Pink Floyd, Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Parts I-V (1975)

Artist: Pink Floyd
Title: Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Parts I-V
Description: album track, Wish You Were Here
Label: Harvest
Release date: 1975
First heard: 1988

Come on you raver, you seer of visions
Come on you painter
You piper, you prisoner and shine

Here’s my footnote in Pink Floyd history: I proof-read the booklet that was boxed up with the remastered Shine On compilation set released in 1992. I’m not 100% sure how it happened. Either my friend Rob was working for Storm Thorgerson, who by law designed the sleeve and packaging, or he was working for Stylo Rouge, who may have been designing the book. Either way, it was a commission borne of benign nepotism, and not one that I was honestly up to. A journalist of some three or four years’ standing, what I knew of “subbing marks” was learned from having had my own typewritten pages red-penned at the NME. Nonetheless, I manfully went through the proofs and – somebody else will have to check this – I think I earned a thanks in the box-set credits.

What’s more significant about my intersection with the mighty Floyd’s back catalogue (Shine On contained nine discs and was a selective history via eight albums – from their second, A Saucerful Of Secrets, to their 13th, A Momentary Lapse Of Reason – plus some early singles) is that it was my first in any meaningful way. I did not own a Pink Floyd album in 1992. I had reviewed the live album Delicate Sound Of Thunder for the NME in 1988, when I was at the office-boy stage of my writing career and was grateful for rejects and flotsam from the LPs cupboard, but I really was unqualified. I only recognised the hits.

However, it helps me carbon-date what was my first conscious exposure to Shine On You Crazy Diamond, which endures as my favourite Pink Floyd track. (It’s actually rather sweet that the first version I must have heard was a live one, in all its grandiloquent melancholy at Nassau Coliseum in Long Island.) I think we all know the score about this track, and the album it so definitively bookends in its nine – count ’em – parts: it’s a tribute to Syd Barrett that would have been no sadder and more heartfelt had the band’s tragically scooped-out founder actually died before they laid it down.

Crazy Diamond defines Pink Floyd. Big, beaty and bold, it’s also personal and emotional, a prog-rock movement that actually moves. So much of it is preamble, so much of it is atmosphere and noodling – the very facets of this kind of “dinosaur” rock that made it toxic and heinous to punk rock come the revolution – and yet, at its heart lies a song. An old-fashioned song. It earns back every minute you’ve potentially wasted not singing along, not tapping a toe, tempted to make a cup of herbal tea and come back. It’s the longest song in The 143, in that even Parts I-V divorced from Parts VI-IX runs for 13:38, but it’s succinct and to the point in surprising ways. Roger Waters only sings his handful of verses in the two-and-a-half-minute Part IV (and again, foreshortened, in Part VII); the rest, you could say, is noise. But what noise!

This being Pink Floyd, whose compositions have been picked over by the technically inclined for decades, I could look up exactly which guitars and keyboards are played where, and in what key, and blind you with talk of arpeggio variations and 6/4 time and the “bleed” on the Abbey Road mixing console, but let’s just instead switch off and tune in. Nobody actually died in the making of it, but four grown men left a little bit of their souls in the studio over the days and weeks it took to process, a spirit that’s unlocked each time they play it live. Know that.

I will have innocently enjoyed the majesty of its rock and the mystery of its roll without gleaning its meaning, but it’s the backstory that powers it (and the rest of the album; this was a close-run thing with the title track Wish You Were Here itself), and the tribute that lifts it. We won’t ever really know what Syd thought of it (see how easily we call him by his first name?), even though he wandered into Abbey Road while they were laying it down and made Waters cry with his altered physical state, but there are few nods of the head in song that shine so brightly with sincerity and pulse. When Waters sings, “You wore out your welcome with random precision,” that’s the sound of something being nailed.

I grew to appreciate Pink Floyd with age. I certainly had to get out of the NME first. They’re one of those classic rock bands whose back catalogue I greedily completed at the fag-end of the century when new music – except Radiohead, funnily enough – was failing to move me. I recognised Floyd as canon. You need all of the albums, but each can be addressed separately, and individual tracks isolated, depending on mood. I think I enjoyed shocking my teenage self by getting into them.

There are parts of Dark Side Of The Moon, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, Barrett’s solo records and even The Wall that I enjoy as much as Wish You Were Here, but it retains its seat at my top table. Because it’s got Shine On You Crazy Diamond on it, in full.