The video threads together black-and-white footage of the band, otherworldly animation, and microscopic close-ups of a fertilized egg
Fifty years after the release of Pink Floyd‘s Wish You Were Here, the band returned earlier this month with a massive anniversary box set to celebrate the landmark 1975 album. About a week after the retrospective compilation arrived, the band treated fans to a music video of the stunning title track — filled with everything from nostalgic footage of the band in the studio and running through a subway station to whimsical animations of a figurine floating through time and space.
The video, fittingly, opens with a slice of the moon before immediately bursting into chaotic images of sperm racing toward an egg, an eye filled with flames, and lights zipping through darkness before cutting to intimate shots of the band. The rest of the video unravels like a fever dream before circling back to a series of images echoing its beginning.
A Rolling Stone review of the 50th anniversary set praised the “time capsule anthologizing one of the strangest times in the quartet’s lives.” Among the studio rarities are two versions of “Wish You Were Here” including a take with David Gilmour on pedal steel guitar and a rendition with a violin solo by jazz virtuoso Stéphane Grappelli, which music writer Kory Grow describes as “almost too beautiful for the song.
The set also includes the mythical tape of the L.A. Sports Arena show recorded by famed bootlegger Mike “The Mic” Millard — the most pristine recording of any show on Pink Floyd’s 29-date Wish You Were Here tour.
As Grow remarks, “Listening to the box set, you remember when they were young: They were heroes and ghosts, legends and martyrs, and, by the way, they were all ‘Pink.’”
