Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here

I recently listened to Pink Floyd's song "IF"  (from their 1970 album "Atom Heart Mother")  at the suggestion of a friend, who suggested I should try to cover it.

My own familiarity with Floyd has been mainly restricted to "Dark Side Of the Moon", "Wish You Were Here" and "The Wall".... all absolutely AMAZING albums..... although I HAD listened to " The Piper at the Gates of Dawn"  as a young teen in the early 1970's.

Having listened to this song, I read the lyric of  "IF"  in two ways:

a) as Roger Waters' apology to Syd Barrett who had slipped into a drug fuelled depression, schizophrenia and general madness and  had become a liability to the group before becoming a complete recluse. In this interpretation Waters is the first person "I" 

b) as Syd describing his own personal pain and confusion... including a reference to his undergoing electric shock treatment ("please dont put your wires in my brain"). In this interpretation it is Barrett's voice speaking in the first person,  through Waters' lyric.

However you choose to  interpret this, it is a sad lyric.  And the very poignant line "If I were a good man, I'd talk with you more often than I do..." works from both perspectives.

Pink Floyd's songs make several references to Syd Barrett's descent into madness in even their later albums, including in such songs as "Brain Damage",  "Wish You were Here" and  "Shine on You Crazy Diamond".

I hope I have  been able to do justice to Roger Waters'  beautiful song with this interpretation recorded at home last evening.

Cyrus Dali Vesuvala
Gurugram, India
8th August 2023

P.S: On a  purely TECHNICAL note, although this is a SAD song, with an overall MINOR chord FEEL,  the whole song works off a set of purely MAJOR (and Major 7th) chords:   E, D, C#7, F# and B7

.
Here's a link to a video recording of this song
https://fb.watch/mifsHjpkbH/?mibextid=Nif5oz

IF (A Pink Floyd Cover)

Pierrou asked me a couple of weeks ago if I would like to partake in a collab along with some very talented singers on this Pink Floyd classic, to which I  obviously responded with a big "YES" !! The original cover can be found on his page here : https://soundcloud.com/pierrou/another-brick-in-the-wall-cover-by-soundcloud-fellows

I was so impressed with Pierrou's guitars that I asked him if I could use his instrumental track in order to do an "extended" version, incorporating "The happiest days of our lives" as it features on the album "The Wall"

Hum Bekhudi Mein Tumko

Venayak Gupta

Related tracks