Fact #141778

PINK FLOYD

THE MAKING OF DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

This feature by Johnny Black first appeared in Classic Rock Magazine

Four decades after its release, Dark Side Of The Moon, the first of Pink Floyd’s two magnum opuses, still stands as a monumental achievement in the annals of rock music. Despite never reaching No1 in the UK, and scoring just one week at the summit in America, it has since notched up a staggering 591 consecutive weeks (11.4 years) on the Billboard 200 Albums chart, and shifted over 34m copies worldwide. From its humble beginnings in a small rehearsal room to selling as many copies as there are people in Canada, here’s how it happened.

1971
Nov 29 : Pink Floyd begin twelve days in a rehearsal room at Decca Studios, Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead, London, working on a suite of music under the title of Eclipse. In due course it will evolve into Dark Side Of The Moon.

David Gilmour : It began in a little rehearsal room in London. We had quite a few pieces of music, some of which were left over from previous things.

Roger Waters : I think we had already started improvising around some pieces at Broadhurst Gardens and, after I had written a couple of the lyrics for the songs, I suddenly thought, I know what would be good: to make a whole record about the different pressures that apply in modern life.

1972
Jan 3 - 15 : Rehearsals move to The Rolling Stones’ rehearsal facility, a disused Victorian warehouse at 47, Bermondsey Street, South London.
David Gilmour :  We were there for a little while, writing pieces of music and jamming.  It was a very dark room. 

Nick Mason : We started with the idea of what the album was going to be about, the stresses and strains on our lives.

Jan 20 : A sixteen-date UK tour begins at The Dome, Brighton, including the first live performance of Eclipse, now re-named Dark Side Of The Moon - A Piece For Assorted Lunatics. The performance is cut short mid-way through Money because of technical problems.

Tony Stewart (NME) : A pulsating bass beat, pre-recorded, pounded around the hall's speaker system. A voice declared Chapter five, verses 15 to 17 from the Book of Athenians. The organ built up; suddenly it soared, like a jumbo jet leaving Heathrow; the lights, just behind the equipment, rose like an elevator. Floyd were on stage playing a medium-paced piece.

The Floyd inventiveness had returned, and it astounded the capacity house.

The number broke down thirty minutes through.

Mick Kluczynski (Pink Floyd road crew) : In those days, we didn't understand how to separate power sufficiently between sound and lights. That was the only show that we had to cancel and re-organise, because we were all sharing the same power source. It was the very first show any band had done with a lighting rig that was powerful enough to make a difference. So we had this wonderful situation where the fans were actually inside the auditorium, and we had Bill Kelsey and Dave Martin at either side of the stage screaming at each other in front of the crowd, having an argument.

Tony Stewart : A drone and a hissing sound filled the hall as Floyd went into a simple riff. Gilmour turned to Waters and spoke. We didn't catch what he said, but it had a staggering effect. Waters removed his guitar, and both he and Gilmour left the stage.

Jan 21 - Feb 13 : The tour continues, featuring full performances of DSOTM.
Roger Waters : The actual song, Eclipse, wasn’t performed live until Bristol, Colston Hall on February 5. I can remember one afternoon rolling up and saying, ‘Hey chaps, listen, I’ve written an ending.’ Which was what’s now called Eclipse or Dark Side. So that when we started performing the piece called Eclipse, it probably did have Brain Damage, but it didn’t have...“All that you touch, all that you see, all that you taste.”

Feb 17 - 20 : DSOTM is performed during four shows at The Rainbow, Finsbury Park, London.
Nick Mason: It was a hell of a good way to develop a record. You really get familiar with it; you learn the pieces you like and what you don't like. And it's quite interesting for the audience to hear a piece developed – if people saw it four times, it would have been very different each time.

Feb 23, 1972 : Work on Dark Side is derailed by the obligation to record a the film soundtrack Obscured By Clouds, followed by sporadic touring.

May 24, 1972 : DSOTM sessions resume at Abbey Road. Working titles for existing songs include Travel (Breathe), Religion (The Great Gig In The Sky) and Lunatic (Brain Damage).The first song worked on is Us And Them.
David Gilmour : It was mostly recorded in Studio Three.  Probably some of it in Two.  We did an awful lot of work in both over the years.  It wasn’t that essential thing, “We’ve got to be in Two,” or, “We’ve got to be in Three.”  They were quite similar.

Nick Mason : Recording was lengthy but not fraught, not agonised over at all. We were working really well as a band.

Roger Waters : I was definitely less dominant than I later became. We were pulling together pretty cohesively.

David Gilmour : Roger tried definitely, in his lyrics, to make them very simple, straightforward, and easily assimilable - easy to understand. Partly because people read things into other lyrics that weren't there.

Roger Waters : Dave sang Breathe much better than I could have. His voice suited the song. I don't remember any ego problems about who sang what at that point. There was a balance.

Alan Parsons : The vocals would never take very long. Dave's a great singer, it would never be more than a couple of hours, except sometimes he might give it up and come back another day.

Roger Waters : Rick wrote the chord sequence (for Us And Them) and I used it as a vehicle.

Rick Wright : It has quite a simple chord sequence, except for the rather strange third chord, influenced by jazz.  It was an augmented chord, hardly ever used in pop music then.

Roger Waters : The first verse is about going to war, how on the front line we don't get much chance to communicate with one another, because someone else has decided that we shouldn't.

The second verse is about civil liberties, racism and colour prejudice. The last verse is about passing a tramp in the street and not helping.

Jun 7 : Work begins on Money.

Roger Waters : I knew there had to be a song about money in the piece, and I thought the tune could be about money. Having decided that, it was extremely easy to make up a seven beat intro that went well with it.

Nick Mason : Roger and I constructed the tape loop for Money in our home studios and then took it to Abbey Road. I had drilled holes in old pennies and then threaded them onto strings; they gave one sound on the loop of seven. Roger had recorded coins swirling around in the mixing bowl Judy (his wife) used for her pottery. The tearing paper effect was created very simply in front of a microphone and the faithful sound library supplied the cash registers.

Alan Parsons (EMI engineer) : He (Mason) was always the guiding light in matters to do with the overall atmosphere, and he was very good on sound effects and psychedelia and mind-expanding experiences.

Jun 8 : Work begins on Time, whose music is credited to the whole band but with lyrics by Waters.

David Gilmour : He (Parsons) was a very good engineer, and he had one or two production ideas that were very good.  In a clock shop in Hampstead, he had recorded the ticking clocks and made these tapes up to offer us an idea, which was great.

Rick Wright : Those big, grand keyboard chords are mine.  Dave used to complain I’d write in these hard keys and weird major and minor sevenths, which is difficult to play on a guitar. 

Jun 25 : Work begins on The Great Gig In The Sky but again, recording is soon derailed because of touring, holidays and other commitments that keep the band occupied for much of the year.
Roger Waters : Are you afraid of dying? The fear of death is a major part of many lives, and as the record was at least partially about that, that question was asked, but not specifically to fit into this song.

Oct 10 - 12, 17, 25-27 : Sporadic sessions are held in Studio 2, during the first of which Dick Parry, an old friend from Cambridge, overdubs sax solos to Money and Us And Them. Later in the month, a quartet of female session vocalists - Doris Troy, Leslie Duncan, Liza Strike and Barry St. John - are brought in to embellish Us And Them, Brain Damage and Eclipse.
David Gilmour : I asked Dick Parry to play beautiful, quiet, breathy sax.  It’s lovely.  I worked really hard on all the vocal harmonies and backing vocals.

Leslie Duncan : They weren’t very friendly. They were cold, rather clinical. They didn’t emanate any kind of warmth. … They just said what they wanted and we did it … there were no smiles. We were all quite relieved to get out.

1973

Jan 18 : The final round of recording sessions begins in Studio 2, focussing on Brain Damage, Eclipse and Any Colour You Like.

Rick Wright : "We’ve got nothing in this space… what can we do?  We’ll have a jam.”  And that’s what it (Any Colour You Like) was - it’s just two chords.  It starts off with the synth, which sets the mood.  And you have this extraordinary guitar solo from Dave.

Roger Waters : I wrote that (Brain Damage) at home. The grass (mentioned in the lyric) was the square in between the River Cam and King’s College chapel. The lunatic was Syd, really. He was obviously in my mind.

Jan 21 : Session singer Clare Torry overdubs improvised vocals to The Great Gig In The Sky. Work continues on the album throughout the month.

Clare Torry : When I arrived they explained the concept of the album to me and played me Rick Wright's chord sequence. They said, 'We want some singing on it.' But didn't know what they wanted, so I suggested going out into the studio and trying a few things. I started off using words but they said, 'Oh no, we don't want any words.' So the only thing I could think of was to make myself sound like an instrument, a guitar or whatever, and not to think like a vocalist. I did that and they loved it.
I did three or four takes very quickly, it was left totally up to me, and they said, 'Thank you very much.' In fact, other than Dave Gilmour, I had the impression that they were infinitely bored with the whole thing, and when I left I remember thinking to myself, 'That will never see the light of day'. If I'd known then what I know now I would have done something about organizing copyright or publishing. I would be a wealthy woman now. The session fee in 1973 was £15, but as it was Sunday I charged a double fee of £30 which I invested wisely, of course.

Roger Waters : The slide guitar was just something that Dave was into at the time. A brilliant sound.

Jan 24 - 27, 29-30 : In the latter part of the month Waters completes the album’s 'overture’ Speak To Me, and work continues on the as yet uncompleted other pieces.

Roger Waters : I thought the album needed some kind of overture (Speak To Me) and I fiddled around with the heartbeat, the sound effects and Clare Torry screaming until it sounded right.

David Gilmour : The On The Run sequence came in at the very last minute when we were nearly finished recording. We replaced another sequence which was more of a guitar jam thing, and the little synthesizer piece came along when the synthesizer arrived. Someone turned up with a (VCS3) synthesizer and showed us how to work it, and that came from that.

Alan Parsons : Often I'd carry on experimenting after they had gone. The footsteps were done by Peter James, the assistant engineer, running around Studio 2, breathing heavily and panting.

Rick Wright: It (Eclipse) is a great ending.  The music grows, it gets bigger, it goes up in decibels.  We would lift it up and up.  If I ignore the depression of the words, which I tend to do, I think there’s hope in it, because of the music.

Roger Waters : It was something I added after we'd gone on the road. It felt as if the piece needed an ending. It's just a run-down with a little bit of philosophising.

The icing on the cake of DSOTM’s kaleidoscopic array of innovations came as the sessions were ending, when Waters hit on the concept of posing questions to Abbey Road staffers, Floyd crew members and other studio visitors. Their answers were then edited and woven into the tracks at various points throughout the album.

Roger Waters: We did about 20 people. The interviewees all have cards with questions printed on them like: 'Have you ever been violent?' 'When was the last time you thumped someone?' 'Were you in the right?' and so on.

David Gilmour : He wanted to use things in the songs to get responses from people. We interviewed quite a few people that way, mostly roadies and roadies' girlfriends, and Jerry the Irish doorman. We also had Paul and Linda McCartney interviewed but they're much too good at being evasive for their answers to be usable.

Jerry the Irish doorman said, "There is no da'k side o' de moon really, it's all da'k." And stuff like that, when you put it into a context on the record, suddenly developed its own much more powerful meaning.

Feb 1 : The final Abbey Road session is held in Studio 2.
David Gilmour : We’d finished mixing all the tracks but, until the very last day, we’d never heard them as the continuous piece we’d been imagining for more than a year. We had to literally snip bits of tape, cut in the linking passages and stick the ends back together. Finally, you sit back and listen all the way through at enormous volume. I can remember it. It was really exciting.

Mar 4 : Pink Floyd begin a North American tour for DSOTM, at the Madison Coliseum, Madison, Wisconsin, USA. However, rather than the cerebral complexities of Brain Damage or Eclipse, it is the rootsy funk of Money that wins the band a new audience.

David Gilmour : It started from the first show in America. People at the front shouting, 'Play Money! Give me something I can shake my ass to!'

DSOTM was released in America on March 17, and in the UK on the 24th. Four days later it hit No1 in the Billboard albums chart in the USA.

Roger Waters : We’d cracked it. We'd won the pools. What are you supposed to do after that? Dark Side Of The Moon was the last willing collaboration: after that, everything with the band was like drawing teeth; ten years of hanging on to the married name and not having the courage to get divorced, to let go; ten years of bloody hell. It was all just terrible. Awful. Terrible.


SOURCES :
interview with Peter Henderson in Mojo
http://www.brain-damage.co.uk/obituaries/marek-mick-kluczynski.html
Tony Stewart, review in New Musical Express, January 29, 1972.
https://www.thestage.co.uk/features/2013/pink-floyd-at-bermondsey-street/
http://floydlyrics.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/dark-side-of-moon.html (Also has some
Nicholas Shaffner book …..
Uncut Magazine June 2003
DSOTM : The Making Of The Pink Floyd Masterpiece by John Harris
http://utopia.knoware.nl/users/ptr/pfloyd/interview/dark4.html
http://www.kitrae.net/music/Music_mp3_DSOTM.html
http://www.mediaandmarketing.com/13Writer/Interviews/PAR.Alan_Parsons_HFR.html


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David Gilmour (guitarist, Pink Floyd) : Dark Side of the Moon is the next, sort of, stage on from that (Meddle) where we actually really got it right. We got the record right and we got the cover right and the whole package. The whole thing was very good, you know, recording the songs, the lyrics, the idea.

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, but, um, we definitely knew that it would do considerably better than anything we'd done before.

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DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
by Johnny Black

“No,” says Roger Waters, “it’s not our best album. The Wall is deeper and more musically powerful.”

Having composed virtually all of both albums, the estimable Mr Waters’ is more than entitled to his opinion, but the international record-buying public begs to differ. Over the past three decades we’ve shelled out for a mere 23m copies of The Wall, while lapping up 34m copies of Dark Side, which isn’t bad for an album with somewhat humble beginnings.

“It began in a little rehearsal room in London,” remembers Floydian guitar supremo David Gilmour. “We had quite a few pieces of music, some of which were left over from previous things.” During the closing weeks of 1971, that room in Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead, saw the gestation of an epochal album, rich in sonic experimentation, powerful melodies and startling lyric concepts, that would transform Pink Floyd from major cult figures into the world’s biggest rock band.

“At some point during the proceedings,” Gilmour has said, “Roger came up with the idea of making it a piece about madness…”

Madness, of course, was a subject about which Pink Floyd probably knew more than they’d really like to, having watched their first leader, Syd Barrett, reduce himself from brilliantly inventive songwriter to incoherent babbler, via the frequent ingestion of LSD. Understanding that the madman in Dark Side of The Moon is Syd Barrett is essential to grasping why Waters’ concept galvanized the band, sparking them to new creative heights.

Having spent the previous five years in a wilderness of pleasantly inconsequential electronic noodling, Pink Floyd now surged forwards to create a genuinely ground-breaking album that charted one man’s retreat into paranoid insanity, via the medium of impeccably languid rock songs linked by beautifully realised electronic sound collages.

Dave Gilmour has asserted that another major reason why Dark Side differed from previous Pink Floyd albums was that, “We'd played it live before we recorded it.” He’s absolutely right and not only did the Floyd play it live, they developed it from gig to gig.

They emerged from West Hampstead on January 20, 1972, to give their first live performance of a musical suite entitled Eclipse : A Piece For Assorted Lunatics, at The Dome, Brighton, Sussex, UK, but it was very much a work in progress.

Waters confirms, for example, that, “The actual song, Eclipse, wasn’t performed live until Bristol, Colston Hall, on February 5. I can remember one afternoon rolling up and saying, ‘Hey chaps, listen, I’ve written an ending.’ So when we started performing the piece called Eclipse, it probably did have Brain Damage, but it didn’t have, ‘All that you touch, all that you see, all that you taste.’”

By the time Sunday Times critic Derek Jewell saw the piece, now titled The Dark Side Of The Moon, at London’s Rainbow Theatre on the 17th, it had been hammered into a shape that more closely resembled how the finished album would turn out. “In their own terms,” wrote Jewell, “Floyd strikingly succeed. They are dramatists supreme.”

Tours of the Far East, America and Europe enabled the band to fashion the material still further so that, according to Gilmour, when recording finally began at EMI’s legendary Abbey Road studios on June 1, 1972, “we all knew the material. The playing was very good. It had a natural feel.”

Intriguingly, the first track they worked on was Us And Them, which keyboardist Rick Wright had originally composed for the film Zabriskie Point in 1969. It failed to make the film’s final cut so now, with additional input from Waters, it was pressed into service for the new album.

A week later, they were in full flow, recording a Waters’ song Money, which Mason recalls as having been composed very quickly, in the space of 24 hours. “I knew there had to be a song about money in the piece,” explains Waters, “and I thought that the tune could be a song about money and having decided that, it was extremely easy to make up a seven beat intro that went well with it. I often think that the best ideas are the most obvious ones.”

The following day they laid down the basic track for Time, whose music is credited to the whole band but with lyrics by Waters. “For me it was the first time we'd had great lyrics,” reckons Gilmour. “The others were satisfactory, or perfunctory or just plain bad. On Dark Side, Roger decided he didn't want anyone else writing lyrics.”

Before the month was out, they’d also set to work on the basic track for The Great Gig In The Sky, a wordless Rick Wright composition evoking Waters’ fear of dying in a plane crash, and notable for session singer Clare Torry’s astonishing gospel-blues wailing, intended to represent the pain and ecstasy of life and death.

Work on Dark Side was however, inconveniently derailed by further tours of America and Europe, not to mention the recording of a soundtrack, Obscured By Clouds, for the film La Vallee, plus work on a ballet score for French choreographer Roland Petit.

During October of 1972, they returned to Abbey Road and, among other things, decided to bring in an outside musician to add sax solos to Money and Us And Them. “There were several big names we could have gone to,” points out Gilmour, “but it can be tedious bringing in these brisk, professional session men. A bit intimidating.” Instead, they called up their old Cambridge mate Dick Parry who did them proud.

The final burst of studio sessions did not begin until January 18, 1973. During the last two weeks of the month they completed the spooky instrumental On the Run, which had been recorded earlier as a guitar and keyboard piece. Now they added synthesizer sequences courtesy of a newly arrived EMS VCS Synthi-AK, then overlaid them with synthesized aeroplane sounds and running footsteps recorded in an echoey tunnel under London’s Science Museum.

One of the most distinctive and, at the time, fairly avant-garde aspects of the album was its ingenious use of spoken voice samples, another innovation that Gilmour attributes to Waters. “He wanted to use things in the songs to get responses from people. We wrote a series of questions on cards and put them on a music stand, one question on each card, and got people into the studio and told them to read the first question and answer it. Then they could remove that card and see the next question and answer that, but they couldn't look through the cards so they didn't really know what the thread of the questions was going to be until they got into it.”

Interviewees included roadies and their girlfriends, Jerry the Irish doorman at Abbey Road, and Paul and Linda McCartney who turned out to be, “much too good at being evasive for their answers to be usable.”

The unseen questions included ‘When did you last hit someone?’, ‘Were you in the right?’, ‘Would you do it again?’ and most crucially, ‘What does the dark side of the moon mean to you?’ It was Jerry the doorman who responded with the astonishingly appropriate, "There is no da'k side o' de moon really, it's all da'k." Placed in the context of the closing track, Eclipse, this spontaneous response resonates with as much power as if it had been written by a playwright.

It’s worth noting that, although Waters was undoubtedly the primary architect of The Dark Side Of The Moon, the album was made at a time when he and Dave Gilmour were working in harmony, with each contributing a unique set of attributes to the project. “I think I tend to bring musicality and melodies,” is how Gilmour explains it. “Roger was certainly a very good motivator and obviously a great lyricist. He was much more ruthless about musical ideas, where he'd be happy to lose something if it was for the greater good of making the whole album work. So, you know, Roger'd be happy to make a lovely sounding piece of music disappear into radio sound if it was benefitting the whole piece. Whereas, I would tend to want to retain the beauty of that music.”

The final studio session was held on February 1, 1973. “We’d finished mixing all the tracks,” remembers Gilmour, “but until the very last day we’d never heard them as the continuous piece we’d been imagining for more than a year. We had to literally snip bits of tape, cut in the linking passages and stick the ends back together. Finally, you sit back and listen all the way through at enormous volume. I can remember it. It was really exciting.”

The tone of the album is set from the opening seconds, when an ominous overture employs a heartbeat to underscore ticking clocks, cash registers, manic laughter and screams, before giving way to the liquid slide guitar intro of Breathe. Roger Waters’ stark lyrics tie the tracks together as much as the music does, dealing in turn with the big issues of birth, time, death and money, before introducing the theme of madness with Us And Them, and developing that idea to its logical but shattering conclusion on Brain Damage.

Looking back at that particular song, Roger Waters has said that the title line was, “Me, speaking to the listener, saying, ‘I know you have these bad feelings and impulses, because I do too, and one of the ways I can make contact with you is to share the fact that I feel bad sometimes.’”

Although many of the ideas (tape-loops, voice samples, sound effects etc) were not new, even in a pop context, Dark Side’s use of them to sustain a mood that permeates the entire work, was startlingly innovative.

And that’s where Nick Mason deserves a hearty pat on the back. While the contributions of Waters, Gilmour and Wright are reasonably self-evident, it’s all to easy to see Mason as the Floyd’s Ringo, contributing not much more than a solid thump as and when required. Dark Side engineer Alan Parsons has pointed out that this view could hardly be more misguided. “He was always the guiding light in matters to do with the overall atmosphere,” says Parsons, “and he was very good on sound effects and psychedelia and mind-expanding experiences.”

It would be heartening to conclude that the album went on to massive success simply on its sublime musical merit, but no-one in Pink Floyd is sufficiently self-delusional to believe that’s the case. “It wasn't only the music that made it such a success,” says Mason. “EMI/Capitol had cleaned up their act in America. They put money behind promoting us for the first time. And that changed everything.”

Gilmour too has stated that, rather than the cerebral complexities of Brain Damage or Eclipse, it was the rootsy funk of Money that reached out and grabbed the band a new audience. “It started from the first show in America. People at the front shouting, Play Money! Give me something I can shake my ass to!”

Whatever the reasons, after its release on March 24, 1973, Dark Side went on to achieve astronomical worldwide sales but, astonishingly, it has never topped the UK chart, and spent only one week at No1 in America.

Inevitably, Roger Waters never had any problem seeing the sow’s ear behind the silk purse of the Floyd’s greatest moment. “We'd cracked it. We'd won the pools. What are you supposed to do after that? Dark Side Of The Moon was the last willing collaboration: after that, everything with the band was like drawing teeth; ten years of hanging on to the married name and not having the courage to get divorced, to let go; ten years of bloody hell. It was all just terrible. Awful. Terrible.”

Certainly Floyd’s internal wrangles seem to have intensified after Dark Side, even though it finally exorcised the notion that the band could never creatively equal the work they had done on their first album when Syd Barrett was in the driving seat.

When all’s said and done, The Dark Side Of The Moon is the kind of thing that could give concept albums a good name.

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Dave Gilmour : The big difference for me with this album was the fact that we'd played it live before we recorded it. You couldn't do that now of course, you'd be bootlegged out of existence. But when we went into the studio we all knew the material. The playing was very good. It had a natural feel. And it was a bloody good package. The music, the concept, the cover, all came together. For me it was the first time we'd had great lyrics. The others were satisfactory, or perfunctory or just plain bad. On Dark Side, Roger decided he didn't want anyone else writing lyrics.
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