11 hours ago
3
It was derided by some critics as self-indulgent and “gimmicky” when it was released in 1975 but has since been marked a perfect 10 and inspired exhibitions and postage stamps.
Now to mark the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s album Wish You Were Here, the poet laureate, Simon Armitage, has written an epic poem about the record, the band and their “profound” impact on him titled Dear Pink Floyd.
“You can hear this record coming towards you from a distance. It feels like something huge and important is approaching, and it’s going to envelop you,” he told the Guardian. “It’s astonishing to think that it’s half a century old.”
The poet and ardent Pink Floyd fan was approached by the group to write a new piece about the record and has produced a sprawling piece with no punctuation that reads like a mix between a fan letter and the ramblings of a religious devotee.
Armitage, who was 12 when the record was released, describes it as a “time capsule treasure chest message in a bottle tied to a life buoy thrown on a life raft from a ghost ship”, while imagining the band playing in the hanging gardens of Babylon and in the Mariana trench.
“It was a chance to do something a little bit different,” he said. “I just thought it might drag me off in a different direction. And I felt quite in tune with the record and the atmosphere and the anniversary.”
The album followed on from the progressive rock and invention of the band’s Dark Side of the Moon. It only has five tracks, with the middle three songs – Welcome to the Machine, Have a Cigar and the title track – sandwiched between the band’s epic multipart song in honour of departed member Syd Barrett, Shine On You Crazy Diamond.
The initial critical response to the album was mixed. Rolling Stone singled out Gilmour’s long solos for criticism, with Ben Edmunds accusing him of being “just another competent guitarist who thinks with his fingers instead of his head”.
But Wish You Were Here proved popular on release, going to No1, while bootleggers sold a reported 25,000 copies of a live recording when the band played it in Stafford.
It has since become a critical darling, with Pitchfork scoring it a perfect 10 and declaring that it “marked a new kind of creative breakthrough for a rock band in the 70s”.
Armitage says that growing up in West Yorkshire as punk was taking hold, Pink Floyd had to be a private indulgence, and the album’s reputation for being a “headphone record” – ideal for solo bedroom listening sessions – made that easier.
after newsletter promotion
“I started listening to it when you weren’t really allowed to like it,” he said. “I might have been wearing Doc Martens and a Buzzcocks T-shirt, but I was listening to this as well, privately, secretly.”
While a lot of the poem is fantastical there are some real-life insights, including the claim Armitage saw people wearing Pink Floyd merch in an Arctic rescue hut and in the deepest reaches of the Amazon.
“There are a lot of things in the piece that are made up and imagined, but that’s definitely real,” he said. “I made some radio programmes way, way up the Amazon with some Caboclo River Indians. One of them had a Pink Floyd hoodie on and another one had a Paul Smith T-shirt.”
The 50th anniversary of what is arguably the group’s masterpiece will thrust them into the limelight, although they’ve already been in the charts in 2025.
The band’s 1972 live record, Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII, made its way to the top of the album charts earlier this year, becoming their seventh No1 album.
