100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Speak to Me

02 Breathe

03 On the Run

04 Time (includes ‘Breathe (Reprise)’)

05 The Great Gig in the Sky

06 Money

07 Us and Them

08 Any Colour You Like

09 Brain Damage

10 Eclipse

Drummer Roger Mason described Pink Floyd’s masterpiece in terms of an air crash. ‘You need a whole bunch of things to go wrong before you actually get the accident,’ he explained. ‘The lyrics are very important, but the music is important as well, and so are the sound effects, the voices, the concept, the fact that these ideas are rolled into one. There’s a bit of avant garde, a bit of rock &roll. You’ve probably got five different things that work for it.’

Pink Floyd started in 1965 playing psychedelic blues. After three years they had released their first hit ‘See Emily Play’ and founder Syd Barrett had gone mad. He was replaced by guitarist David Gilmore and the group settled into prog grooves which they described as ‘epic sound poems’ and others called ‘a blues band with alarm clocks’. In 1971 bassist Roger Waters proposed a concept album.

‘The concept was originally about the pressures of modern life – travel, money and so on,’ Mason said. ‘But then Roger turned it into a meditation on insanity.’ Waters had long been haunted by the death of his father during the war and the recent breakdown of his friend Barrett. He threw himself into the lyrics for the album and much of its intensity comes from Waters.

‘You make choices during your life, and those choices are influenced by political considerations and by money and by the dark side of all our natures,’ says Waters describing his lyrics. ‘So when I say, “I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon”, what I mean is, “If you feel that you’re the only one … that you seem crazy ’cos you think everything is crazy – you’re not alone”.’

Pink Floyd spent 38 days in the studio recording Dark Side, but while the album was in progress they road-tested the whole album in a month of concerts called ‘Dark Side of the Moon – A Piece for Assorted Lunatics’.

The band launched themselves enthusiastically into not only writing the music but also suggesting production ideas and sound effects. Noises of clocks, heartbeats, cash registers and random snippets of dialogue became an integral part of composition. They experimented with synthesisers, which were just starting to come into use. Keyboardist Richard Wright had a piece left over from the band’s soundtrack for the film Zabriskie Point, which became ‘Us and Them’ and ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’. Session singer Clare Torry improvised a breathtaking wordless vocal on this track that complemented the often cold electronica elsewhere on the album.

Obsessed with sound, the band mixed the record as a quadraphonic album (for four speakers rather than two). ‘Hi-fi stereo equipment had only recently become a mainstream consumer item,’ recalled Mason. ‘Dark Side became one of the definitive test records that people could use to show off the quality of their hi-fi system.’ It was also highly regarded as a record to get stoned to.

On its release, The Dark Side of the Moon went from being an album to a phenomenon. It became the biggest selling record in history at that time and remained on the charts for the rest of the decade.

‘We struggled and sweated and argued and fought over every bar, all the way through the whole album,’ says Gilmore. ‘We really, really worked to get as near to perfect as we could get it. Our music has depth, and attempts philosophical thought and meaning with discussions of infinity, eternity and mortality.’