The problem with creating an incredible work of art is that you're expected to do it again and again.
This was issue facing English rock band Pink Floyd in the wake of their massive 1973 album The Dark Side Of The Moon, which had suddenly made them the biggest band in the world.
Grappling with their new-found global fame, they began the slow, laborious process of making what would become Wish You Were Here — a record that simultaneously attacked the very industry that had made them stars, while honouring a man who'd helped them get there.
That man — the band's mercurial former frontman Syd Barrett, from whom they had recently split — would add to the growing mythos around Pink Floyd by making a strange visit to the studio during the making of Wish You Were Here, which was released 50 years ago this week.
Have a cigar, you're gonna go far
The story of Wish You Were Here, and indeed the story of Pink Floyd, begins with Barrett.
A uniquely talented songwriter and inventive guitarist, Barrett led Pink Floyd as it burst out of Cambridge in the mid-60s, penning most of the band's lauded debut album The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, released August 1967.
Less than 12 months later, Barrett's erratic behaviour — fuelled by a combination of LSD and undiagnosed mental health issues — had become too much for his band mates, who made the pragmatic decision to simply not pick him up on the way to a gig one night.
But the spectre of Barrett loomed large.
When the frontman officially parted ways with the group in March 1968, the band's management went with him, believing him to be the key creative force behind Pink Floyd.
The remaining members — Roger Waters, Nick Mason, Richard Wright and the newly added Dave Gilmour — began to forge a new direction, which would ultimately lead to the record-breaking success of The Dark Side Of The Moon in 1973.
Welcome to the machine
It's impossible to overstate how huge The Dark Side Of The Moon was (and is).
Believed to be one of only four albums to have sold more than 45 million copies worldwide, it has spent a record 990 weeks, the equivalent of about 19 years, in the US Billboard top 200 albums chart.
Upon release, Dark Side's success brought Pink Floyd success beyond its wildest dreams. Suddenly they were millionaires with country manors and luxury cars — ironic for a band that had sung that money was "the root of all evil today" on Dark Side's lead single Money.
But Dark Side's success capped off an exhausting stretch for the band.
They had released eight albums and played close to 750 shows in six years, and the added whirlwind of attention for Dark Side left them drained in new ways.
In a 2012 documentary about the making of Wish You Were Here, Waters said the band could "easily have split up" after Dark Side, but didn't because they were each too afraid to exist outside the financial and creative safety of Pink Floyd.
However, guitarist Gilmour said the period after Dark Side was an important moment of self-reflection.
"We were all having to assess what we were in this business for, why we were doing it, whether we were artists or business people," Gilmour said.
"Having achieved the sort of success and money … that could fulfil anyone's wildest teenage dreams, why we would still want to continue to do it?"
The band spent long, often fruitless periods in a rehearsal room, occasionally touring, and frequently feeling they were getting nowhere.
In the studio they were equally listless, spending whole days drinking, playing squash or shooting at a dartboard with an air rifle, recording in fits and starts between bouts of rumination and argument.
But out of this soul-searching, two clear ideas emerged, directed largely by Waters: a distaste for the record industry vultures who had preyed on their success, and a yearning for their friend and former band mate Syd Barrett, who had been chewed up and spat out by "rock'n'roll" and the drug-fuelled lifestyle that came with it.
"It was felt that Syd's 'madness' had partly come about through the demands of the record industry," Gilmour said.
These two factors became the basis of Wish You Were Here.
We call it riding the gravy train
Pink Floyd's feelings about the music industry are best exemplified by the tracks Welcome To The Machine and Have A Cigar.
The former is an ominous-sounding song about a musician who graduates from "the pipeline" into "the machine", and achieves great riches but is "told … what to dream".
The real venom is saved for Have A Cigar, sung from the perspective of industry fat cats by folk singer and friend of the band Roy Harper.
It features the great industry kiss-off, "We're so happy we can hardly count" and the real-life query often put to the band by ignorant label suits,"Oh, by the way, which one's Pink?"
But it was the songs about Barrett that provided the heart and soul of the album, and tied together its deeper theme about failing to be present as the world spins.
Shine on, you crazy diamond
After officially parting ways with Pink Floyd in early 1968, Barrett began recording a solo album.
A string of producers (including Gilmour and Waters) and session musicians found themselves befuddled by Barrett's behaviour — he wouldn't play in time, would rarely play the same thing twice, gave little to no direction to the backing musicians, and his songs and performances wavered from genius to sub-par, depending on his mental health and drug intake on the day.
The haphazard sessions were also interrupted by Barrett spending time in psychiatric care at one point.
The Madcap Laughs came out on January 2, 1970, and was quickly followed by a more polished and contained album simply called Barrett.
But after that, his music career was, for all intents and purposes, over, and he fell out of contact with his former band mates.
Gilmour noted Wish You Were Here's title track was a broader song about absence that he "couldn't sing … without thinking about Syd", but Shine On You Crazy Diamond was "specifically about Syd".
Waters called the latter his "homage to Syd and my heartfelt expression of my sadness and admiration for [his] talent, and sadness for the loss of [my] friend".
It refers to Barrett in many ways, all true — stranger, legend, martyr, raver, seer of visions, painter, piper, prisoner.
A 26-minute epic in nine parts, Shine On You Crazy Diamond bookended the album — the first half featuring the bulk of the lyrics and a now-famous four-note arpeggio known as "Syd's Theme", and the last half ending with a reference to the Barrett-era single See Emily Play.
It was during the mixing of this massive song — revered as one of Pink Floyd's greatest moments — that Barrett turned up unannounced at Abbey Road Studios.
Barrett was unrecognisable. He had gained weight and shaved off his eyebrows and hair, and according to Wright, it took more than half an hour before anyone figured out who he was.
"In those days it was quite normal for strangers to wander into our sessions," Wright told Mojo magazine in 1994.
"This guy kept on getting up and brushing his teeth and then sitting, doing really weird things, but keeping quiet."
When they finally figured out it was Barrett, the band members were in shock.
Waters and Gilmour wept to see their once vivacious livewire of a frontman as a shell of himself, who didn't seem to fully comprehend where he was or what was happening.
That he had wandered into the studio while the band was working on a song about him added to the absurd and sad nature of the scene.
Barrett was invited to stay at the conclusion of the session for a celebration of Gilmour's recent wedding, but he left soon after and his band mates never saw him again.
Barrett died in 2006, having effectively withdrawn from society after moving back into his mother's house in Cambridge in 1978.
How I wish you were here
Wish You Were Here was always going to fall short of its once-in-a-lifetime predecessor, The Dark Side Of The Moon, but it was still huge, hitting number one around the world, and cementing Pink Floyd as the biggest band on the planet.
It has sold more than 20 million copies globally, and appears in countless top album lists, alongside Pink Floyd's other big albums Dark Side, The Wall, and their influential psychedelic debut The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn.
From its iconic artwork of a businessman shaking hands with an on-fire counterpart (achieved by setting a stuntsman aflame about 15 times) to its mix of ideas around absence and loss in an increasingly corporate society, Wish You Were Here summed up where the band was at in the mid-70s.
As Waters noted in 1993, "at the beginning of the recording sessions most of us didn't wish we were there at all".
Maybe that's why it resonated then, and why it still resonates 50 years on.
