Pink Floyd - The Dark Side Of The Moon

Released - March 1973

Genre - Progressive Rock

Producer - Pink Floyd

Selected Personnel - David Gilmour (Vocals/Guitar/VCS3 Synthesiser); Roger Waters (Bass/Vocals/VCS3 Synthesiser/Tape Effects); Richard Wright (Keyboards/Vocals/VCS3 Synthesiser); Nick Mason (Percussion/Drums/Tape Effects); Dick Parry (Saxophone); Clare Torry (Vocals); Doris Troy (Backing Vocals); Lesley Duncan (Backing Vocals)

Standout Track - Money

When going through music history chronologically like this, every now and again you come up against an album of such enormity that the prospect of reviewing it just seems immensely daunting and futile. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was one such album, but at least there I had the vague novelty of being able to talk about the fact that I don't like it quite as much as most music fans. But with Pink Floyd's landmark masterpiece The Dark Side Of The Moon, there's very little I'm able to say that hasn't already been said better elsewhere. This is an album whose legacy, while totally earned by the brilliance and the inventiveness and the importance of the music within it, is so enormous that it's hardly worth discussing any more. Still, no list of the greatest albums would be complete without it, so in I go.

Inevitably, The Dark Side Of The Moon was the first Floyd album I actually listened to and, as usual with artists that I end up truly loving, it was after I'd spent a fair amount of time (perhaps a year or so) actively resisting any recommendations to listen to them because, from what little I knew about them, they struck me as too artsy and ponderous (this was when I was still principally listening to upbeat pop rock and before prog had taken hold of me). Via my love of Supertramp, though, it soon became clear that doors to new kinds of music were being thrown open, and Pink Floyd seemed to be one of the major ways in. I listened to my stepdad's copy of Dark Side... while visiting home for Christmas in 2008 and that was that. It was therefore a major stepping stone towards my discovery of a huge amount of music I now love unreservedly, including, of course, the vast majority of Floyd's discography, and that personal significance is just another string to its bow in terms of the enormous number of cultural and historical points of relevance it has established over the years.

It's fair to say, though, that Floyd had taken time to arrive at the brilliance on show here. Their early psychedelic nonsense under original bandleader Syd Barrett had been fairly eccentric and endearing but has always ultimately left me fairly cold, and after his departure and rapid descent into mental instability, the band had taken time to push forwards into uncharted territory, continually managing to develop twin disciplines of both challenging artistic boundaries and utilising new technologies or musical styles to inform their work, while at the same time becoming an ever tighter and more commercially appealing band. 1971's Meddle, while it had included the magnificent 23-minute epic "Echoes," had seen them able, for the most part, to focus their songwriting efforts into short, coherent songs rather than sprawling, semi-improvised instrumentals as on albums like 1968's A Saucerful Of Secrets. That was a direction they continued moving in, aiming to make something that had all the artistic and intellectual merit and rampant creativity of their work so far, but that condensed it all into something gloriously simple. While the band was yet to fall totally under his tyrannical, autocratic sway, it was bassist Roger Waters who set about creating the overall template for the album that was to come, writing lyrics that followed a single unified theme looking at the things that "make people mad" - greed and consumerism on "Money," the ravages of ageing on "Time," personal relationships on "Us And Them," mental illness itself on "Brain Damage," and so on. It's a very loose precept off which to hang a concept album, but the idea of bringing each of these individual songs back to a central concept enabled the band to create a unified song-cycle, each song segueing seamlessly into the next.

The sense of a unified theme was further developed by the fragmentary voices that are scattered across the record, consisting of roadies and technicians that the band would interview about mental health, death, ageing and the like in order to splice in their contributions, from the famous opening chuckles and confession of "I've been mad for years, absolutely fucking years" to the climactic "There is no dark side of the moon." Many of the album's sonic collage elements, from the looping of cash register sound effects for the iconic rhythm track to "Money" were developed via collaboration with the album's engineer, a certain Alan Parsons who would go on to be the leading svengali figure of the Alan Parsons Project, one of the most gloriously glossy pop-rock acts of the late 70s and another of my all-time favourite bands. But, while the loops and ethereal voices and innovative recording techniques might all inform the album's mystique and sense of technical innovation, it is of course in the music itself that the true brilliance lies.

"Speak To Me" is one of Nick Mason's very few solo compositional credits in Floyd's history, consisting of a collage of assembled sounds, including the album's famous slow heart-beat intro, before the sound of distant screaming ushers in the languid, lazy guitar squalls of "Breathe," whose sense of wide-eyed haziness in the music is matched perfectly by David Gilmour's airy vocals. It's followed by perhaps the album's only mild disappointment in "On The Run," a piece of music supposedly exploring Roger Waters's fear of flying that seems to get so excited by the opportunity to have fun with new-ish synthesiser effects that it forgets to do anything particularly compelling musically. It's followed by "Time," easily the most epic song on offer and perhaps the nearest thing to the starkly cinematic grandeur of their earlier pieces like "Echoes" or "Atom Heart Mother Suite." From the opening crashes of clock chimes and the slow, ominous intro into its bellowed opening vocal "Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day," it builds in intensity into Gilmour's magnificently epic guitar solo before ushering in a more restrained reprise of "Breathe." Sounding declamatory and angry on "Time" after being so laid-back on "Breathe," Gilmour really proves himself as a great vocalist on The Dark Side Of The Moon for perhaps the first time, having so far been most notable for his incredible guitar work on the band's earlier albums. But here, shouldering the majority of the lead vocals himself, he proves himself a singer of real depth too.

"The Great Gig In The Sky" is one of the band's great unusual masterpieces, starting with Richard Wright's meditative piano and the vocal snippet "I am not frightened of dying" before exploding into a more incendiary organ part and providing a showcase for the remarkable vocal talents of Clare Torry, whose non-lexical vocal bavado is an absolute tour de force. For years there would be an ongoing legal debate over whether Torry should receive a writing credit for the song, which was ultimately settled decades later, and it's certainly fair to say that it would be a wholly less compelling piece of music without her incredible vocal contributions. The album's second side kicks off with the aforementioned ringing of cash tills that ushers in the most iconic bassline in the history of prog rock, and one of Pink Floyd's truly great classic rock songs. That bouncy bassline and the sarcastic bite of Gilmour's vocals render it an undeniably fun, if savagely felt, song, before Gilmour's incendiary guitar solo kicks the whole thing into another gear. There's a significant shift in tempo into the slow, reflective "Us And Them," a beautiful organ-driven song that gives plenty of room for occasional Floyd saxophonist Dick Parry to explore in.

In perhaps the album's finest segue, the meditative strains of "Us And Them" dissolve into the almost jazz-fusion-esque, spacey jam of "Any Colour You Like," where Gilmour's distorted guitar trades licks with Wright's swirling organ, and there follows a pretty much perfect closing double whammy with the psychedelic, almost Barrett-esque meditation on madness that is "Brain Damage," where Roger Waters sings the lead vocal for the first time on the album, his more nasal and menacing tone proving a great counterpoint to the cleaner vocals we've had from Gilmour and Wright so far. The crashing of organs builds to the triumphant, explosive fanfare of "Eclipse" that is so powerful it doesn't even bear talking about. Just listen to it now.

In fact, of course, The Dark Side Of The Moon is an album of such repute and of such musical power that even trying to describe any of the music in an attempt to enlighten the uninitiated feels unnecessary - it's quite simply just an album that everybody has to have listened to at some point, and is perhaps the most iconic and commercially successful peak of progressive rock. For my money, it's actually not Pink Floyd's finest album - its brilliance in condensing the band's artistic vision into something simple and coherent and song-based is a great achievement, but for me The Wall in 1979 managed to achieve the same musical heights while also boasting greater ambition and character, but it's impossible to deny that The Dark Side Of The Moon has to be regarded as one of the finest moments in the history of rock music. After years of slowly trying to establish their sound and work out where they were going, Pink Floyd had finally proven themselves to be one of the finest bands of their generation, and the world rewarded them for it as the album became a global smash hit. Having finally come in from the cold, Floyd were free to do what they wanted, and for their next outing they would return to the longer-form songwriting of albums like Meddle. They had won their mainstream fanbase, and now they could take them wherever they wanted, so the next step would be a far more direct and haunting exploration into madness than the glimpses seen on The Dark Side Of The Moon.

Track Listing:

1. Speak To Me (Nick Mason)

2. Breathe (Roger Waters, David Gilmour & Richard Wright)

3. On The Run (David Gilmour & Roger Waters)

4. Time (David Gilmour; Roger Waters; Richard Wright & Nick Mason)

5. The Great Gig In The Sky (Richard Wright & Clare Torry)

6. Money (Roger Waters)

7. Us And Them (Roger Waters & Richard Wright)

8. Any Colour You Like (David Gilmour, Roger Waters & Richard Wright)

9. Brain Damage (Roger Waters)

10. Eclipse (Roger Waters)