t's 1972 and in Britain the optimistic, swinging Sixties already feels like a long time ago. The year opens with the British Army shooting thirteen unarmed civil rights marchers dead in Derry, Northern Ireland; in February, a coal miner's strike prompts the declaration of a state of emergency and the first outing of the three-day working week. Abroad, the Vietnam War is in full swing. As the year progresses, so too do stagflation, unemployment, industrial action, civil unrest and violence. The UK feels like a miserable, angry place, and in many ways out of control.
You wouldn't know it from the charts though: in pop and rock terms, 1972 is not a particularly dark place. The music industry has responded to Britain's turmoils by giving the country cheery, gender-bending rock in the form of T-Rex and The Sweet and putting David Bowie's androgynous alter ego, Ziggy Stardust, on Top of The Pops.
And in many ways, this makes sense. These dolled-up glam rockers are well placed to provide Britain's weary population with much-needed musical escapism.
But their music is, in many ways, at odds with the seriousness of the times.
There is one band, however, that is quietly working on something that will, when released, utterly capture the zeitgeist — and much more besides.
Oh, by the way, which one's Pink?
By 1972, Pink Floyd had been together for eight years and gone down a lot of musical alleyways. Their releases from 1967 to 1971 had included whimsy, in the Syd Barrett-powered psychedelia of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn; ambient, ethereal stuff on Saucerful of Secrets; instrumental film soundtrack music on More; out-and-out experimentation on Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother; and acoustic rock on Meddle.
Despite the eclecticism and experimentation, and the acid-induced departure of Barrett, the band had managed to keep fans and its label onside; and however strange Pink Floyd's music was, their albums were no strangers to the UK's top 10. The band was making a decent living from its musical eccentricities, and at this point, there was no commercial reason to change course.
But there was a creative one: Pink Floyd's work up to that point, while interesting, had been devoid of a clear direction or an unequivocal critical smash. Most importantly, the band itself wasn't terribly happy with its back catalogue. Roger Waters and David Gilmour both viewed Atom Heart Mother as "crap," and Gilmour was "tiring of that psychedelic noodling stuff."
Waters in particular wanted to take the band in a more focused, and more overtly political, direction — in his words to "drag it, kicking and screaming, back from the borders of space, from the whimsy that Syd was into" back to his concerns, which were "much more political, and philosophical." And at a meeting in December 1971, in drummer Nick Mason's kitchen, the band determined to make an album that did precisely that.
Significantly, this change in approach was to begin not in a recording studio, but on the road.
On the run
Many people think of The Dark Side of The Moon as the quintessential 'studio' album — a record born in Abbey Road Studios that owes its entire existence to electronic experimentation and wizardry.
But this isn't actually true. The Dark Side of The Moon began, and was developed, as an entirely live project built around a need to come up with some new songs for a 17-date British tour that was kicking off in January 1972. Writing sessions in December 1971 in Hampstead were followed up by rehearsals of the new material at The Rolling Stones' Bermondsey Street warehouse; and remarkably, nearly all of the songs that ended up on The Dark Side of The Moon were ready to be performed live at a show on 17 January 1972 at The Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, London.
Pink Floyd performing at The Rainbow Theatre in 1972. Photo credit: Ilpo Musto / Alamy
This was followed up with nearly fifty live performances of the Dark Side tracks in Japan and the US. By the time Pink Floyd entered the studio to record these songs, most of them were already fully written and arranged, and the band knew them backwards.
Things would mean what they meant
Pink Floyd's 1971 album Meddle had hinted at the sonic direction that the band would take on The Dark Side of The Moon — musically speaking, Meddle was a lot more more cohesive than their previous releases, and boasted considerably higher production values.
But lyrically speaking, the whimsy and eclecticism of earlier years were still there: Meddle boasts a song about a dog called Seamus; an account of a pleasurable day spent in San Tropez; and in Echoes, a fairly abstract (and long) reflection on empathy. All enjoyable tracks, but with lyrical content that flits from the trivial to the ponderous.
The band were aware of this lack of lyrical direction. "I think we all thought — and Roger definitely thought — that a lot of the lyrics that we had been using were a little too indirect," recalls Gilmour. "There was a definitely a feeling that the words [on the next record] were going to be very clear and specific...Things would mean what they meant. That was a distinct step away from what we had done before."
This was putting it mildly: Roger Waters was about to craft lyrics that aimed to describe what it meant — or perhaps what it should mean — to be alive.
Over the course of just ten songs, these lyrics would confront all the big themes associated with the human condition — the purpose of life; the passage of time; greed; madness; and death.
A more prosaic thing the band had to confront was where to record them.
To Abbey Road
Abbey Road Studios (or EMI Studios as they were known in 1972) are best known for their association with The Beatles, but are also famous for being the recording location for The Dark Side of The Moon.
Interestingly however, the album could easily have been recorded somewhere else.
Despite its reputation as a world class studio, Abbey Road didn't always house the latest recording technology — its lack of 16-track recording facilities in the early 70s had nudged Pink Floyd in the direction of other studios (London's AIR and Morgan studios) to complete the more complicated parts of Meddle.
Their new album project was going to be more complicated still, and it was not a given that Abbey Road was going to be the band's choice of studio for The Dark Side of The Moon's recording sessions. But by June 1972, EMI had installed a Studer A80 16-track recorder there; and, satisfied that access to the latest tech was not going to be a problem, Pink Floyd ultimately came down in favour of recording the project at that famous London NW8 address.
Doing so meant working with Abbey Road engineer Alan Parsons. Like legendary Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick, Parsons had entered EMI Studios at a young age and quickly worked his way up to the position of engineer. This was by way of some very high profile projects: he tape-opped on The Beatles' Let it Be sessions before going on to assist Geoff Emerick in the engineering of their swansong, Abbey Road.
Alan Parsons. Image credit: alanparsons.com
Parson's experience of assistant engineering the Abbey Road album is of significance here: there is huge amount of that record's DNA in The Dark Side of The Moon. Most (if not all) of Dark Side of The Moon is, like side two of Abbey Road, a 'long medley,' involving the segueing of tracks into each other in seamless fashion. Parson's close involvement in shaping a prototype for this sort of thing was to come in handy during the Dark Side sessions.
(Dark Side was also recorded using the same mixing desk as Abbey Road — EMI's custom-built TG12345 — giving it another sonic connection to that album.)
Parsons' experience of working with a complicated analogue synthesiser — George Harrison's Moog — during the recording of Abbey Road was to prove useful during the recording of Dark Side too. Pink Floyd were determined to use their new VCS3 and Synthi A synthesisers on their new songs — and the understanding of voltage control and synth patch bays that Parsons had gained during the Abbey Road sessions was to make the process of working with these complex devices a lot more straightforward during the Dark Side sessions.
The EMS VCS3 routing matrix
But the biggest advantage of having Parsons engineer the album was that he already knew the material really well: he had been the band's live sound engineer when they toured the material in early 1972.
But what about a record producer?
Well, given the classic album that The Dark Side of The Moon was to become, and the groundbreaking recording work it involved, it's remarkable to think that it didn't technically have one: the job of arranging the songs and capturing them to tape fell to the band and Parsons.
(Chris Thomas, who was brought in to mix the album, is viewed by some — including himself — as having had a production role. Pink Floyd disagreed with this analysis, so at the suggestion of Beatles' producer George Martin, he ended up with a credit of 'mix supervisor').
All this was arguably to lead to a musical injustice. Similar to the way that engineer Geoff Emerick's production contributions to the making of The Beatles' Revolver have been historically overlooked, Alan Parsons never got a production credit for The Dark Side of The Moon. Given how involved he was in in crafting it — and in sourcing and arranging so many of the sound effects that became so integral to it — he was, in my view, rather shortchanged here.
Welcome to the tape machine: recording the songs of Dark Side of The Moon
Speak to Me
Essentially the overture for The Dark Side of the Moon, and symbolising a birth or awakening of a child, 'Speak to Me' consists of a montage of sound effects that are heard again at various points of the album.
These include a beating heart, which we encounter again in 'Eclipse'; the clocks from 'Time'; the laughter from 'Brain Damage'; the cash register from 'Money'; and a clip from Clare Torry's vocal improvisation for 'The Great Gig in the Sky.'
(The famous heartbeat that starts proceedings is not actually a heartbeat at all but Nick Mason whacking a padded-out bass drum with a mallet.)
During this montage, which steadily increases in volume, we also get to hear a preview of some of the spoken phrases that punctuate the album. These came about as the result of Waters creating a set of questions — relating to the themes explored in the record — that were posed to various people present at Abbey Road at the time. Responses were elicited to quite troubling probes like "When did you last hit someone?", "Were you in the right?", "Would you do it again?" and "Do you fear death?"
Those questioned by Waters involved several of the band's roadies; studio staff; Alan Parsons; and even Paul McCartney, who happened to be working on Red Rose Speedway at Abbey Road at the time.
(Paul McCartney's answers never appeared on the album, because — according to Waters — "he was trying to be funny, which wasn't what we wanted at all." Parsons' contributions remained unused, too.)
Recorded on June 23, 1972 and worked on again in November, the track got its title from a phrase used repeatedly by Parsons during soundchecks for the interviewees — to check levels, he would always say "speak to me" prior to hitting the record button.
Breathe (in the Air)
After the crescendo of 'Speak to Me' (delivered via a reversed recording of a sustained piano chord) we arrive at 'Breathe' — a track that is much gentler in tone than its predecessor, but not entirely devoid of its darkness.
Directed towards the baby born in 'Speak to Me,' the song essentially gives the child some life advice (we assume from a parent). According to Waters, it was an "admonition to that newborn...that it’s important to grasp [that] as far as we know, you only get one go at this, this being alive business.”
Lyrically speaking, this admonition starts encouragingly enough, with a suggestion to go out and enjoy life (while remembering to stay connected to those who love you) and to make your own decisions:
Breathe, breathe in the air
Don't be afraid to care
Leave, but don't leave me
Look around, choose your own ground
From a sonic perspective everything starts calmly enough too — with a gentle, double-tracked vocal from Gilmour sitting over his reverb-drenched slide guitar, and Wright's electric piano played through a Leslie speaker.
As the track progresses though, we get a warning about the perils of focusing on work above all else:
Run, rabbit run
Dig that hole, forget the sun,
And when at last the work is done
Don't sit down it's time to dig another one.
Gilmour's vocal gets more aggressive on these lines, and they're prefaced with an angry Hammond organ run by Wright too.
Recorded in seven sessions between May 1972 and January 1973, 'Breathe' provided a leitmotif of sorts for the album, reintroducing us at various points to the character that is spoken to in the album's opening lines. A reprise of the track appears at the end of 'Time' and a chord sequence similar to that used in the song largely forms the basis of 'Any Colour You Like' too.
(In fact, the track's melody is used on Dark Side in a very similar way to the how The Beatles' used the melody of the verse in 'You Never Give Me Your Money,' which crops up in various guises on side two of Abbey Road. Of the many connections between the two records, this one is, to me, perhaps the most obvious.)
On the Run
Originally called 'The Travel Sequence,' 'On the Run' was conceived as a track about Pink Floyd's constant air travel and the feeling of burnout it generated for them. And of all the songs on the album, it's the one that changed most profoundly between being performed live and committed to tape.
In truth, between stage and studio it became an entirely different piece of music, morphing from a guitar jam into an avant garde sound collage that, during its assembly, was simply (and appropriately!) referred to as 'Weird Noises' and 'More Weird Noises' by the band.
Many of those weird noises came from an innovative synth, the EMS Synthi AKS. This came with one of the first programmable sequencers.
At the heart of the song was an an 8-note sequence (conceived by Gilmour but improved by Waters) that Waters entered into the Synthi and sped up to the point where it practically amounted to a babbling noise.
White noise, backward guitar parts, airport announcers, footsteps, heartbeats and panting were then overdubbed on the song to create a disorientating travel landscape that ends with the sound of a plane crashing, some footsteps, and the ticking clocks that announce the arrival of the next song, 'Time.'
Time
The relatively gentle ticking clocks that 'Time' opens with soon make way for a cacophony of alarm clocks and chimes that, even after repeat encounters, never fails to give the listener a fright. This was entirely the work of Alan Parsons, who had previously recorded them for an EMI quadraphonic test record. The idea of using them in a Dark Side context came to him when he heard the tick tock sequence that Roger Waters was working on for the track (interestingly, using a bass guitar rather than a clock or sound library snippet).
As the song progresses though, we leave cacophony behind and encounter an altogether funkier situation; we also meet the four female session vocalists who were to make a big sonic contribution to The Dark Side of The Moon — Doris Troy, Leslie Duncan, Liza Strike and Barry St. John. These four singers were go-to backing vocalists in the 1970s, and were no strangers to appearing on records made by high-profile acts (you can also hear them— in various combinations — on releases by The Rolling Stones, Elton John, The Who and Carly Simon.)
On this track, Parsons put their vocals through an early Abbey Road effects unit — the 'Frequency Translator' — giving them a 'swirling,' Leslie-speaker style flavour.
The guitar solo in 'Time' — arguably the most famous guitar moment on the album — was improvised (and loudly) by David Gilmour. According to Parsons, the recording setup for these guitar parts was extremely simple: "Dave used to play at deafening volumes...I would just use one microphone, about a foot away."
The lyrics of this song are direct, Waters criticising himself and/or the listener for not making the most of the small quantity of time we are given to exist.
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull dayYou fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand wayKicking around on a piece of ground in your home townWaiting for someone or something to show you the way
Speaking about the lyrics to Rolling Stone Magazine in 1982, Waters explained that they came about from a sudden realisation that life is not about preparing for something to happen, but is happening now.
"I spent an awful lot of my life — until I was about twenty-eight — waiting for my life to start. I though that at some point I would turn from a chysalis into a butterfly, that my real life would begin. So if I had that bit of my life to live again, I would rather live the years between eighteen and twenty-eight knowing that was it, that nothing was suddenly going to happen — that it was happening all the time. 'Time' passes, and you are what you are, you do what you do."
The Great Gig In The Sky
Like the other songs on Dark Side, Richard Wright's 'The Great Gig In The Sky' composition had been gigged extensively — but unlike most of them, it was to change significantly in the studio.
On tour, it had started out as an organ piece accompanied by recordings of Bible readings and extracts of speeches by the controversial conservative Malcolm Muggeridge; and was not known by its final title but as 'The Religious Section' or 'The Mortality Sequence.' Initially, the song amounted to an attack on the church, but evolved into a piece that reflected on a fear of dying — a fear, that as Richard Wright observed, was felt by all the band members and linked very much to their touring activities:
"One of the pressures for me — and I'm sure all the others — is this constant fear of dying, because of all the travelling we're doing on the motorways of America and Europe, and the planes. That for me is a very real fear."
Wright's gorgeous piano-based version of the song was recorded on a grand piano in Abbey Road's cavernous Studio 1; the spoken-word recordings used on it at gigs were then overdubbed onto it. However, when listening back to the results, the band felt something was missing.
Another Alan Parsons idea was to prove transformative here: his suggestion that they hire 25-year old session singer Clare Torry to add a vocal part on it. Turning up at Abbey Road on a Sunday night to record it, she recalls that she wasn't really given a brief:
“They didn’t say very much. The only person that really said anything was David Gilmour. That’s my abiding memory. I don’t remember really speaking to any of the others. I went in and they just said, ‘Well, we’re making this album, and there’s this track - and we don’t really know what to do with it.’ They told me what the album was about: birth, and death, and everything in between. And I said, ‘Well, play me the track.’ They did that, and I said, ‘Well, what do you want?’ They said, ‘We don’t know.’"
Torry's first attempt — involving phrases such as "ooh aah," "baby" and "yeah" — was quickly aborted after negative feedback from the band on her choice of words. Torry then decided that she would need to approach the recording as though she were an instrument, leaving words entirely behind.
This, in effect, meant screaming.
"So I started getting this pattern of notes, and they said, ‘Well, that seems the right direction to go.’ And I told them to put the tape on. I knew from past experience...well, I used to be called ‘First-take Torry’ because, very often, the first take I did was the best. And at the end of the first take, Dave Gilmour said, ‘Do another one — but even more emotional.’ So I did another one. And then he said, ‘I think we could do a better one.’ I started, and half way through, I realised that I was beginning to be repetitive; derivative. It didn’t have that off-the-top-of-the-head, instantaneous something. It was beginning to sound contrived. I said, ‘I think you’ve got enough.’ I thought it sounded like caterwauling."
Caterwauling or no, a couple of hours later Torry left the studio having produced one of the album's most iconic moments. Sadly it was a moment that she wasn't adequately credited for: despite effectively having written the melody for the song, she was only paid a £30 session fee for her work, and not credited as songwriter.
Clare Torry
(This situation was eventually rectified following a court case. Torry sued the band in 2004; an out-of-court settlement was reached in her favour, involving undisclosed payment terms and a 'vocal composition by Clare Torry' credit on post-2005 releases of The Dark Side of The Moon.)
Another significant moment in the song comes in the form of spoken-word content: at 0:39, we hear Gerry O'Driscoll, the Abbey Road doorman, muse on death:
"And I am not frightened of dying. Any time will do, I don't mind. Why should I be frightened of dying? There's no reason for it, you've got to go some time."
The yearning melancholy of the music accompanying O'Driscoll's relatively positive spin on mortality, in a Brechtian way, completely undermines his take on death.
Money
Side one of The Dark Side of The Moon deals largely with life and death. Side two spends a lot of time considering humanity's other great obsession, money.
In the famous opening percussive loop that kicks off side two, we hear this money immediately — via expertly stiched-together recordings of a cash register, an adding machine, coins and paper being torn. The loop represented a technical triumph, and foreshadowed how sampling would one day play a huge role in the construction of percussion tracks.
Besides that, it underlined just how physical the recording techniques involved in creating The Dark Side of the Moon were by comparison to their modern-day counterparts. There was no vast sample library to draw on; no copy and paste facility to speed things up; no unseen hard drives to record to. You had to create your own sounds and you had to touch — or even mutilate — your recording media.
Gilmour's recollection of the creation of the 'Money' intro speaks to the physicality of the recording process involved in Dark Side of The Moon:
"With the tape loops on 'Money' we had mic stands set up in the control room, with yards of tape doing a circle...Everything that one can do these days digitally, in seconds, was a major logistical nightmare. We were all experts in cutting and splicing tape and making loops, because we had to be."
Alan Parsons' description of the 'Money' loop being created also underlines just what a hands-on process it was:
"We got bags of cash and recorded them being dropped from a height of six feet on the studio floor. There was another sound that was meant to represent money being torn up. That was just bits of paper — The Floyd weren't that rich then."
(This song would soon help to rectify that.)
The other interesting production trick in 'Money' involves its primary time signature - 7/4. This is a very unusual signature to throw into a Western rock track (perhaps, as Nick Mason observed, because it is rather hard to dance to). Not only did the 7/4 time signature sound unusual, it set up one of the album's most exciting moments beautifully — the sudden switch at three minutes five seconds in to 4/4 time, where Gilmour comes screaming in with that famous Stratocaster guitar solo and the track really takes off.
A song that acknowledges the allure of money ("it's a gas") while vehemently denouncing those who have and hoard it, it was ironically the song that was to propel Pink Floyd into the hi-fidelity, first-class travelling set that it denounces. Released as a single in multiple countries in May 1973, it made its way into charts that Pink Floyd had never previously troubled, peaking at number 13 on the US Billboard and hitting number 1 in France.
Ultimately the line "Money, it's a hit" would turn out to be as much of a prophetic statement as a pop lyric; and the song enriched the band to the point where they ultimately could be considered one of its targets.
Us and Them
'Us and Them' had started life as a piece of piano music originally earmarked (but ultimately rejected) for the soundtrack of Michelangelo Antonioni's film Zabriskie Point. Ending up as the album's longest song, it began life on 1 June 1972 at a session in Abbey Road's Studio 3 (it was, in fact, the first track that the band tackled for the Dark Side project).
The song's most noticeable production trick — the tempo-based delay effect on the words 'Us' and 'Them' that placed echoes of these phrases across the stereo spectrum — amounted, at the time, to a a serious feat of sound engineering. An effect that would take just a few seconds to create on today's recording equipment in 1972 required Alan Parsons to spend hours bouncing those two words around a separate 8 track tape recorder. Parsons has since said that this effect was one of the hardest aspects of the album to record.
The song starts in the First World War, outlining how nation states and their generals divided 'ordinary men,' forcing them to fight each other against their will; we then encounter another 'us' and 'them' in verse two, which dwells on racism as a dividing force; and finally, we move back to monetary issues as Waters' lyrics highlight how money separates us into groups of "with, without."
The song ends with the death of a tramp, who we can perhaps assume to be a war veteran, one of the 'ordinary men' referred to earlier. He finds himself at the start of his life (and the song) being defined by a border, and at the end of it by his economic status.
Waters concludes that the wars over borders and the economics are intrinsically linked:
Down and out
It can't be helped but there's a lot of it about.
With, without.
And who'll deny it's what the fighting's all about?
Any Colour You Like
While the rest of the album speaks fairly directly to the listener — by way of rather didactic lyrics — 'Any Colour You Like' is more opaque in terms of its meaning. Much of this is of course down to the fact that it is an instrumental: there is no lyrical content to guide us here.
The song's title, however, may offer us a clue as to what the band was hinting at: illusory choices. 'Any Colour You Like' was an expression often uttered by the band's roadie Chris Adamson, who when asked for a guitar would say "Choose any colour you like, they're all blue." This may in turn have had its roots in Henry Ford's catchphrase "Any color he [a customer] wants, as long as it's black."
The point is that the choice being offered (by society? by capitalism?) is not really there. Roger Waters, when speaking about the song, implied as much, saying that "metaphorically, 'Any Colour You Like' is interesting...because it denotes offering a choice where there is none."
Interestingly, Waters' suggestion here that life deprives us of meaningful choice is somewhat at odds with his encouragements in 'Breathe' and 'Time' to actively choose to live a meaningful life (it also somewhat contradicts his statement in 2003's The Making of The Dark Side of The Moon documentary that "at any point you can grasp the reins and start guiding your own destiny.")
Either way, as a purely instrumental song, 'Any Colour You Like' is one of the few songs on The Dark Side of the Moon that you can entirely project your own feelings onto; you can give it any meaning you like, perhaps.
Musically speaking, the track starts out largely focussed around a synth — Richard Wright's VCS 3 — before David Gilmour takes over proceedings by soloing on his black strat at around 1:20. The recordings of both instruments are notable for the heavy use of effects: the echo on the synth is provided by a Binson Echorec delay unit (made famous by Hank Marvin), and the warble on the guitar by a Uni-Vibe pedal (a 1960s Japanese effects unit that was designed for creating chorus and vibrato effects).
If you listen to the song carefully, you can just about hear David Gilmour scat along with his guitar solo (a production trick we'd encounter again, in a more pronounced way, during the guitar solo on 'Wish You Were Here.')
Brain Damage
If the aim of The Dark Side of The Moon was to leave Syd Barrett's musical influence behind, the band couldn't quite leave the man himself out of proceedings. As Roger Waters has made clear in interviews, the lunatic on the grass referred to in the lyrics of this song is Barrett, and the grass is the square in between the River Cam and Kings College chapel in Cambridge.
Waters remembers a time before Syd's mental health deteriorated — of "games and daisy chains and laughs" — before going on to identify the real lunatics, the politicians and celebrities whose "folded faces" he sees every day on the floor of his hall, courtesy of the front page of his daily paper.
And then we get the empathy, and the explanation of what the dark side of the moon actually is: our hidden selves, our own sense of isolation and madness.
And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
And if there is no room upon the hill
And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon
As Waters explains:
"The line 'I'll see you on the dark side of the moon' is me speaking to the listerner, saying 'I know you have these bad feelings and impulses, because I do too; and one of the ways I can make direct contact with you is to share the fact that I feel bad sometimes."
Of all the tracks on the album, this is probably the song that has the biggest connection to the work of The Beatles. Based largely around a White Album-esque arpeggiated guitar (processed through a Leslie speaker) it ends up seamlessly segueing into the album's final track ('Eclipse') in a way that is highly reminiscent of how the end of Abbey Road plays out.
(There's even a possible Beatles reference in the lyrics too — the hill mentioned being the one frequented by 'The Fool on The Hill.' Another lunatic.)
The track is notable for the fact that it's the first one on the album to feature Waters singing; he takes the lead vocal and initially provides the harmonies too, before Doris Troy, Lesley Duncan, Liza Strike and Barry St John enter the fray at 1:16, providing backing vocals that go far beyond having a supportive function; their efforts amount to more of a transcendental one.
Eclipse
And finally, in the form of 'Eclipse,' we reckon with death. But not before Roger Waters recaps every aspect of our lives for us:
All that you touch
And all that you see
All that you taste
All you feel
And all that you love
And all that you hate
All you distrust
All you save
And all that you give
And all that you deal
And all that you buy
Beg, borrow or steal
And all you create
And all you destroy
And all that you do
And all that you say
And all that you eat
And everyone you meet (everyone you meet)
And all that you slight
And everyone you fight
And all that is now
And all that is gone
And all that's to come
All of it — everything under the sun — Waters concludes, is eclipsed by the moon: death. The absurdity and futility of the human condition is laid bare for us. Death wipes out all our achievements, our failures, our mundane moments, our encounters with other humans, our lunch — all of it. And as if to add to the gloom, the last spoken word recording on the album then hammers the point home; we hear Abbey Road doorman Gerry O'Driscoll conclude that "There is no dark side of the moon, really. As a matter of fact it's all dark."
(There is a bit of dark humour to be detected in the inclusion of this comment too, of course. Straight after an impressive — perhaps even bombastic — ending to one of the greatest albums ever made, O'Driscoll has just implied that the band have been labouring under a misapprehension. There is no dark side of the moon.).
So existence is fleeting. Death is final. And yet...this is all followed by a heartbeat (the same one we hear in 'Speak to Me'). Is Waters leaving the door open for something? An afterlife? A reincarnation? Or is this just the sound of another human life beginning, and the circle starting all over again?
Sung by Waters, 'Eclipse' was not recorded as a standalone song but as part of the 'Brain Damage' takes; in fact it was the only track on the album involving a segue that didn't involve a tape edit. And everybody involved in the recording is on fire here. Waters does his bleak lyrics justice with a ferocious vocal performance; Troy, Duncan, Strike and St John provide backing vocals that manage to be simultaneously harmonious and terrifying. Wright's Hammond roars throughout, with his intro screaming 'This is the end of an album' in no uncertain terms. While all this is going on, Nick Mason's drums seem to thunder above the track, rather than underneath it, adding a suitably celestial vibe to proceedings. Only David Gilmour is holding back, providing arpeggiated guitar that is relatively gentle by comparison to his other guitar work on the album.
And when at last the work is done
Released in the US on 1 March 1973, and in the UK on 16 March 1973, The Dark Side of The Moon went on to become one of the best-selling albums of all time, remaining in the Billboard 200 album charts for 736 consecutive weeks (from 17 March 1973 to 16 July 1988).
While a huge proportion of this success can of course be explained by the quality of the musical work on the album, there are two other contributing factors that have to be highlighted.
One of them was a man called Bhaskar Menon, the chairman of Capitol Records, the label that distributed Pink Floyd records in the US. Absolutely blown away by the record, and convinced that it had potential to be an enormous success, he devoted himself completely to making it precisely that. The huge marketing campaign that accompanied the album's release in the US was all down to him and his realisation that despite the album's weighty, dark themes, its music would resonate with millions.
The second factor was the band's unusual decision to release singles from the album — something they hadn't done since 1968's release of 'Point Me at The Sky.' In the US, Menon organised the release of radio edits of 'Us and Them' and 'Time'; in the UK, 'Money' was released as a single. This put three of the album's strongest tracks in front of millions of listeners, bringing the band out of the shadows at precisely the moment that they were producing their best work.
Finally, it's worth noting that the promotion of the album was unquestionably helped by the brilliance of its artwork. Produced by Storm Thorgerson's Hipgnosis agency, the album's minimalistic cover perfectly summed up both the darkness and the light of its themes; but perhaps more significantly (at least from a commercial perspective), its stark minimalism helped it stand out in record shop window displays.
The sleeve's ability to poke out was further aided by the fact that if you line up multiple copies of the album together, you get a visually impressive series of prisms and rainbows — record store owners liked and took advantage of this visual effect, which resulted in the record getting bigger promotional displays than competing releases.
By lining up multiple copies of the album, record store owners were able to make creative (and large) promotional displays for The Dark Side of The Moon
But in the end it's only round and round
With its focus on the human condition, and its exploration of universal themes, The Dark Side of the Moon will always resonate.
But as we enter 2025, the album feels more relevant than ever.
The lunatics who shape our existence are particularly mad; with the rise of nationalism the distinction between 'us' and 'them' has never felt greater, or more encouraged; and most of the world's inhabitants are in one way or another forced to live to work, spending their most precious resource — time — making money for an even richer high-fidelity, first-class travelling set. (A set that now asks us to do away with facts and truth.)
Dark Side is the perfect soundtrack to all this madness, and its call for self-reflection and empathy remains vital.
Sources: a wide range of sources of information were used to research this article, but significant ones include John Harris' excellent book The Dark Side of The Moon; Martin Popoff's Pink Floyd and The Dark Side of The Moon: 50 Years; and Pink Floyd: All The Songs by Jean-Michel Guesdon and Phillipe Margotin.
About the author
Chris Singleton is the songwriter in Five Grand Stereo and a regular contributor to this blog. When not writing music — or about it — he edits a popular blog about ecommerce and web design, Style Factory.