Dark Side Of The Moon marks the apogee of Pink Floyd’s career. Even now, more than 30 years later, the album has hardly dated, with the possible exception of the sound of cash registers on ‘Money’ which few younger listeners would recognise. The shared experience of being on the road for seven years had created a closeness that the Floyd never had before, and would not have again. They were working well together and there was an unprecedented creative collaboration and sharing of ideas between them. This solidarity could be said to be responsible for much of the album’s quality and subsequent success.
In addition the ‘Eclipse’ suite – as it was still known – had been performed live enough times for it to have grown and developed and for most of the wrinkles to be ironed out. They already recognised it as being their finest work and expected it to do well, but no one could have predicted its tremendous worldwide success, as David said, “The whole thing was a very powerful package, you know. We knew before we finished it that that it was definitely going to do a lot better than anything we’d done before. I mean we didn’t think that it would do that well.”
Dark Side Of The Moon did not appear fully formed. In September 1971 the band thought it was about time they undertook an English tour but felt that they couldn’t book any dates unless they had some fresh material to perform. Ideally they liked the concerts to consist of new material in the first half, followed by a selection of earlier songs. The Floyd toured the States until the end of November and the first UK date was pencilled in for January 20, 1972. As usual the band was desperate for ideas. After some unproductive messing around in a scruffy warehouse owned by the Rolling Stones in Bermondsey, south London, the band met at their favourite rehearsal studio, a place on Broadhurst Gardens near West Hampstead tube station, and began to go through the scraps and bits and pieces they had left over from previous albums to see if anything could be salvaged.
Roger: “Everything we got together we immediately put on the Revox. At the end of four days we’d got half a dozen short pieces of music. It was exactly the same technique we used when we put together Meddle. Just putting ideas down … We sat in a little room and played our instruments, and we got quite a lot of stuff together – music – no lyrics, or ideas or anything. We had all these different pieces, like the riff of ‘Money’ came out of those sessions, and so on and so forth.”
Rick: “At the start we only had vague ideas about madness being a theme. We rehearsed a lot just putting down ideas and then in the next rehearsals we used them. It flowed really well. There was a strong thing in it that made it easier to do.” Wright was responsible for the music on five of the 10 tracks on the album – possibly the only time he felt fully integrated into the group and he was responding to the task well.
By the time of The Dark Side Of The Moon album was released in 1973, Pink Floyd’s stage shows had turned into theatrical spectacles with light projections, film backdrops and pyrotechnics.
The band had Christmas off with their families and reconvened on New Year’s Day 1972 in Nick Mason’s kitchen in Highbury, north London. It was there Roger presented his idea of an album based on a theme of work, madness, aging and death.
Roger: “I’d been listening to songs and we thought we could do a whole thing about the pressures we personally feel that tend to drive one over the top, to drive one into crazy situations. So after that it was just really a question of sitting down and writing a few headings like – all this travelling about – money – the pressure of earning money. The time thing, time passing by very fast. The thing about organised power structures like the church or politics, violence, aggression. I sat down with that list of things having talked to mainly Nick about it, and just saying that we could work with that bit and go in that order.”
Nick: “The album was going to be about … what we felt were the stress and strain of our lives and what was wrong with them or what we were motivated by and so on. And so we ended with a piece of paper upon which was written various subjects that would be covered, and worked from there. There wasn’t any sitting down and saying let’s produce something so crystal clear and delightful that everyone will adore it.”
Roger: “I thought, and said, “Listen, if it was some kind of theme that ran through it – y’know – life, with a heartbeat and that … and then you could have other bits coming in, like the pressures that tend to be anti-life – how about that?” And then we all started writing out a list of what those pressures might be. And that was that.”
David: “Sometime after we had started and got quite a few pieces of music sort of formulated vaguely, Roger came up with the specific idea of going through all the things that people go through and what drives them mad, and from that moment obviously our direction slightly changed. We started tailoring the pieces we already had to fit that concept and Roger would tailor words in to fit the music that we had, and from that moment on, it had a new impetus to it … it is set out very simply and clearly; the ideas that are behind it and what it’s trying to say, I think … Roger tried definitely in his lyrics to make them very simple, straightforward, and easy to understand.”
Obscured By Clouds was released in June, 1972.
Roger: “And then I started writing lyrics with all these different bits of music that all came from different people in the band … I started writing a series of sets of lyrics about the different things we talked about. It’s all terribly simple!”
Some people might think that this wasn’t a simple theme at all; it was after all, the whole human condition that the band was attempting to explain. Roger, as the self-appointed lyricist, wrote all the words. There is much debate about the importance of lyrics in Pink Floyd’s work but clearly in this case the words gave the album its theme. Dark Side … is a great record both musically and lyrically and the lyrics contributed greatly towards its success: it is very much an album to listen to alone when the soaring anthemic melodies and almost religious sonorities can have a deep emotional effect.
The early to mid Seventies was the age of the singer-songwriter and albums by Leonard Cohen, James Taylor, Neil Young and the like constituted a whole separate bedsit and dorm market. The words are kept simple, too simple for my taste, but designed to get the message over in as straightforward a way as possible and in this Waters succeeds admirably. It was an ambitious subject.
Roger: “There are a number of things that impinge upon an individual that colour his view of existence. There are pressures that are capable of pushing you in one direction or another and these are some of them and whether they push you towards insanity, death, empathy, greed, whatever, there’s something about the Newtonian view of that physics that might be interesting and it’s what this album is about.”
Waters might sound pretentious but he believed deeply in what he was writing about, it had long been his subject matter but it found its most successful form here; later work became too dark. The lyrics were perfect for the work; they appealed to adolescent and undergraduate angst, in their clumsy way they articulated the confusion and wonder of young people emerging, blinking and a little scared, from adolescence into adulthood. They gave form to the nameless fears and anxieties about the future, and what might happen to them. It was a very positive message; having presented a grim picture of life, Roger’s lyrics also gave hope.
As he explained when interviewed for the documentary The Making Of Dark Side Of The Moon: “I think within the context of the music and within the context of the piece as a whole, people are prepared to accept that simple exhortation to be prepared to stand your ground and attempt to live your life in an authentic way.” For him, Dark Side Of The Moon was “an expression of political, philosophical and humanitarian empathy that was desperate to get out.”
Though adolescents were not the only audience for Dark Side, each year brought a new crop of listeners for whom it was the audio equivalent of On The Road or The Catcher In The Rye. Musically it was a complicated piece and took some time to shake down into a coherent whole. David: “An awful lot of time went into writing it in rehearsal rooms, and when we first got it together, took it out and did it in shows, it changed all the time. I can’t remember when the specific changes happened and cemented it into being.”
Roger accepted the idea that much of its appeal was to adolescents. He told Rolling Stone: “It’s very difficult to write ‘Breathe, breathe in the air, don’t be afraid to care,’ without people going, ‘Fucking wanker!’ And I think that’s what Radiohead and these other bands are attaching to. There is a purity in those records. The records are bought by people when they hit puberty, when it becomes important to us to attach to ideas. That’s why people are still buying Catcher In The Rye: to help us discover how we think.”
The Dark Side Of The Moon took about six weeks to write, though some pieces on the album were not added until they recorded it some time later and other parts changed pretty radically. The Floyd toured Britain in the spring of 1972 to great acclaim. Already there was such a buzz about the band that they didn’t need to advertise; in fact their total advertising budget for the UK tour, according to promoter Peter Bowyer, was £13 which included money for a notice to let fans know that because a power cut had cancelled a date in Manchester they would be returning on another date. They played more than a dozen cities, and every seat, all 13,000 in the provinces, was sold by word-of-mouth. The tour culminated in four nights at the Rainbow Theatre in London, a series of concerts regarded by many as the turning point in Pink Floyd’s career.
They used the occasion to showcase ‘Eclipse’, and pulled out all the stops. It took four roadies six hours to assemble nine tons of equipment on stage and 12,000 people saw the four performances which each sold out. The critics loved it; Pink Floyd were no longer a psychedelic space band, they were presenting complex modern music, closer to the electronic music of Luciano Berio, Pierre Henry or Pierre Schaeffer than to the psychedelic noodlings of the Grateful Dead, and their lyrics were no longer abstract random appropriations and vague felicities to suit the mood, they were about the fears and problems of ordinary people.
The Financial Times wrote: “If anyone else attempted a visual and aural assault it would be a disaster; the Floyd have the furthest frontiers of pop music to themselves.”
The band was still underground but their fame and success was growing exponentially. A very professional looking bootleg of their Rainbow concerts was released called Pink Floyd Live which many people bought thinking it was their latest official release; sales apparently topped 120,000 copies. This was to be an ongoing problem for the band that they were never able to satisfactorily solve. Three weeks after the Rainbow, they were in Tokyo to begin a short Japanese tour but before that, they recorded another soundtrack.
La Vallée aka Obscured By Clouds was the second Floyd film commission from Barbet Schroeder. Schroeder: “The reason Pink Floyd music was used in La Vallée was because the actors were people that were listening to Pink Floyd music, so that’s why we used Pink Floyd. Because it fit the actors. I asked them to write different songs with different moods. Some of it I told them what I wanted and some of it they did themselves. When the LP came out I chose what I could use for the movie.”
The soundtrack was recorded in just two weeks, February 23-29 and March 23-27 1972 at the ‘Honky Chateau’ as Elton John called it, the Chateau d’Herouville outside Paris. This rather overlooked album in the Floyd canon is a favourite of the band’s. Nick thought it was “sensational” and David said, “I love that album. Yes, it was really fast, rapid stuff without any great need to make a concept out of it. That was when we’d just got the very first synthesiser ever invented, and we were playing with it, the EMS Synthi. And all you could do was tune it up to play a note, and then press it for it to play the note, like you couldn’t play notes with a keyboard, not at that juncture. Or if you could, we didn’t know how to. That was the first time we ever used any form of a synthesiser, was on Obscured By Clouds.”
Apart from the inevitable slow building drone that opens it – the Floyd often had trouble starting songs – who would ever guess that David’s ‘Childhood’s End’ was a Pink Floyd song? It’s a classic early Seventies British rock song with a surprisingly biting guitar solo and makes you wonder what direction Gilmour might have taken had he not joined Pink Floyd. Roger’s ‘Free Four’, despite its cynical treatment of such weighty themes as aging and death, has a jauntiness not normally associated with the Floyd and is also pinned down by another blistering solo. The possible reason the album is so free and energetic was because the band members were getting on so well and just went into the studio, quickly playing their way through the numbers with high energy and enthusiasm; they were still at heart fans of rock ‘n’ roll and it sounds as if they were having fun. It is further evidence that the band were in peak condition during the gestation period of Dark Side Of The Moon.
Back on the road, the Japanese tour was followed almost immediately by a 15-city American trek. The Floyd performed ‘Eclipse’ at all of these shows, honing it, perfecting the dynamic flow, identifying weak spots. By the time they went into the studio, they had a very good idea of what they wanted and were well rehearsed.
Sessions for Dark Side Of The Moon began on June 1, 1972 at Abbey Road where the Floyd had use of EMI’s newly installed 16-track. Though spread over a nine month period, they actually made the album quite quickly, spending no more than 36 days in the studio, a little over a month in total, usually in four or five day blocks, using both studios 2 and 3. By now the Floyd were old hands at using the recording studio as an instrument and they took full advantage of the facilities on offer. They knew the people there and they had a very good team, led by balance engineer Alan Parsons.
Nick told Tommy Vance: “Abbey Road was, by ‘73, a much easier place to work. I know a number of people have talked about what Abbey Road used to be like, and when we first went in there, it was a lot less friendly, a lot less approving of the rock business. It was felt that they made proper music there, and these weird gits came in and messed about … you know, it wasn’t quite right. We were sort of ‘B’ class…. But, once the Beatles had been in and put their stamp on it, it really changed.”
Tommy Vance: “It was like going to the BBC?”
Nick: “It was more like going to the Lubyanka, painted in that green, I believe, the secret police at least favour.”
There is movie footage of them at work on the album in the Live At Pompeii film directed by Adrian Maben. This was a sort of anti-live concert film. So many bands had been filmed with a sea of adulatory fans waving their arms and lighters, and there was plenty of footage of Pink Floyd’s extraordinary lightshow. Maben came up with the idea of them performing in a stunning location, a 2000 year old Roman stadium, with no audience at all; just the ghosts of the long gone citizens whose town had been wiped out by volcanic gas and falling lava in 79 AD.
Nick: “Initially we were supposed to do it in playback, but the conditions were such that we went all the way and played live. And I believe that the music, in that arena filled with dust and sunshine, and later on with wind and darkness, was of great quality.”
Though they had finished making the film a year and a half before, it had taken so long in post production that it was already out of date. Maben wanted footage of the Floyd working on their next album to make it more commercial. The film crew set up at EMI Studios and captured some of the actual recording of Dark Side Of The Moon. Apart from some rather stilted conversation in the canteen nothing was staged for the film.
The Dark Side Of The Moon album opens with ‘Speak To Me,’ a collage of voices suggested by Roger and assembled by Nick who, because of his interest in tape recorder techniques, became the de facto project manager for the album. Nick: “Usually I take care of everything referring to the magnetic tapes problem. I’m really not able to write songs. What I often do is give suggestions to the orchestration of the melodies the others come up with. That’s the reason why I often co-write songs in Pink Floyd.”
In keeping with the theme of the album, Roger wanted to get actual people talking about life. The studio lights were dimmed, a microphone was positioned above a chair and a music stand arranged in front of it. Roger wrote out a series of questions, one on each card, and asked people to read the question and answer it. Then they could remove the card and see the next one but they were not allowed to read through the cards in advance so they did not know what the thread of the questions was going to be. First Alan Parsons had to get a level for their voice, so he would ask them “Speak to me,” thus giving the track its title.*
The questions began innocuously enough with “What is your favourite colour?” but quickly moved on to “Do you fear death?”, “Are you mad?” and “When did you last hit someone?” followed by “Were you in the right?” and “Would you do it again if the same thing happened?” First the Floyd’s roadies Chris Adamson, ‘Puddy’ Watts, ‘Liverpool Bobby’ and ‘Roger the Hat’ – whose stoned cackle appears in ‘On The Run’ – and their girlfriends were interviewed, followed by Jerry Driscoll, the Irish doorman at EMI Studios and other members of staff. Paul McCartney and Wings were recording in one of the studios at the time so Henry McCullough and his wife were quizzed as well as Paul and wife Linda who were so used to being interviewed that they were unable to react spontaneously. David: “They were much too good at being evasive for their answers to be usable.”
One question was “What does the dark side of the moon mean to you?” ‘Dark Side’ was still the original title of Roger’s song ‘Brain Damage’ but some of the responses such as that of Jerry the doorman which appeared on the record, when heard in the context of the other tracks, made them consider it as the most obvious title.* There was a problem in that Medicine Head had released an album of that name the year before but, fortunately for the Floyd, it went nowhere and as titles cannot be copyrighted, the band felt free to use it themselves.
The lyrics for ‘Breathe’ relate straight back to the work that Roger did with Ron Geesin on the soundtrack for The Body which opened with the words: “Breathe, breathe in the air.” It was a good lyric for the time, instead of just saying “love everybody” as most bands did then, Waters said “Don’t be afraid to love everybody,” a very different message.
The next track, ‘On The Run’ was one of the Floyd’s most ground-breaking efforts which predicted the sampling and appropriation of sounds that would not occur in pop music until decades hence. It shows their complete mastery of sound effects and creates an astonishing multi-layered sonic environment into which they mix even more effects: a heartbeat, the sound of footsteps – assistant engineer Peter James walking up and down Studio 2 breathless in heavy shoes – a tannoy announcing flight departures and so on including the terrifying throbbing of what sounds like a military helicopter swooping low – the Vietnam war was still raging as they made the album, something Roger, if not the others, must have been acutely aware of. The narrative, such as there is one, was someone running for a plane. David produced the jet engine roar on his Strat but it took the synthesiser to crash the plane.
The ‘On The Run’ electronic sequence came in at the very last minute when the band was nearly finished recording. They had already taped an ‘On The Run’ section which was more like the guitar jam they performed live when that part was known as ‘The Travel Sequence’ but they all felt that this instrumental chunk sat uneasily in the overall piece. When taking delivery of a briefcase model EMS-1 synthesiser that had a sequencer built into the lid, the band were all shown how to use it and immediately began to experiment. David: “I was playing with the sequencer device attachment, and came up with this sound, which is the basic sound of it. Roger sort of heard it, came over and started playing with it, too. Then he actually put in the notes that we made … He made that little sequence up, but I had got the actual original sound and I actually was the one doing the controlling on the take that we used. Then we chucked all sorts of things over the top of it afterwards.” The synthesiser solved all their problems as well as creating one of the most remarkable tracks on the album.
One of Alan Parsons’ jobs as a staff engineer at EMI Studios was to record different things for the legendary sounds effects library. He had recently taken a full set of field equipment to a clock shop to tape scores of different clocks ticking and chiming for a quadraphonic sound effects album. When the Floyd came to record ‘Time’ he mentioned this to the band. David: “He said, ‘Listen, I just did all these things, I did all these clocks,’ and so we wheeled out his tape and listened to it and said, ‘Great! Stick it on!’ They copied a clock on to each of the 16 tracks of the multi-track and back timed them to make their chimes coincide, then mixed it down to stereo. The effect was stunning. The other great feature of this track is of course the drumming. Nick used roto-toms but they also spent some time experimenting with some very small tuned drums called boo-bans. The roto-toms gave the best effect. The sound of the clocks in full quadraphonic sound went on to become a much loved feature of the Floyd’s live show.
‘The Great Gig In The Sky’ is perhaps the album’s most emblematic track with its beautiful melody and extraordinary singing by Clare Torry. Written originally for the live version of ‘Eclipse’ it was then accompanied by parodies of Ecclesiastes to show how religion might cause insanity. This idea was dropped – they did, after all, want to sell records in America – and when it came time to record it was simply thought of as a musical evocation of fear of death, in particular Rick’s fear of death by a plane crash. It began when Wright was sitting in the studio, tinkering with some chords on the piano, and David or Roger commented, “That sounds nice. Maybe we could use that on the album.” Encouraged, Rick went home and worked on it. By the time they came to record it, he knew it off by heart and it was recorded in just one session.
The memorable key change that makes the track special was something that Rick took from ‘So What’ on Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue, one of his all-time favourite albums. But after they had overdubbed the other instruments Roger was not satisfied and it was Parsons who suggested bringing in Torry, whom he had worked with on a Music For Pleasure (EMI’s budget label) album of pop hits. Alan had been impressed by her vocals and thought she would be good at improvising to Rick’s melody. 22-year-old Clare arrived at the studio on the Sunday evening of January 21. She knew little about Pink Floyd and she told John Harris: “They told me what the album was about: birth and death and everything in between. I thought it was rather pretentious to be honest.” When she asked what they wanted her to sing they didn’t know, all David could tell her was that it should be “emotional”.
She tried the normal backing vocal fills of the “Oh baby” variety, but David didn’t want that; they would have used Doris Troy for that type of sound. Then Clare decided to use her voice purely as an instrument and that was when the magic happened. She didn’t know it was great at the time, in fact she was rather embarrassed at being asked to scream and moan; sounds halfway between orgasm and terror. But David kept urging her to be more emotional so she really let go. It was a short but draining session and Torry left the studio soaked in sweat. She told Harris that as far as she was concerned, “It seemed a bit screechy-screechy. I really thought it would never see the light of day.”
With the addition of some judicious echo, she had succeeded beyond the band’s wildest expectations and her contribution is one of the most memorable aspects of the album.* Though as far as the band were concerned the subject of ‘The Great Gig In The Sky’ concerned death, the listeners thought the opposite, and within just a few weeks of the album’s release it became the most popular backing track for live sex shows in Amsterdam and, although no accurate statistics exist, it was also put to the same use in bedrooms across the world as one of the great all-time lovemaking accompaniment songs.
Unusually for the band, ‘Money’ was in 7/4 time. It was Roger’s song and he brought it in more or less completed in the form of a bluesy, guitar pickin’ number. David: “We just made up middle sections, guitar solos and all that stuff. We also invented some new riffs – we created a 4/4 progression for the guitar solo and made the poor saxophone player play in 7/4. It was my idea to break down and become dry and empty for the second chorus of the solo.” The first solo was artificially double-tracked and for the final one Gilmour had to switch from his Fender Stratocaster to a Lewis which had two whole octaves, enabling him to reach notes that the Strat couldn’t reach. It is the switch from 7/8 to 4/4 for the hard rock ‘n’ roll guitar solo that made the song so popular, that and the greasy saxophone solo. Dick Parry, an old friend of David’s from Cambridge, and the only saxophone player the band knew, was contacted and played a superb, honking solo in the best King Curtis manner.
Gilmour also contributed technically to the production of ‘Money’. Alan Parsons was filled with praise for David’s studio work, telling Circus magazine: “I think he’s the most technically minded of the four. He actually knows what’s going on technically inside the control room, and he would often come up with ideas of his own for production of a track. One instance was the cash register sounds for ‘Money’. Originally we were timing the beats with a click-track but we weren’t getting it right. David came up with the idea of actually measuring out pieces of tape with a ruler … David was very much a force behind the production of Dark Side Of The Moon.”
The sound effects used on ‘Money’ also contribute greatly to its appeal. Roger: “I thought it would be good as an introduction to create a rhythmic device using the sound of money. I had a two-track studio at home with a Revox recorder. My first wife was a potter and she had a big industrial food mixer for mixing up clay. I threw handfuls of coins and wads of torn-up paper into it. We took a couple of things off sound effects records too. The backing track was everyone playing together, a Wurlitzer piano through a wah wah, bass, drums and that tremolo guitar. One of the ways you can tell that it was done live as a band is that the tempo changes so much from the beginning to the end. It speeds up fantastically.”
It’s hard to believe that the Floyd had ‘Us And Them’ on hold ever since Zabriskie Point and had not used it. Back then this lyrical ballad was known as ‘The Violent Sequence’, written by Rick to accompany news footage of Americans cops beating up anti-war demonstrators but inexplicably Antonioni never used it; it was, according to the director, “Too sad, it makes me think of church!” Then, when the band was working on Dark Side, there was a section that needed filling and Rick’s ballad fitted perfectly. Rick: “‘Us And Them’ was a little piano piece I had worked out. I played it for them; they liked it. Roger went into another room and started working on the lyrics.” The long echo on the vocals is one of the peculiarities of this track that makes it so special because it introduces masses of space into the voice.
‘Any Colour You Like’ is just an organ fantasia followed by an old-style Floyd guitar vamp; the only filler track on the album but one that was needed for balance; it’s lightweight psychedelic noodling lightens the tone before reaching ‘Brain Damage’. This song, first called ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ used to be the finale of the ‘Eclipse’ suite when the band played it in late-‘71. Roger: “I had actually written a song previously when we were finishing the Meddle album and I wrote this song called ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ about the lunatic on the grass, and it had been running round my mind.” Roger was inspired by the signs forbidding people to walk on the great lawn behind Kings College Chapel in Cambridge. To him it questioned the whole idea of who was sane and who was not; who, in their right mind, would go to the trouble to plant a wonderful grass lawn and then forbid anyone to use it? It was also, of course, about Syd, one of Roger’s first attempts to write about his reclusive friend.
After they had performed it a few times live, Roger felt that this was not a complete enough resolution to the ‘Eclipse’ suite. Roger: “It seemed to need something at the end.” That something was ‘Eclipse’, which Waters was very casual about, walking in one day and saying, “Oh, by the way, I’ve written an ending.” Roger: ‘The last thing I wrote on Dark Side Of The Moon was ‘Eclipse’: ‘All that you touch and all that you see, all that you taste, all that you feel’ So I was getting kind of Buddhist about it. So what caused it? I suppose all the un-Buddhist ‘stuff’ of living in a van, seeing what the world was like, and being faced with one’s ambitions and what they actually ‘were’.”
Floyd fans have engaged in a lively debate about the true meaning of this track ever since but it is a straightforward explication of the Waters world view. Roger: “There was no riddle. It’s saying that all the good things in life are there for us to grasp, but that the influence of the dark forces in our natures prevents us from seizing them.” Roger could not have chosen a more powerful image to end the album: the cold dead moon passing silently in front of the blazing life-giving sun, blocking out its Earth-sustaining energy. Roger: “When Doris Troy did her wailing on ‘Eclipse’ we knew it was the climactic ending we wanted … We knew we had the album in the bag.”
The amiable working conditions did not extend to the mixing of the album, which quickly polarised into two camps, with David on one side and Roger on the other. David: “[Producer] Chris Thomas came in for the mixes, and his role was essentially to stop the arguments between me and Roger about how it should be mixed. I wanted Dark Side to be big and swampy and wet, with reverbs and things like that. And Roger was very keen on it being a very dry album. I think he was influenced a lot by John Lennon’s first solo album (Plastic Ono Band), which was very dry. We argued so much that it was suggested we get a third opinion. We were going to leave Chris to mix it on his own, with Alan Parsons engineering. And of course on the first day I found out that Roger sneaked in there. So the second day I sneaked in there. And from then on, we both sat right at Chris’ shoulder, interfering. But luckily, Chris was more sympathetic to my point of view than he was to Roger’s.”
Dark Side Of The Moon was released in March, 1973.
By now the Floyd recognised that they had created something exceptional. Roger: “It sounded special. When it was finished, I took the tape home and played it to my first wife, and I remember her bursting into tears when she’d finished listening to it. And I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s kind of what I expected,’ because I think it’s very moving emotionally and musically. Maybe its humanity has caused Dark Side to last as long as it has.”
It was not just the mix that was a cause for argument. Waters and Gilmour had a fundamental disagreement over the importance of lyrics. David told Tommy Vance: “My problem with Dark Side was that I thought Roger’s emergence on that album as a great lyric writer was such that he came to overshadow the music in places, and there were moments when we didn’t concentrate as hard on the music side of it as we should have done – which is what I voiced to all the band after the making of Dark Side. That was absorbed into an effort to try and make the balance between music and the words a better one on [the next Pink Floyd album] Wish You Were Here.”
Predictably Roger’s view was diametrically opposite and he later criticised the others for not recognising the significance and importance of his lyrics, claiming they were only interested in making money. This was mostly during the Eighties when Waters felt Pink Floyd should have disbanded just because he left, but even at the time there were certain tensions. Roger: “I just don’t think they understand the songs or what they’re about. If you read old interviews, they actually say that. I can remember interviews from Dark Side where Rick was saying, “We really don’t care about the lyrics.” They remain connected to the numbers, the money, and so that’s what you get, that’s what you feel through it all. What you don’t feel is the connection with the magic, because there isn’t any. The working relationship I had with Dave and Nick and even Rick to a certain extent up to and including Dark Side Of The Moon was very exciting and interesting and worthwhile, but after that it became very problematic.”
I must confess that I am in the camp that feels that even if the lyrics were all sung in Italian, like an opera, it would make very little difference to the meaning of Pink Floyd’s records, Dark Side Of The Moon in particular, which is very much a sonic poem; a beautifully constructed soundscape. In fact the album sold (and continues to sell) remarkably well in foreign countries where the listeners probably don’t understand enough English to follow the words. The lyrics are just not that important to the music though in this case they extended the album’s appeal to a wider audience of young people who might not otherwise have bought it.
However, Roger himself has subsequently recognised the naïvete of much of the lyrics: “It always amazes me that I got away with it really because it’s so ‘lower sixth’: ‘Breathe the air, don’t be afraid to care …’” But perhaps it is this simplicity and naivete that appealed to the audience. Like many songwriters who try to be serious, Roger’s work is mostly made up of clichés. This is because most songwriters are not readers, otherwise they would realise that their profundities have been expressed many times before, and usually in a much more meaningful way. We know Roger is not an avid reader because he told Chris Salewicz in 1987: “I was put off books early on, and I find it very difficult to read. As a child I never got into the habit of reading. I went through a period when I was a teenager of reading people like James Joyce, because it was hip to do so. Then I got a very basic grounding of what there was in literature that might be enjoyable. But now, if I’m sitting on the beach I’d rather be reading A Ship Must Die or something of that nature. I’m fond of those very involved English Second World War naval stories in the Hornblower tradition.”
The other thing that Dark Side had going for it was one of the most memorable yet simple album sleeves ever designed. Storm Thorgerson’s prism refracting white light into a rainbow is an instantly recognisable, iconic image. Hipgnosis had been asked to prepare an abstract idea that was both simple and direct. Thorgerson prepared seven or eight images and laid them out in a back room at EMI. The band came in, took one look, and all pointed to the prism. Storm was a little annoyed that the other images, on which he had spent some considerable time, did not even get a look in.
Dark Side Of The Moon was released in both the UK and US in March 1973. Former EMI International boss Bhaskar Menon had taken over Capitol Records and had decided to really put the full weight of the company behind it. With Dark Side sitting at number one position in the Billboard charts, Menon decided to boost sales by releasing ‘Money’ as a single.* It reached number 13, introducing the LP to millions of record buyers in the Midwest and other more conservative areas that only listened to Top 40 radio. Most of this audience thought the song was in praise of money and a jolly good thing that was too. ‘Money’ may have been ironic, but it worked because album sales mushroomed. Dark Side … was to stay in the US charts for 724 weeks, selling worldwide more than 30 million copies and continues to sell at a steady rate of about a million a year.
The album thrust Pink Floyd into the rarefied atmosphere inhabited by the Rolling Stones, the Who and Led Zeppelin. From now on they could fill huge auditoriums and stadiums and their fees became equally stratospheric. The income stream generated by the album and its publishing meant that the band could have retired right then and never had to work again in their lives. Their biggest problem became what to do with all the revenue, something that really did trouble Roger with his socialist principles but in the end, even he decided to keep it. The second biggest problem was what to do next because, as usual in the music business, the record company was clamouring for a follow-up. More so than usual, the band hadn’t the faintest idea of what to do.
Roger: “When Dark Side of the Moon was so successful, it was the end. It was the end of the road. We’d reached the point we’d all been aiming for ever since we were teenagers and there was really nothing more to do in terms of rock ‘n’ roll.”
Their stage act just grew and grew.
* ‘Speak To Me’ was originally part of ‘Breathe’ but was separated off in order to give Nick a publishing credit.
* The album was still known as Eclipse.
* 30 years on, when she had retired from professional singing, Torry decided to claim royalties for her contribution to the track. She had not pursued this during her career because she knew the penalty for being seen as a “troublemaker”. Her claim was settled in 2005 in an out-of-court agreement the details of which she is prohibited from disclosing but henceforth the song is now credited to ‘Wright/Torry’.
* Like their equally successful contemporaries Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd vetoed the release of singles off their albums in Britain.