![]() But when we went into the studio we all knew the material. David Gilmour reckons that playing the songs live beforehand made a big difference. The recording was long – they spent six months in the studio in between tours of Europe, America and Japan – but it wasn’t laborious. They even had the album’s title before discovering that another lesser-known British band, Medicine Head, had released an album called Dark Side Of The Moon.įor a while Pink Floyd called their planned album Eclipse, but when Medicine Head’s album failed to make any impact they reverted to Plan A. The songs and basic structure for the album came together over a period of about six weeks. But on Dark Side Of The Moon these themes were still relatively unsophisticated and easier to follow. Over it all lurked the spectre of Syd Barrett, looking back at Roger and the group from the dark side. Roger would pursue these themes with a vengeance on later Pink Floyd albums, driven by his hatred of authoritarian leaders and their bureaucratic henchmen, and his rage at the death of his father right at the end of World War II. Isolation, paranoia and mental breakdown are the unrelenting themes of the last three tracks, Any Colour You Like, Brain Damage and Eclipse. Breathe and On The Run evoke the stresses and strains of everyday life, Time and The Great Gig In The Sky cover the fear of ageing, loss and dying, Money returns to the remorseless struggle to survive and Us And Them hones in on power struggles and violence. Roger’s decision to write all the lyrics for Dark Side Of The Moon gave the music a focus. They lacked the instrumental prowess of fellow progressive rockers ELP, the wondrous stories of Yes, the androgyny of David Bowie or the art school pose of Roxy Music.īut Atom Heart Mother and Meddle with its side-long Echoes epic had at least given them a growing musical identity. Pink Floyd had spent the beginning of the 70s groping for a new direction following the loss of their creative spirit Syd Barrett to drugs and a mental breakdown. “The concept grew out of group discussions about the pressures of real life, like travel or money, but then Roger broadened it into a meditation on the causes of insanity,” recalls Nick Mason. As a concept album, Dark Side Of The Moon was pretty loose. The sonic experience of the album is as vivid now as it was then. You are now eight minutes into the album, and there’s another 35 to go. As it dies away there’s the reassuring tick of a clock which just has time to lull you again before a cacophony of alarm clocks shatters your senses and leads into the heavy ponderous guitar chimes of Time. It all ends in a dull explosion and more running footsteps. Just as you’ve relaxed into the song, however, it suddenly shifts gears and you are being carried long by a rapid hi-hat rhythm and electronic riff while atmospherics, voices, footsteps, airplanes and bits of feedback fly by on either side of your head. That in turn collides with a screaming female voice before subsiding into the slow, deliberate beat and soothing guitars of Breathe. You could lie back and hear the heartbeat gradually getting louder, mingled with a disembodied Scottish voice saying ‘I’ve been mad for fucking years’ and a maniacal laugh before being blotted out by a helicopter noise whirring from one ear to another. Dark Side… was the perfect stereo album and its pleasures were notably enhanced with the aid of a meticulously rolled Camberwell carrot. There was a rapidly expanding market for rock music for new generations, stereo had just become affordable and cannabis was becoming widely available. Released in March 1973, over a year after the band had previewed most of the tracks at London’s Rainbow Theatre, Dark Side Of The Moon caught the prevailing feeling perfectly. And like porn, men can go back to Dark Side Of The Moon over and over again. There’s certainly something in Roger’s theory, particularly if you accept (as most women do) that most men never get much further than puberty.
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