If you have access to main players and master tapes, your “classic album” documentary is home and dry: particularly if it concerns an artefact as revered as Wish You Were Here. Eagle Vision are in a bingo-bango situation here – scoring the double coup of not just peering forensically beneath Wish’s skirt, but also rekindling a genuine appetite for the album that grew up in Dark Side’s monolithic shadow.
Too easily dismissed on release in 1975 as torpid and enervated, Wish was actually freighted with a very real sense of melancholy. Pink Floyd’s long-deposed lynchpin, Syd Barrett, is the ghost that stalks its cloisters, emblematic of the album’s recurrent theme of absence – and this documentary wisely doesn’t stint on footage, stills and fondly despairing recollections of the crazy diamond. The fragile détente between David Gilmour and Roger Waters appears to be holding, with the latter in characteristically forthright mode when discussing Roy Harper’s guest vocal on Have A Cigar: “He was singing a kind of parody. I never liked it.” Sleeve designer Storm Thorgerson, engineer Brian Humphries and artist Gerald Scarfe all contribute to the bigger picture, while some contemporary solo acoustic performances prove that Gilmour still handles those high notes, while Waters growls like an itinerant.
