Tuesday 25 February at 11.25 pm the documentary “Pink Floyd: The Story of Wish You Were here” is aired on Rai5 (then streaming on RaiPlay). The film traces the gestation and birth of one of the most famous and loved albums of Pink Floyd, revealing its deepest nature: a tribute to its inspirer, Syd Barrett. The “Crazy Diamond”, as he is defined on the album, was the first leader of Pink Floyd, the lost companion that the English band would then continue to recall even in the following records.
Everything talks about him on the 1975 album, but he is not there. Not even when he appears without announced in the Abbey Road studios on June 5, 1975, shocking his ex-compagni who are working on “Shine on you Crazy Diamond”, the song dedicated to him. It is unrecognizable: corpulent, eyebrows and shaved hair, but above all dull look. Syd Barrett, in the album “Wish You Were here”, which will be released in September of the same year, is present with his absence. The founding member and first leader of the band is remembered by David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Roger Waters in the “Pink Floyd: The Story of Wish You Were here” DOC.
The psychic disorders related to the abuse of drugs force Barrett to abandon the group in 1968. But it is his psychedelic visions that make Pink Floyd a cult phenomenon: “As soon as I entered the studio I realized that the creative engine was Syd”, Remember the first producer of the band Joe Boyd.
In 1973, five years after Barrett's departure, “The Dark Side of the Moon” became the top album of all time. Planetarium success disorientates the four artists, suffocated by the music industry: “We had to understand for what reason we were in the sector – if we were actually artists or businessmen”, says guitarist David Gilmour and continues: “We would no longer be separated because We were afraid of the next Pink Floyd, to lose that brand so strong and protective. ”
When in January 1975 they put themselves in the studio for a new album, the creative inertia freezes them. The shadow of Syd burns on the group: they will build an album based on the absence that starts from the lack of their first frontman. They recover “Shine on You” of the previous year. “It's my homage to Syd. The sincere experience of my sadness, the admiration of his talent and the pain for having lost a friend “, says Waters, who sees” Wish You Were here “, born from the collaboration with Gilmour, as a wider idea:” I can tell you what it means to me, but any interpretation is legitimate. ”
The disappointment for the music industry is the other great theme, expressed in “Have a Cigar”, recorded by singer Roy Harper, who is there by chance, because none of the band can sing it.
“Wish You Were here” is a concept-album On the purity and innocence now lost, with references not too veiled to Syd Barrett. He will sell 19 million copies all over the world, going to history together with the cover of the artist Storm Thorgerson, with the two businessmen who hold their hand while one of the two takes fire, not a photomontage but a shot of the partner of Thorgerson, Aubrey “Po” Powell. “It is an album of pain, anger and love. But above all love ”, Waters will say, who in 1985 will leave the band. Gilmour, Waters, Wright and Mason will play together again only 25 years later, in 2005. The following year, at 60 years old, Syd Barrett will die.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
