One of the treats on the new “Immersion” box set of the Pink Floyd classic, Wish You Were Here, is the Floyd’s recording with the great jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli on an unused alternate version of the title cut.
Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason called it “the jewel in the crown” of the band’s unreleased recording archive. The tape had been in the EMI vaults for 36 years. In it, Grappelli takes a soaring solo at the end of the song. His playing was actually there on the original album, but so low in the final mix that the band opted not to credit him, thinking it would be insulting.
The master tape of the Grappelli solo was presumed to have been wiped, as Nick Mason told BBC radio:
“My understanding was that we’d had to record over it in order to put on other sections. It still astonishes me that we didn’t use it originally, didn’t realise what a wonderful thing it was.”
In “A Rambling Conversation with Roger Waters Concerning All This and That,” that was published in the Wish You Were Here Songbook, Roger Waters was asked about the Grappelli session by Nick Sedgewick:
Nick Sedgewick: Didn’t you also use Stephane Grappelli on the album somewhere?
Roger Waters: Yeah. He was downstairs when we were doing Wish You Were Here. Dave had made the suggestion that there ought to be a country fiddle at the end of it, we might try it out, and Stephane Grappelli was downstairs in the number one studio making an album with Yehudi Menuhin. There was an Australian guy looking after Grappelli who we’d met on a tour so we thought we’d get Grappelli to do it. So they wheeled him up after much bartering about his fee—him being an old pro he tried to turn us over, and he did to a certain extent. But it was wonderful to have him come in and play a bit.
Nick Sedgewick: He’s not on the album now, though?
Roger Waters: You can just hear him if you listen very, very, very hard right at the end of Wish You Were Here, you can just hear a violin come in after all thewind stuff starts—just! We decided not to give him credit, ‘cos we thoughtit might be a bit of an insult. He got his 300 pounds, though.
