Wish You Were Here (Pink Floyd Album) - Reception

Reception

The band played much of Wish You Were Here on 5 July 1975 at an open-air music festival at Knebworth. Singer Roy Harper, performing at the same event, on discovering that his stage costume was missing proceeded to destroy one of Pink Floyd's vans (injuring himself in the process). This delayed the normal setup procedure of the band's sound system. As a pair of World War II Spitfire aircraft had been booked to fly over the crowd during their entrance, the band were not able to delay their set. The result was that a power supply problem pushed Wright's keyboards completely out of tune, damaging the band's performance. At one point he left the stage, but the band were able to continue with a less sensitive keyboard, a piano and a simpler light show. Following a brief intermission, they returned to perform The Dark Side of the Moon, but critics displeased about being denied access backstage savaged the performance.

The album was released on 12 September 1975 in the UK, and on the following day in the US. In Britain, with 250,000 advance sales it went straight to number one, and demand was such that EMI informed retailers that only 50% of their orders would be fulfilled. With 900,000 advance orders (the largest for any Columbia release) it reached number one on the US Billboard chart in its second week. As of 1991 Wish You Were Here was Pink Floyd's fastest-selling album ever, but initially received mixed reviews:

Shine on You Crazy Diamond is initially credible because it purports to confront the subject of Syd Barrett, the long and probably forever lost guiding light of the original Floyd. But the potential of the idea goes unrealised; they give such a matter-of-fact reading of the goddamn thing that they might as well be singing about Roger Waters's brother-in-law getting a parking ticket. This lackadaisical demeanor forces, among other things, a reevaluation of their relationship to all the space cadet orchestras they unconsciously sired. The one thing those bands have going for them, in their cacophonously inept way, is a sincere passion for their "art." And passion is everything of which Pink Floyd is devoid. —Ben Edmunds, Rolling Stone,

Robert Christgau, however, thought highly of the album, writing "... the music is not only simple and attractive, with the synthesizer used mostly for texture and the guitar breaks for comment, but it actually achieves some of the symphonic dignity (and cross-referencing) that The Dark Side of the Moon simulated so ponderously." He later wrote, "My favorite Pink Floyd album has always been Wish You Were Here, and you know why? It has soul, that's why—it's Roger Waters's lament for Syd, not my idea of a tragic hero but as long as he's Roger's that doesn't matter." Melody Maker, on the other hand, was disparaging: "From whichever direction one approaches Wish You Were Here, it still sounds unconvincing in its ponderous sincerity and displays a critical lack of imagination in all departments." Modern reception has been mostly positive, and in 2012, Wish You Were Here was voted 211th on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". In 1998 Q readers voted Wish You Were Here the 34th greatest album of all time. In 2000 the same magazine placed it at number 43 in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever. In 2007, one of Germany's largest public radio stations, WDR 2, asked its listeners to vote for the 200 best albums of all time. Wish You Were Here was voted number one. In 2004 Wish You Were Here was ranked number 36 on Pitchfork Media's list of the Top 100 albums of the 1970s. IGN rated Wish You Were Here as the 8th greatest classic rock album.

Despite the problems during production, the album remained Wright's favourite: "It's an album I can listen to for pleasure, and there aren't many Floyd albums that I can." Gilmour shares this view: "I for one would have to say that it is my favourite album, the Wish You Were Here album. The end result of all that, whatever it was, definitely has left me an album I can live with very very happily. I like it very much."