Half a century after its release, Wish You Were Here still feels like the emotional core of Pink Floyd’s mythology – a record haunted by the absence of founding member Syd Barrett, the childhood friend whose mercurial, era-defining brilliance shaped the band before slipping beyond their reach.
It was Barrett’s departure from the band in 1968, following his now well-documented struggles with drug addiction and mental health, that inspired arguably their greatest song, Shine On You Crazy Diamond, which bookends the album. The making of this epic, slow-burning elegy, and the shock of Barrett’s unexpected appearance at Abbey Road Studios during the final mixes, has long since passed into rock folklore.
Now, as part of the Wish You Were Here 50 campaign, a newly mixed, unbroken edit of the song has been unveiled, accompanied by a specially commissioned painting of Barrett by lifelong fan Noel Fielding. Together, they rekindle the shimmering psychedelic world from which both Barrett and Pink Floyd’s most poignant masterpiece emerged.
Painted over a single session while listening to the 25-minute version of Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Fielding’s portrait of Barrett is less an exercise in capturing his likeness than an attempt to distil his essence. It emerges through fast, physical gestures – Fielding applying paint directly onto the canvas with his fingers – as if he were trying to catch Barrett in motion before the music runs out.
Fielding describes Barrett as his “biggest influence”, adding that he “absorbed him very early on”. As a child, his father played him compilation tapes in the car loaded with early Floyd singles such as Arnold Layne and See Emily Play. He remembers pulling out The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here from his parents’ huge record collection and drawing the covers. At 12, he borrowed a cassette of the band’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, from the local library.
Various other artists from the British psych scene – from Kevin Ayers to Soft Machine – informed Fielding’s time at art school, his first steps in stand-up comedy, and ultimately the look and feel of The Mighty Boosh – but Syd Barrett “was always my favourite,” he says. “He was just cool, you know – the clothes, the hair, everything about him, really. He just captured the zeitgeist of the late 60s, the counter-culture and the UFO Club and all that stuff. Even though he died much later, he’s sort of frozen in that era.”
Fielding talked about Barrett for years with veteran photographer Mick Rock, who shot some of the most iconic images of the musician, before Rock’s death in 2021. Through Rock he met other members of Floyd’s inner circle, including Storm Thorgerson, who went to school in Cambridgeshire with both Barrett and Roger Waters and went on to become one of the band’s closest artistic collaborators.
Across these meetings, Fielding’s affinity for Barrett grew. Recently, when Josh Cheuse, another famed music photographer now working as creative director at Sony Music, called Fielding with a proposal for Wish You Were Here’s anniversary, he jumped at the opportunity. “I’d do anything for Pink Floyd,” he says. “I grew up on [Barrett], and I’ve heard so many amazing stories from people who knew him, so it made sense to start doing paintings of him.”
What Cheuse didn’t yet know was that Fielding had spent the summer in France painting Barrett repeatedly – portraits inspired by the album cover shoot for Barrett’s debut solo LP, The Madcap Laughs, photographed by Rock and Adrian Boot in Barrett’s Earl’s Court flat. The stripy blue-and-burnt-orange floorboards which Barrett had painted himself had long captured Fielding’s imagination. “He looks like an 18th-century poet in those photos,” he says. “Those colours, that emptiness…. I thought, these would be good to paint from.”
So when the Sony commission arrived, Fielding approached it as an extension of the work he was already doing. The major difference being that, for the first time, he would be painting on camera. “At first I thought, how the fuck am I going to do this live in 25 minutes…. But actually, it was a fun challenge to work with that constraint. I felt like I’d already done the prep, because I’d been painting Syd a lot, so I just focused on getting the main features down and getting the energy right before the music ended,” he explains.
The result reflects the way Fielding has always engaged with Barrett: not as a tragic casualty of the psychedelic era, but as a foundational voice guiding his personal creative evolution. Does he have plans to continue painting his idol? “I’d love to do a big painting of Syd one day,” he teases. “Something large-scale and more surreal.
“The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is a reference to The Wind in the Willows, so I thought of painting Syd sitting on a riverbank playing a pipe … there’s Ratty and Mole looking at him, there’s a gnome fishing under the moonlight, maybe a mouse going past on a bike, and the washing line from Arnold Layne…. I think Syd is someone I’ll always return to.”
Shine On You Crazy Diamond (pts. 1-9, New Stereo Mix) will be included in the 50th anniversary edition of Wish You Were Here, released on December 12 via Sony Music; pinkfloyd.lnk.to
Noel Fielding exhibits with Podgorny Gallery, Don’t Walk Walk Gallery and Jealous Gallery
