Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here (1975 Live Bootleg)

Pink Floyd’s masterpiece Wish You Were Here is being reissued for its 50th anniversary across multiple formats this December. This is the second release under the new curatorship of the band’s catalogue by Sony Music, after Pompeii earlier this year. The package is primarily centred around the original album, studio out-takes, and a brand new Atmos mix of the album by James Guthrie, but once again I’m honoured to have been involved, this time in restoring a much loved live bootleg recording of the band.

Unfortunately no properly recorded multi-tracks of Pink Floyd live were made during the Wish You Were Here era, so what we are left with are the recordings made by fans attending the shows. One of these is regarded as the best quality recording of the band at the time, made at the Memorial Sports Arena, Los Angeles on 26th April 1975 by concert attendee Mike Millard. For a long time this legendary recording has been in circulation, with various transfers made from the original cassette master over the years.

More recent transfers have better fidelity, but suffer more from tape degradation and dropouts as the tape has aged, so my role was primarily to research all of the available versions and compile what I hope is a definitive master, repairing as many of the dropouts, level fluctuations and other anomalies as possible. To this new edit I applied minimal mastering, but without wanting to make the recording sound too hyped or processed, so it still sounds essentially like the excellent audience bootleg recording it always was - no AI here! (And for those that are particular about mastering compression, note all the remastered LA75 tracks “score” DR12-DR13 in dynamic range terms.)

Wish You Were Here 50 will be released in multiple physical formats including 3LP, 2CD, Blu-ray, and a deluxe box set on 12th December, with the restored LA show appearing on the stand-alone blu-ray and the blu-ray included in the deluxe set.