Pink Floyd to Celebrate ‘Wish You Were Here 50’ with Worldwide Pop-Ups and Unreleased Live Bootlegs by Mike Millard
Pink Floyd, photo by Storm Thorgerson (courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment)
This Friday, Dec. 12, Pink Floyd will honor the 50th anniversary of their legendary ninth studio album with Wish You Were Here 50, a massive reissue coupling the immortal record with a wealth of unheard material. As anticipation for the sprawling retrospective reaches a fever pitch, the band has expanded the celebration with a few more surprises, including plans for worldwide pop-up stores and a behind-the-scenes feature on Mike Millard, the legendary taper who preserved the electrifying Wish You Were Here tour.
From Dec. 12-15, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Milan and Berlin will see the arrival of special Pink Floyd pop-up stores. Created in partnership with News & Coffee Studio, the independent magazine curator’s newsstand-style kiosks will be decked out with an immersive tribute to the iconic album and carry exclusive merchandise, including a Wish You Were Here 50 edition of Glenn Povey’s legendary Brain Damage fanzine. Five editions of the fanzine will be limited to 250 copies each at the four News & Coffee locations, with a limited global edition available at the Milan and Berlin pop-ups and through Pink Floyd’s webstore. The four newsstand locations will also carry a strictly limited white vinyl repress of Wish You Were Here.
Before the launch event, the Pink Floyd camp stoked intrigue around their landmark anniversary with a new Rolling Stone feature dedicated to Millard and the live recordings featured in the Wish You Were Here 50 box set. The article, featuring commentary from Millard’s taping partner Jim Reinstein and writer and archivist Erik Flannigan, who contributed the anniversary issue’s liner notes, dives deep into the cultural context of live bootlegging in the ‘70s and the famed Millard method, which involved smuggling a bulky Nakamichi 550 tape recorder past prying venue security under a wheelchair and tucking twin AKG 451E microphones in a hat.
“Mike dug his dad’s wheelchair out of his garage,” Reinstein recalled. “We stuffed the recorder into the seat cushion. And in the bathroom of the arena, I’d wire him from head to toe, with two microphones sticking out of his hat. The wires went down his shirt, through his pants, down to his boots.”
Millard and Reinstein’s bootlegs, captured at the Los Angeles Sports Arena concert on April 26, 1975, are the authoritative record of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here tour; given the hefty price and logistical difficulty of creating mult-track live recordings at the time, the band didn’t record any shows on the Wish You Were Here or Dark Side of the Moon world tours. After Millard’s tragic passing in 1994, his recordings circulated on BitTorrent sites and elevated the late fan to unparalleled renown in the world of underground concert tapes. Today, Millard’s work is still freely available on platforms like YouTube and widely known as the gold standard, enduring as a testament to the passion and fervor that led listeners to make legends of rock’s most important acts.
“They wanted to bring that show home in the same way that if your parents went to Hawaii in the 1980s, they brought slides back and leis and whatever,” said Flannigan. “For these guys, this was their vacation. That was their thing they wanted to re-experience. Mike was like, ‘How can I take that to the highest level? How can I make the highest quality recordings of these things that I love?’”
Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here 50 features a new Dolby Atmos mix of the album by James Guthrie, alongside previously unreleased studio rarities, alternate versions, demos and live bootlegs. The reissue will be released on three-LP, two-CD, Blu-ray, digital and deluxe box set formats via Sony Music. Learn more about the project at pinkfloyd.com.
