Recommendations of the Editorial team
Fifty years after the release of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here,” the band returned earlier this month back with an extensive anniversary box, to celebrate the landmark 1975 album.
Dreamlike images between nostalgia and surrealism
About a week after the retrospective compilation was released, the band treated fans to a music video for the impressive title song. Filled with nostalgic footage of the band in the studio and running through a subway station, as well as playful animations of a character floating through time and space.
The video appropriately opens with a slice of the moon before immediately exploding into chaotic images. Sperm racing towards an egg, an eye full of flames and lights shooting through the darkness before intimate shots of the band. The rest of the video unfolds like a fever dream, eventually returning to a series of images that mirror the beginning.
A ROLLING STONE review of the 50th Anniversary Edition praised the box set as a “time capsule documenting one of the strangest phases in the quartet’s lives.” Studio rarities include two versions of “Wish You Were Here,” including a recording with David Gilmour on pedal steel guitar and a version with a violin solo by jazz virtuoso Stéphane Grappelli, which music writer Kory Grow describes as “almost too beautiful for this song.”
Rare recordings and legendary live recordings
The box set also includes the mythical tape of the LA Sports Arena performance, recorded by famed bootlegger Mike “The Mic” Millard – the sonically best recording of a show from Pink Floyd’s 29-date Wish You Were Here tour.
As Grow notes, “Listening to the box reminds you how young they were: they were heroes and ghosts, legends and martyrs – and by the way, they were all ‘Pink’.”