Pink Floyd: The Story of Wish You Were Here Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

Pink Floyd: The Story of Wish You Were Here Blu-ray Movie Review

How Pink Floyd got 'Here' from there.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 26, 2012

EMI probably delighted and shocked longtime Pink Floyd fans in about equal numbers with their massive (and massively expensive) “Immersion Edition” box sets of The Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here. With an embarrassment of audio riches, both of these oversized sets also featured some passing video content (as well as some questionable swag), but there was little doubt that it was the lossless audio (and some febrile remixes) that really provided the allure for a lot of fans. Probably like a lot of fans, I had been so overwhelmed by Dark Side of the Moon that I had probably given that iconic albums’ follow up, Wish You Were Here, short shrift through the years, deeming it an acceptable if not exactly stellar companion piece to one of the bestselling albums of all time. The Immersion Edition of Wish You Were Here necessitated a rather radical reassessment of the album’s sonic pleasures, and if I’m still of the opinion that the album doesn’t quite reach the overall brilliance of Dark Side of the Moon, I’m certainly a much more appreciative listener now than I was even as recently as October 2011, just before the Immersion Edition of Wish You Were Here was released. Now comes this really interesting (if perhaps way too short—at least for diehard fans) documentary about how Wish You Were Here came to be. Much less salacious than, say, an MTV Behind the Music exposé, Pink Floyd: The Story of Wish You Were Here still doesn’t shrink from a “warts and all” approach as it discusses a band in the throes of wrestling with the after effects of a heretofore unimagined success, as well as the long lasting repercussions of the mental breakdown of founding member Syd Barrett. Filled with fantastic interviews with the band and various “supporting players”, Pink Floyd: The Story of Wish You Were Here is a case study in a band, suddenly a rock phenomenon after years of journeyman success, wondering where to go next.

Bb – F – G – E. Those four notes sparked the genesis of Wish You Were Here, and became the album’s defining song, an ode to the memory of Syd Barrett, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”. It’s a testament to Floyd’s musicality that an entire album was built on the foundation of one motif, a decision that put the band in some fine company, including countless classical composers from ages past. (I'll put on my musicological hat for a moment and comment that one of the most interesting things about this motif is that while it traces a diatonic framework that can either be thought of as Gm seguing to C or Bb major doing the same, what really sticks out to the ear on first listen is the jarring tritone between the motif's opening Bb and its closing E.) But it wasn’t really as organic a decision as might be expected, as Pink Floyd: The Story of Wish You Were Here makes clear. The band was in surprising disarray after the enormous success of Dark Side of the Moon, and they had just come in for some equally unexpected critical pillorying when a United Kingdom tour in support of the album showed the band to be (in their own words) “disconnected”. That very feeling of dissociation perhaps was subliminally linked to memories of Syd Barrett, their brilliant onetime front man who had slowly but surely been subsumed by an incipient mental illness. As Roger Waters terms it, Wish You Were Here was built not just on a musical motif, but on a whole feeling of “absence”, of that feeling of missing something or someone and of not being totally connected to what is at hand.

The opening segment of Pink Floyd: The Story of Wish You Were Here is given over to a remembrance of Syd, replete with some great archival footage of Barrett in action. Who knows what Pink Floyd would have become had Barrett not suffered the breakdown he did? What’s both disturbing and commendable is that even though Barrett’s breakdown did obviously deeply affect his bandmates, to their credit they didn’t try to sweep everything under the rug, though it does seem like they had to deal with their trauma more through their music than actual “talk therapy”.

Some of the other trials and tribulations of Wish You Were Here may not seem quite as emotionally affecting as the Barrett issue, and in fact seem kind of petulant in retrospect. Waters still seems to be upset that his voice doesn’t grace “Have a Cigar”, and there seems to be a certain tension to this day between Waters and guest vocalist Roy Harper, and perhaps even to a lesser extent between those two and David Gilmour, though Gilmour at least seems— somewhat reticently it must be admitted—ready to admit that the version on the album has its own merits.

It was probably no great surprise to the band when Wish You Were Here didn’t match the enormous success of Dark Side of the Moon, but the band seems resigned to the vagaries of the music business, in contrast to how scrappily they were fighting about it back in the day (as witnessed by the scabrous lyric of “Have a Cigar”). Time brings a certain perspective that being in the fray of battle doesn’t allow, and the band seems proud of their accomplishments while not ignoring the internecine warfare (or at least energetic squabbling) that got them there. Wish You Were Here has undergone a similar critical reevaluation through the years as well and now is appreciated as a (perhaps minor) classic in its own right. They say that “getting there is half the fun”, but this really compelling documentary proves that the same is true of getting Here.

Pink Floyd: The Story of Wish You Were Here Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Pink Floyd – The Story of Wish You Were Here is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Eagle Rock Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer in 1.78:1 (some of the archival footage is in 1.33:1, as evidenced by a couple of the screencaps included with this review). For the most part, this is a nicely sharp and well detailed high definition presentation that looks best in its contemporary interview segments. There are occasional very minor combing artifacts due to the interlaced presentation, but they're a niggling concern for the most part. As is to be expected, the archival footage is sourced from a number of different formats and some of it frankly looks pretty ragged. However, by far the largest bulk of this documentary is the contemporary footage, and that pops rather nicely, with pleasing fine detail (almost all of the talking heads sequences are shot close up), nicely saturated color and solid contrast.

Pink Floyd: The Story of Wish You Were Here Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Pink Floyd – The Story of Wish You Were Here features both a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround mix as well as an LPCM 2.0 stereo fold down. This is by and large a talking heads documentary, so there's perhaps less to recommend the 5.1 mix than would otherwise be the case. While there are certainly musical sequences here, which in fact do benefit from the 5.1 audio, they are typically short and edited, and as often as not feature voiceover narration or commentary. Fidelity is very strong on both of these tracks and even with the lack of real consistent surround activity, the 5.1 track at least gives hints of what awaited listeners who sprang for the Immersion Edition of Wish You Were Here.

Pink Floyd: The Story of Wish You Were Here Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Bonus Footage (1080i; 25:43) features several longer interviews with the band. Gilmour and Waters are not especially shy about detailing their discontent with the music business, and there is some nice footage of each of them playing the guitar.

Pink Floyd: The Story of Wish You Were Here Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

They say that nothing succeeds like success, but in the case of Pink Floyd that saying might be slightly amended to state "nothing confounds like success". The band obviously was gobsmacked by the overwhelming response to Dark Side of the Moon and floundered badly in the wake of such an astounding cultural phenomenon. The band looks back on this time with a certain rueful irony, not unaware of their failings at the time, but also deservedly protective of what they managed to do despite their emotional upheaval. Pink Floyd – The Story of Wish You Were Here makes a fantastic companion piece to the Immersion Edition of the album that came out last year, but even for those who chose not to spring for the pricey boxed set, this is a fascinating documentary that really sheds light on the vagaries of the music business and how it affects the "overnight sensations" that find themselves ensnared by their very fame. Highly recommended.