Simon Armitage, the poet laureate, has written a poem celebrating the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s album Wish You Were Here.
The psychedelic rock band delighted fans by posting a video of Armitage, 62, reading a five-minute long poem called Dear Pink Floyd dedicated to the album.
The stream-of-consciousness poem describes the record as a “time capsule, treasure chest, message in a bottle” that reached fans as far away as the Amazon rainforest.
The poet and Pink Floyd fan was approached by the group to write a new piece about the record. His text will appear in the box set of the re-released album — Wish You Were Here 50 — when it comes out on December 12. It comes with six previously-unreleased alternate versions and demos.
Wish You Were Here, the band’s ninth studio album, was released two years after the bestselling The Dark Side of the Moon.
The lyrics of the five tracks express longing and alienation, with Shine On You Crazy Diamond, a multi-part tribute to former frontman Syd Barrett.
Armitage’s poem asks “Did you ever think how many ears you’d worm your way into Pink Floyd? Can I be in your band?”
He later adds: “You fashioned soundtracks for deep dreams. Did astrophysics without the numbers, philosophy without the words, made atoms vibrate in bones and brains.”
Armitage, who was 12 when the record was released, describes seeing people wearing Pink Floyd merchandise “so far up the Amazon, even the trees were lost”, on the banks of the Ganges and even in an Arctic rescue hut.
Speaking about the poem, Armitage said: “I was thinking about the album and their noise, and what effect that has had on people right across the globe.
“I didn’t know whether I could put into words what that music sounded like. I only get involved with projects if I think I can’t do them, so this was a natural invitation.
“I wanted to write something that was album-shaped, that would fit onto the side of an LP and bleed right to the margins of a square. I was trying to mimic the noise of Wish You Were Here — there are no gaps in it. Like a wall of warm sound. I wanted the text to be a physical manifestation of that.”
• Poet laureate Simon Armitage leads artists back on to the road with tour of public libraries
He described listening to Pink Floyd as a teenager: “It was so profound, so thought provoking. There aren’t many artistic experiences in the form of noise that send shivers up my spine and make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. But when I put Wish You Were Here on as a record, and it begins, I get that feeling every single time.”
Wish You Were Here 50 will be released in multiple physical formats including 3LP, 2CD, Blu-ray, digital and a deluxe box set.
Pink Floyd in 1968 in Los Angeles: (L-R) Nick Mason, Dave Gilmour, Rick Wright (centre front), Roger Waters
MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES – GETTY
The digital version includes 25 bonus tracks made up of nine studio rarities, and 16 live recordings at Pink Floyd’s Los Angeles Sports Arena concert on April 26th 1975.
Earlier this year, Pink Floyd brought out The Machine Song (Demo #2, Revisited), a previously unreleased version of Welcome To The Machine.
Nostalgic dad rockers get their poetic voice
The job of poet laureate is notoriously unforgiving (James Marriott writes). You get famous as a poet by writing passionate, personal sonnets wrung from the very depths of your soul. The bizarre reward is that you get to spend the latter part of your career writing pompous poetic pronouncements about such deeply artistically unpromising occasions as royal weddings and state banquets.
The consensus is that Simon Armitage is making a pretty splendid go of this difficult job. Cannily, the tone of his public poetry is not of the national bard addressing the crowd from the podium but of the everyman outsider, the ordinary bloke who has snuck in at the back to gawp at the cathedral/palace/banqueting hall. Witness his coronation poem An Unexpected Guest.
The idea of writing a poem about the fiftieth anniversary of the Pink Floyd album Wish You Were Here is a characteristically nice one. It is a national occasion in a sense, if not quite the kind that Tennyson would have written about. It’s important that it evidently means so much to Armitage. I’d much rather read a poet laureate on a subject that inspires him than dutifully putting Trump’s presidential visit into rhyme. And though the poem is personal, Armitage speaks for Pink Floyd fans all across the world. “You found the resonant frequency of the human soul”, he tells the band. And perhaps it’s about time nostalgic dad rockers — shockingly under-represented in the history of English verse — got their poetic voice.
The poem itself is charming if not (in my view) mindblowing. By far the best image in it is the one of Armitage lowering “the lunar explorer of the stylus” on to the record. That very acutely captures the way that a landing craft touching down on a strange planet does have the careful, hovering motion of a record player stylus being lowered into its groove. And the stylus, like the lunar craft, is about to take its operator to new worlds.
• Modern poetry is booming — why is so much of it Insta-drivel?
Elsewhere I wished Armitage had made his language work a bit harder. “It all comes cascading back,” he writes of the band’s music, deploying a well-used cliché. “Did you ever think how many ears you’d worm your way into” he asks the band, using another. Perhaps the reason the poem feels a little frictionless is that it’s a fan’s outpouring of praise. I think the best poems in which poets address other poets and artists always come with a hint of complication (bitterness, envy, competition) mixed in with the enthusiasm. But perhaps I’m the wrong age for it. I suspect the poem will make a lot of Pink Floyd fans of a certain generation very happy indeed.