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  5. Aside from the great music, the packaging of WYWH is amazing. It was shrink-wrapped in black plastic with the robot hands sticker on the front (below) and that iconic sleeve we’re familiar with wasn’t visible until you got it home and ripped off the shrink-wrap and threw it away (a big mistake in retrospect when you look at today’s resale value of an original in black shrink-wrap)

    Inside was and inner sleeve, plus the “diving man” postcard thoughtfully presented (in the UK at least) with “pinked” edges (geddit?)

    Probably my favourite Floyd LP. There’s so much going on there, especially on the Roy Harper track.

    http://i627.photobucket.com/albums/tt351/mojoworking01/1407529428691_zps2opgqjcm.jpg

  6. My favourite PF album. I queued outside Boots (a queue of just me) waiting for it to open to get my copy on the day of release. Turned out they weren’t expecting a delivery till the next week. When my Dad heard the first part of “Wish you were here” he took the record back to the shop because he thought the sound was faulty. True story. They told him the band was a bit weird so it was probably intentional

    • I have a similar story. You know that part at the end of Have A Cigar, where it goes into the title track? It sounds like the sound is being sucked up through a hole.

      I was playing that track one day and my mate’s girlfriend walked into the room and said “Is there something wrong with your record player? The sound has gone all weird”

  8. There are some great moments but it pales in comparison to Dark Side Of The Moon. It just sounds like a mid-Atlantic, blues-based rock album with none of the mystery, innovation and conceptual coherence of Dark Side. A great case in point is Shine On You Crazy Diamond which, apart from the great opening riff, is just a bunch of blues solos one after the other. It could easily have appeared on a post-Waters Floyd album, and those are hardly regarded as classics. In my opinion, they were at their most interesting playing live between More and Obscured By Clouds (especially Atom Heart Mother era), but then managed one perfectly realised album in Dark Side.

  9. I bought the CD (the 2011 remaster) last week and it has been on pretty constant repeat ever since. I even turned the lights off and lay on the sofa to listen when I got it home, and that’s something I wouldn’t do for any record which hadn’t been a teenage favourite.

  12. Definitely one of their best, if not THE best.
    For me though, it ranks second behind The Wall

    (there must be someone else in the world who thinks The Wall is PFs master work? No, just me then)

    • I like The Wall, but I have to be in the right frame of mind to listen to it all the way through (even then I have to resist the urge to skip clunkers like Vera and the Trial…)

    • The Wall starts off strong and contains some great moments, mostly by Gilmour. But it gets way too pompous, operatic and overblown by sides 3 and 4 (the “Vera” track is a case in point).

      I still have a copy of the 1980 track-by-track interview that Roger Waters did for Radio 1 on release of The Wall and even back then I felt the entire concept was massively self-indulgent and wanky. All that stuff about him (Waters) spitting on fans and feeling alienated from his audience was just too precious. Please, spare me your private school angst and self-awareness.

      • Seconded on all points. I must dig out that interview – I think I dubbed it from cassette to MD “for posterity”! I must have thought that the cassette would self-destruct!

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