Studio Three. Grappelli was downstairs. They paid him 300 pounds.
The first thing on Wish You Were Here, the song, is not the band. It is a radio, recorded from David Gilmour’s car at Abbey Road in 1975, sliding between stations. A scrap of classical music goes past. So does a scrap of the band’s own Shine On You Crazy Diamond, leaking as if from the next room. Then an acoustic guitar joins, processed so it sounds like it is coming out of that radio. A second acoustic, dry, sits in the room with you. Gilmour plays both, and he sings. Waters wrote the lyric. The music is Gilmour’s. The credit on the sleeve is both of them.
The song is the fourth track on the album, between Welcome to the Machine and the second half of Shine On. It was recorded at Abbey Road with the rest of Wish You Were Here, January to July 1975, engineered by Brian Humphries, produced by the band. Stéphane Grappelli was downstairs in Studio One, making a record with Yehudi Menuhin. Gilmour wanted a country fiddle on the end of the song. They brought Grappelli up, after the usual argument about the fee. He played. They buried him so low in the mix that you only catch the violin after the wind comes in, and they left his name off the sleeve because a credit that quiet would have felt rude. The fee was 300 pounds.
Harvest released the album in Britain on 12 September 1975. It went to No. 1 in the UK and the US. The single was not this song. It was Have a Cigar backed with Welcome to the Machine, and Roy Harper sang Have a Cigar because Waters’ voice had gone. Wish You Were Here stayed an album track that audiences treated as the single anyway. On the 1977 In the Flesh tour it was already a singalong. It stayed one: Pulse at Earls Court in 1994, and the Live 8 reunion in Hyde Park on 2 July 2005.
You can just hear him if you listen very, very, very hard right at the end of Wish You Were Here, you can just hear a violin come in after all the wind stuff starts. We decided not to give him credit, ‘cos we thought it might be a bit of an insult. He got his 300 pounds, though.
(Roger Waters, Wish You Were Here songbook interview)
People hear a love song. Waters has described it as a song about absence: Syd Barrett, and also the band not being present to each other while they made the record. The radio is the point. Someone is in a room, and the person they want is only on a speaker, half tuned. The alternate take, with Grappelli actually audible, stayed in the EMI vaults until the 2011 Immersion box. On the 1975 album he is a rumour at the fade.
Two acoustics, one of them pretending to be a radio, and a violin you only hear if you lean in. That is the title track of an album about people who are not in the room. The handshake on the cover is on fire. The song is the quieter version of the same idea.
