Words by Riley Fitzgerald
Graphic by Press

Pink Floyd have released an alternate version of ‘Have A Cigar’.

Appearing on 1975’s Wish You Were Here, the song originally featured guest vocals by English folk singer Roy Harper.

This new version contains vocals from the band’s Roger Waters and David Gilmour.

‘Have A Cigar’ chronicles the band’s disillusion with the music industry following the massive success of the previous album The Dark Side of the Moon.

“When I wrote ‘Welcome to the Machine’, all those years ago in the 1970s,” Roger Waters recalled via podcast The COVID-19 Chronicles on May 29, “I was in a pop group and I was recognising we were just f***ing fodder. They don’t give a sh*t about any of this! What they care about is never playing a Black Artist a single cent of royalties. If they do that for the whole day that’s a job well done. I shouldn’t be tarring them all with the same brush but…”

Waters believed Pink Floyd’s artistic impulses were increasingly curtailed by greed.

“‘What’s this? It’s very hot!’” he recounts of record executives’ response to his music, “‘Let’s cool it down. Let’s put a plastic coating around it. Let’s put a bikini on it and make it twerk and then everything will be alright because nobody will ever think about anything again.'”

In keeping with this sentiment, ‘Have A Cigar’ plays out as a collage of music business expressions.

Most famous amongst them, “By the way which one is Pink?”

“We did have people who would say to us ‘Which one’s Pink’ and stuff like that,” David Gilmour shared in a 1992 Radio interview. “There were an awful lot of people who thought Pink Floyd was the name of the lead singer and that was Pink himself and the band. That’s how it all came about. It was quite genuine.”

The song originally appeared on Pink Floyd’s 2011 Wish You Were Here Immersion boxed set.

It is now digitally available as part of the band’s Syd, Roger, Richard, Nick and David evolving playlist.

Listen to Pink Floyd’s playlist in full here.