Pink Floyd found it difficult to follow up their hit 1973 album, The Dark Side of the Moon. The record’s success left them wondering exactly how they could top it, or at the very least come up with something even more stunning.
As guitarist David Gilmour told NPR in October, “We were in a very strange place.”
Now we know just how strange. In a recent talk with NPR for the album’s 50th anniversary, former Floyd drummer Nick Mason explained the group’s methods during their first weeks back in Abbey Road Studios, where Dark Side was recorded.
“In fact, of course, we ended up spending an awful lot of studio time doing nothing or working on a project called Household Objects,” Mason says. The concept behind that latter project, he said, “was to make a record using household objects rather than musical instruments.
“The only thing I remember playing was, instead of using a bass drum, I had an ax and a large log of wood.”
Pink Floyd recorded just two songs before giving up.
“I think if we’d stuck with it, we’d still be in Abbey Road now trying to finish,” Mason says. “We should have carried on touring Dark Side for another year. But we didn’t. We thought we’d sort of had to get on, I suppose.”
It wasn’t all a wasted effort. One of the instruments for Household Objects was a makeshift glass harmonica, made by filling water glasses with varying amounts of liquid and stroking the wetted edges of the glasses to produce bell-like timbres. The instrument reappeared on the intro to “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” the central track on Wish You Were Here, the album they eventually got around to making.
As Gilmour previously explained, bass guitarist Roger Waters came up with the album’s title, which was in part a criticism of his bandmates, who were, creatively speaking, not all there.
But Wish You Were Here was also a tribute to the band’s founder, Syd Barrett, who abandoned the group as his undiagnosed mental health issues made it impossible for him to perform. His breakdown, which began while the band was on tour in the U.S. — a stint that saw them living for a short time with the Alice Cooper band — led to Gilmour joining the band as Barrett’s condition worsened.
His decline would become a central theme in Waters’ music, including Floyd’s 1970s albums The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall. But nowhere was it more explicitly about Barrett than in the central work on Wish You Were Here: “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” The song was written expressly in tribute to Barrett, who coincidentally visited the band in the studio on the day they recorded it.
As Gilmour explained to Rick Beato, that song came about after he stumbled onto a note cluster while playing his electric guitar. The passage, consisting of G F Bb E played in sequence (often referred to as “Syd’s Theme”), became central to the song.
“I was in a rehearsal room doing all sorts of little things, and that one [came] out,” Gilmour explained. “Something in your brain goes, There’s something to that! You do it again, and after a while, other people in the room stop.
“You can see this thing on people’s faces, this awakening moment. People are going, ‘there’s a possibility here. There’s something here’. The whole of 'Shine On' grew out of that moment.”
For all Pink Floyd’s efforts, Wish You Were Here was panned by music critics, who felt it lacked the creativity of its predecessor. Melody Maker called it “unconvincing in its ponderous sincerity,” while Rolling Stone‘s reviewer criticized “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” for its “lackadaisical demeanor.”
Fifty years on, however, the album is considered a classic from a decade that — barring some dabbling with household objects — was Pink Floyd’s most productive.
