he concluded, “I think if I have persevered with it, I would have done it better. I think if I’d have sung it, it would have been more vulnerable and less cynical than the way he did it.”
