Wish You Were Here, the band\u2019s ninth studio album, was released two years after the bestselling The Dark Side of the Moon.<\/p>\n
The lyrics of the five tracks express longing and alienation, with Shine On You Crazy Diamond, a multi-part tribute to former frontman Syd Barrett.<\/p>\n
Armitage\u2019s poem asks \u201cDid you ever think how many ears you\u2019d worm your way into Pink Floyd? Can I be in your band?\u201d<\/p>\n
He later adds: \u201cYou fashioned soundtracks for deep dreams. Did astrophysics without the numbers, philosophy without the words, made atoms vibrate in bones and brains.\u201d<\/p>\n
Armitage, who was 12 when the record was released, describes seeing people wearing Pink Floyd merchandise \u201cso far up the Amazon, even the trees were lost\u201d, on the banks of the Ganges and even in an Arctic rescue hut.<\/p>\n
Speaking about the poem, Armitage said: \u201cI was thinking about the album and their noise, and what effect that has had on people right across the globe.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t know whether I could put into words what that music sounded like. I only get involved with projects if I think I can\u2019t do them, so this was a natural invitation. <\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to write something that was album-shaped, that would fit onto the side of an LP and bleed right to the margins of a square. I was trying to mimic the noise of Wish You Were Here \u2014 there are no gaps in it. Like a wall of warm sound. I wanted the text to be a physical manifestation of that.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2022 Poet laureate Simon Armitage leads artists back on to the road with tour of public libraries<\/a><\/p>\n He described listening to Pink Floyd as a teenager: \u201cIt was so profound, so thought provoking. There aren\u2019t many artistic experiences in the form of noise that send shivers up my spine and make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. But when I put Wish You Were Here on as a record, and it begins, I get that feeling every single time.\u201d<\/p>\n Wish You Were Here 50 will be released in multiple physical formats including 3LP, 2CD, Blu-ray, digital and a deluxe box set.<\/p>\n Pink Floyd in 1968 in Los Angeles: (L-R) Nick Mason, Dave Gilmour, Rick Wright (centre front), Roger Waters<\/p>\n MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES \u2013 GETTY<\/p>\n The digital version includes 25 bonus tracks made up of nine studio rarities, and 16 live recordings at Pink Floyd\u2019s Los Angeles Sports Arena concert on April 26th 1975.<\/p>\n Earlier this year, Pink Floyd brought out The Machine Song (Demo #2, Revisited), a previously unreleased version of Welcome To The Machine. <\/p>\n Nostalgic dad rockers get their poetic voice<\/p>\n The job of poet laureate is notoriously unforgiving (James Marriott writes). You get famous as a poet by writing passionate, personal sonnets wrung from the very depths of your soul. The bizarre reward is that you get to spend the latter part of your career writing pompous poetic pronouncements about such deeply artistically unpromising occasions as royal weddings and state banquets.<\/p>\n The consensus is that Simon Armitage<\/a> is making a pretty splendid go of this difficult job. Cannily, the tone of his public poetry is not of the national bard addressing the crowd from the podium but of the everyman outsider, the ordinary bloke who has snuck in at the back to gawp at the cathedral\/palace\/banqueting hall. Witness his coronation poem An Unexpected Guest.<\/p>\n The idea of writing a poem about the fiftieth anniversary of the Pink Floyd album Wish You Were Here is a characteristically nice one. It is a national occasion in a sense, if not quite the kind that Tennyson<\/a> would have written about. It\u2019s important that it evidently means so much to Armitage. I\u2019d much rather read a poet laureate on a subject that inspires him than dutifully putting Trump\u2019s presidential visit into rhyme. And though the poem is personal, Armitage speaks for Pink Floyd fans all across the world. \u201cYou found the resonant frequency of the human soul\u201d, he tells the band. And perhaps it\u2019s about time nostalgic dad rockers \u2014 shockingly under-represented in the history of English verse \u2014 got their poetic voice.<\/p>\n The poem itself is charming if not (in my view) mindblowing. By far the best image in it is the one of Armitage lowering \u201cthe lunar explorer of the stylus\u201d on to the record. That very acutely captures the way that a landing craft touching down on a strange planet does have the careful, hovering motion of a record player stylus being lowered into its groove. And the stylus, like the lunar craft, is about to take its operator to new worlds.<\/p>\n![\"Pink](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/\/b21ec515-16ac-4ee5-a438-25eedd64a432.jpg\")
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