The Hidden Phone Call on 'Wish You Were Here' and the Radio Trick

That scratchy, distant phone call that opens “Wish You Were Here” wasn’t just a sound effect—it was a real answering machine message. The band asked their manager Steve O’Rourke to call the studio and leave a rambling message about a demo called “Have You Got It Yet,” which was actually a running joke about a song Syd Barrett kept changing. They recorded it straight from the phone line onto tape.

To give the voice that eerie, broadcast-from-another-room feel, the band set up a radio in the studio control room and played the tape back over it. They then ran a microphone from the radio into the live room, so the sound would naturally degrade and pick up the ambient air and room tone. That’s why O’Rourke’s voice sounds like it’s coming through a beat-up transistor radio in a garage—it literally was.