Pink Floyd‘s ninth studio album Wish You Were Here is commonly regarded as a masterpiece, but ahead of the release of a special 50th anniversary reissue of the record, drummer Nick Mason recalls that there was a lot of “fucking about” and frustration before the band hit their groove in the studio.

The band’s previous album, 1973’s The Dark Side Of The Moon, had topped the American charts and sold phenomenally well, making the four band members – Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Richard Wright and Mason – wealthy and successful beyond their wildest dreams. This, however, brought new, unanticipated problems for the quartet.

“We’d reached the point we’d been aiming for since we were teenagers,” Waters reflected to his band’s biographer Mark Blake. “We’d achieved everything we ever wanted to do. There really was nothing more to do.”

Waters would go on to tell Blake that the making of Wish You Were Here was “torture, torture, torture”, admitting, “nothing was getting done, and I didn’t not want to be there.”

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Speaking to Blake in a new interview for Mojo magazine, Nick Mason reflects, “Compared to the records we’d made before and since, it was like hitting a brick wall. To start with, we didn’t have an idea between us. We did it all wrong, though. We should have delayed going back into the studio and toured [1973’s] The Dark Side Of The Moon for longer. Something else that gets forgotten is that we were all, if not growing up, definitely growing older. We weren’t four lovable mop tops anymore.”

In their initial sessions for the record, the quartet spent months at Abbey Road studios – where they were permitted unlimited studio time – recording sounds without using any actual musical instruments, instead recording the sounds of newspapers being torn up, wine glasses being stroked, and aerosol cans being sprayed. These sonic experiments would later help create the Household Objects project, but did little to advance work on the follow-up to … Dark Side.

“If we’d had some restriction – like a studio clock ticking – we might have stopped fucking about,” Nick Mason reflects. “There wasn’t a song, there wasn’t a tune… Thank God we didn’t go through with it.”

Wish You Were Here 50 will be released through Sony Music on December 12 as a Deluxe box set, a Blu-ray edition, which features three concert screen films from the band’s 1975 tour, plus a Storm Thorgerson short film, and on 3LP and 2CD formats, which include the original album and nine studio bonus tracks.