A slow return after an exhausting success
Pink Floyd’s ninth studio album grew out of three new pieces the band had tried out on tour in 1974, its first run of shows since the record that made them internationally famous the year before. Relations with the press had soured by then, and a harsh review in a British music paper may have pushed the group back into the studio at the start of 1975. Sessions ran at Abbey Road’s Studio Three from January into July that year, four afternoons a week stretching late into the evening, and by the band’s own later accounts the writing came slowly and unhappily: all four musicians were physically and emotionally spent from the success of the record before this one, and for weeks there was little to show for the time booked.
A ruined tape and a household-objects experiment
Engineer Alan Parsons, who had worked on the previous album, chose not to return, having just formed his own act, so Brian Humphries took over, unfamiliar enough with the studio’s set-up that an early pass at the centrepiece track was ruined by unwanted echo and had to be rebuilt. Waters eventually settled on stretching that centrepiece, a tribute to former member Syd Barrett, into two long sections bookending the record, over the objection of guitarist David Gilmour, who was outvoted three to one. The opening recalls an earlier, abandoned experiment: wine glasses filled to different levels and played with a wet finger, multi-tracked into chords. A classical violinist and a jazz violinist working in another Abbey Road room were invited onto the title track, though mixed too quietly to be credited. Dick Parry returned on saxophone, Roy Harper took lead vocal on one track, and Venetta Fields sang backing vocals on the tribute.
The man who walked in during the mix
The record’s defining moment happened almost by accident. On the day the band were finishing the mix of the Barrett tribute, an overweight, shaven-headed man wandered into the studio with a plastic bag; several minutes passed before anyone realised it was Barrett himself, changed almost beyond recognition. He stayed for the mixing and later joined a wedding reception in the building’s canteen before leaving unnoticed, and by most accounts it was the last time his former bandmates saw him. That coincidence colours the finished song’s tone far more than any lyric alone could, and the title track’s direct, unadorned expression of missing someone gives the whole record an emotional plainness that its more elaborate arrangements never undercut.
A tepid welcome at the time
Reviewers at the time were unimpressed, judging the record thin next to its predecessor, and some of that hesitation is understandable: at over twenty minutes combined, the two halves of the Barrett tribute ask real patience of a listener before the album even reaches its more conventional songs. The two tracks aimed squarely at the music business make their point clearly and repeat it rather than develop it much further, which can read as narrow when set beside the more open-ended tribute surrounding them. None of this stopped the record’s slow rise in estimation, but it explains why it took years rather than months to be recognised as more than a lesser follow-up.
Absence, on both sides of the glass
Running through the album is a single feeling given two different names: absence. One version is Barrett’s, a former bandmate who left the group and, by the time of his studio visit, seemed barely present even in his own body. The other belongs to the band itself, four men who had achieved the success they had once wanted and found the achievement left them feeling distant from their own lives and suspicious of the industry that had delivered it. Sandwiching the industry critique inside the two halves of the Barrett tribute makes that connection explicit without needing a line of lyric to state it outright, treating personal loss and professional disillusionment as symptoms of the same condition.
Patience rewarded, energy withheld
This suits listeners who want a slow-building, melancholic record and who are willing to let a long instrumental passage develop at its own pace rather than demanding an immediate hook. It works particularly well for anyone interested in how a specific, real event can reshape a song already largely written before it happened, and for anyone who enjoys a record built as much from studio accident as from planning. It offers little for listeners who want energy, tempo changes or a driving rhythm section, and the extended sections either side of the album will test anyone impatient with lengthy, largely wordless music that takes its time reaching a vocal at all.
The band’s own favourite, and rightly so
Time has been kinder to this record than its first reviewers were, and several of the musicians who made it have gone on to call it their favourite among everything the band recorded. That reassessment holds up: the writing is sparse rather than thin, and the coincidence of Barrett’s visit gives the record a weight that no amount of studio craft alone could have manufactured. Anyone willing to sit with its slower pacing will find a genuinely sad, carefully controlled record rather than the underwhelming footnote it was first taken for.