Fact #84908
When:
Short story:
Pink Floyd resume work in EMI Studio 2, Abbey Road, London, England, UK, on their album Dark Side Of The Moon.
Full article:
David Gilmour (Pink Floyd) : We did have it fairly completed a long time before we recorded it and in fact, performed it live in America and in England under the title Eclipse long before the record came out... long before it was all recorded.
I think I tend to bring musicality and melodies. 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. We often had long bitter arguments about these things.
(The spoken segments on Dark Side Of The Moon are) Roger's idea. 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. We interviewed quite a few people that way, mostly roadies and roadies' girlfriends, and Jerry the Irish doorman at Abbey Road. But we also interviewed Henry McCullough 'cause Paul McCartney and Wings were recording in the other studio at Abbey Road at the time. We did that in number three at Abbey Road, and they were in number two. We also had Paul and Linda McCartney interviewed but they're much too good at being evasive for their answers to be usable.
Things like, ‘When did you last hit someone?’ and then the next question would be ‘Were you in the right?’ and ‘Would you do it again if the same thing happened?’ Another question like, ‘What does the dark side of the moon mean to you?’ Of course, understanding that the Dark Side of the Moon was not yet the title of the album as far as anyone was concerned. So they were actually asking people, what does the other side of the moon mean? And 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.
The On the Run sequence came in at the very last minute when we were nearly finished recording. We replaced another On the Run 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 synthesizer and showed us how to work it, and that came from that.
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I think I tend to bring musicality and melodies. 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. We often had long bitter arguments about these things.
(The spoken segments on Dark Side Of The Moon are) Roger's idea. 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. We interviewed quite a few people that way, mostly roadies and roadies' girlfriends, and Jerry the Irish doorman at Abbey Road. But we also interviewed Henry McCullough 'cause Paul McCartney and Wings were recording in the other studio at Abbey Road at the time. We did that in number three at Abbey Road, and they were in number two. We also had Paul and Linda McCartney interviewed but they're much too good at being evasive for their answers to be usable.
Things like, ‘When did you last hit someone?’ and then the next question would be ‘Were you in the right?’ and ‘Would you do it again if the same thing happened?’ Another question like, ‘What does the dark side of the moon mean to you?’ Of course, understanding that the Dark Side of the Moon was not yet the title of the album as far as anyone was concerned. So they were actually asking people, what does the other side of the moon mean? And 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.
The On the Run sequence came in at the very last minute when we were nearly finished recording. We replaced another On the Run 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 synthesizer and showed us how to work it, and that came from that.