(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Tue 23 December 2025 18:30, UK
It’s not often you find Roger Waters and David Gilmour agreeing on much.
Ever since Waters’ unceremonious split from Pink Floyd in 1985, the pair’s legacy has been tainted by public spats, mutual mud-slinging, and a contemptuous to-and-fro of the band’s narrative, Gilmour lambasting Waters’ supposed artistic megalomania and increasing control freakery, while the latter bassist and principal songwriter has been more than happy over the years of throwing shade at the guitarist’s creative captaining of Pink Floyd from A Momentary Lapse of Reason onwards.
Where effusive praise is to be found, however, is among Pink Floyd’s mid-1970s peak. Gone were the LP fumbles in the dark post-Syd Barrett offering pearls of brilliance amid otherwise half-interesting conceptual mushes, and yet had Waters steered the band’s albums toward his own biopic narratives, fuelling the likes of The Wall, as great as that record was.
Alchemic synergy was gleaned from The Dark Side of the Moon, the creative and sonic apex of Pink Floyd’s evolution in the eyes of their fans, where conceptual scope, laser arrangements, and lyrical mining of the human condition all pulsed in heady, cosmic perfection, bringing the quartet the fame they’d been chasing for years.
Pink Floyd would afford their mammoth best seller an immaculate follow-up. Released in 1975, Wish You Were Here furthered their critiques of capitalism and the music industry with a poetic exploration of their original fallen comrade. A tighter, more refined record, Pink Floyd’s ninth LP courses through haunted synth phantasms, cynical funk, and a title track beaming with contemplative radiance beneath its beguiling façade of country folk stroll.
Barrett’s exact presence is ambiguous, but it’s impossible not to sense their former frontman’s spirit all over ‘Wish You Were Here’s existential ruminations. Sparked from Gilmour’s initial riff, Waters’ lyrical lion’s share supposedly was the bassist doing what he does best: writing about himself. Where Floyd’s bassist is channelling the inner turmoil at life’s fraught and twisting traverse, Gilmour’s always maintained he can never perform the song without thinking of their old friend and casualty of the counterculture.
It’s the number that prompts much mutual congratulating. Both appearing on 2012’s The Story of Wish You Were Here documentary, the disgruntled duo were able to shift aside their differences and praise a moment of joint magic, Waters highlighting their efforts on ‘Wish You Were Here’ as “really good. All bits of it are really, really good. I’m very happy about it,” while Gilmour celebrating its “resonance and the emotional weight it carries, it is one of our best songs.”
Future peaks would be surmounted by Pink Floyd before the decade’s end, Animals’ alienated grit soaking up punk’s seethe, and The Wall unleashing a rock opera marvel backed by captivating theatre, but the fraying split between the band would splinter to breaking point before long.
It’s ‘Wish You Were Here’s rippling majesty that best documents the two firing on all cylinders, weaving their synchronic sorcery plucked from the ether, only Pink Floyd in their pomp seemed to ever be able to reach.
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