PINK FLOYD

Alienation, loss and a legendary live bootleg - the prog giants' post-Dark Side masterpiece gets the ultimate 50th-birthday box set treatment.

- Joe Banks

It may have become one of the most iconic albums ever, but Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here remains as beguiling and mysterious as when it was first released 50 years ago.

Blindsided by the success of The Dark Side Of The Moon, the band had struggled to produce a followup, with at least two major false starts and several frustrating months spent in the studio waiting for inspiration to strike. Yet what eventually emerged in September 1975 was extraordinary: an album which somehow managed to channel the inertia and torturous dislocation of the recording sessions to create music of an otherworldly poise and execution.

In particular, the slow-motion intensity of David Gilmour's guitar and Rick Wright's glacial synthscapes possess a haunting, almost mechanical beauty, yet many critics at the time found the album difficult to connect with, decrying it as passionless and cold. But if there's a precision that's far from random in the arrangements and playing, there's plenty of hard-earned heart and soul, too.

It's also easy to overlook just how conceptual it is as an album. Roger Waters' eureka moment was to split