FILTER REISSUES
Shine a light
A new 50th-anniversary box set illuminates the rock titans’ 1975 masterpiece – and some. All that’s missing is an ambient dance mix, says Mark Blake.
Pink Floyd ★★★★ ★
Wish You Were Here 50 (Deluxe Edition)
SONY MUSIC. CD/DL/LP/BR
THE LATE Brian Humphries was Pink Floyd’s long-serving – and long-suffering – sound engineer throughout the late 1970s. In January ’75, he reported for duty on Wish You Were Here at EMI’s Abbey Road studios.
Here, Humphries soon discovered his uninspired employers preferred firing an air rifle at a dartboard to making a new record. Sometimes, Floyd drummer and exhausted new father Nick Mason fell asleep on one of the control room couches. “Hours were wasted,” an exasperated Humphries told MOJO.
This lack of inspiration wasn’t a recent development. In winter ’73, shortly after their last album, The Dark Side Of The Moon, became a UK and US hit, Pink Floyd revisited ‘Household Objects’, a project they’d started and abandoned a couple of years earlier.
“Whether you make a sound on a guitar or a water tap is irrelevant,” forewarned bassist/lyricist Roger Waters, before the group spent weeks creating bass notes on rubber bands, using the hiss of an aerosol can as a hi-hat rhythm, and dispatching roadies to the nearest B&Q or equivalent store for musical props.