Fact #67729
When:
Short story:
Pink Floyd release a new album, Dark Side Of The Moon, in the USA.
Full article:
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.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Tweet this Fact
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.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------