(Credits: Far Out / Pink Floyd)
Sat 31 January 2026 15:06, UK
Not many can claim to have reached the artistic heights that Pink Floyd leader and guitarist David Gilmour has. Gilmour has numerous masterpieces to his name and many moments confirming why he is one of the most influential musicians of all time. Whether it be niche junctures from the band’s early days or the cerebral ambient compositions from their final chapter, Gilmour is an incredibly accomplished creative force.
The two most eminent bodies of work in Gilmour’s Pink Floyd oeuvre are 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon and 1975’s Wish You Were Here. While the mainstream hails the former as the band’s crowning achievement, its follow-up is considered by many fans to be their magnum opus, with it a more refined and subtle offering than its predecessor. Nevertheless, there’s very little that truthfully separates them.
According to David Gilmour, though, he sides with the fans on this one. When speaking to Classic Rock in 2002, he revealed his criticisms of The Dark Side of the Moon and reflected on constructing Wish You Were Here. Due to him pushing the band to take more care creatively on the 1975 album because of the lessons learned making its forebear, he thinks that it is their “most complete album”.
Gilmour said: “I had some criticisms of Dark Side of the Moon. It’s kind of ludicrous in a way to have criticisms of an album that was so successful, but I did voice them at the time. I thought that one or two of the vehicles carrying the idea were not as strong as the ideas that they carried.”
Obviously, artists are always their own worst critics, but Gilmour did seem to be on to something. Pink Floyd’s skill was always the existential theories that lay behind some of their songs, and the guitarist clearly felt that some tunes weren’t built to hold such weighty ideas. He continued, “I thought we should try and work harder on marrying the idea and the vehicle that carried it so that they both had an equal magic, or whatever, to them.”
The fmaous ‘Wish You Were Here’ album cover. (Credit: Pink Floyd)
Gilmour would be sure, as the next album came around, that he wouldn’t fall under a similar strain. “So it’s something I was personally pushing when we made Wish You Were Here,”m hex aplined. But the album certainly didn’t get the widespread attention the previous record did, not that it seemed to undercut Gilmour’s appreciation for the LP, “It’s underrated by some, but not by me. I think it’s our most complete album.”
Following this, it was put to Gilmour that his former songwriting partner and now archnemesis, Roger Waters, had recently said Wish You Were Here was as much about mourning the loss of the group as a band of brothers as it was their original frontman, Syd Barrett.
Asked to give his thoughts on this point, Gilmour said: “Maybe in mourning the band, not as a band of brothers, I don’t think, but more in terms of a band of seekers, if you like. We were people dedicated to hunting down and playing something with meaning and soul. The period after Dark Side of the Moon, when we made Wish You Were Here, was a strange time. We had achieved everything, really, that one could hope to achieve. There was a bit of distance between us all at that point, and Roger wasn’t the only one who noticed this sense of absence.”
Gilmour concluded: “But that sense of absence is part of the album’s magic. It helped create it. I don’t know quite how it did it. I can’t regret that period at all. I don’t think it’s necessary for that absence, that feeling of post-euphoria… I don’t see it as something permanent. You maybe suffer a little dip in some ways, but little dips in life can inspire great things. It’s odd to try and work out how something as good as that album came out of this rather blank feeling that we had.”
Though Wish You Were Here is often thought of as the signal of Pink Floyd’s eventual demise, the album is also one of their finest creations. It’s a record that saw Gilmour and Waters at loggerheads, but somehow, the music didn’t suffer one single bit.
It may have even propelled the LP into a new space and launched it creatively. The record can be considered one of their best and perhaps one of the greatest albums of the century as it influenced millions of people. Noted by both Waters and Gilmour as their favourite Floyd album, the record is the distillation of what made Pink Floyd so brilliant.
Listen to Wish You Were Here below.
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