Fact #84887

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 has shifted over 34m copies worldwide. Happily, Dark Side was born in an era when record companies had faith in their artists, so the Floyd enjoyed the luxury of taking their time in its creation. From humble beginnings in a small rehearsal room to selling as many copies as there are people in Canada, this is how it happened.

1971
Nov 29 - Dec 10 : Pink Floyd spend 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.

At some point during the proceedings, I don't remember exactly when it was, Roger came up with the idea of making it a piece about madness and all the other things that it's about.

Roger Waters : I was getting strong urges to make extended pieces with segues between tracks and also to develop pieces where the songs have relationships. Echoes, which was one side of Meddle, was very much the father and mother of Dark Side in that it had a lot of similar techniques.

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.

Nick Mason : 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.

1972
Jan 3 - 15 : Further rehearsals for Eclipse are held in The Rolling Stones’ rehearsal facility, a disused Victorian warehouse in Bermondsey Street, South London, UK.
David Gilmour :  We went to a warehouse in Bermondsey, which belonged to the Rolling Stones, and we were there for a little while, writing pieces of music and jamming.  It was a very dark room.  We booked a different place in Broadhurst Gardens, near St. John’s Wood, which was a light area, on the ground floor.  It was a knocked-through, normal house.  But I can’t remember the details of what happened when.

David Gilmour : A dingy warehouse with a rehearsal room in it.

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

Nick Mason : The piece is related to the pressures that form on us and other people generally. That is the very rough theme - although it doesn't really relate to us as much as we'd originally planned.

The various pressures that we talked about when we wrote it were physical violence, travelling, money, religion. Those were the things which we thought sidetracked people from things we thought might be important. And religion for us is one of those things. I mean, not religion as much as Christianity as practised by a large section of the population of Britain."

David Gilmour : 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.

Jan 20 : After three days of rehearsals, Pink Floyd attempt their first live performance of Eclipse, now re-named Dark Side Of The Moon - A Piece For Assorted Lunatics, at The Dome, Brighton, UK. The performance is cut short mid-way through the song Money because of technical problems.

Tony Stewart (NME) : As Floyd opened the first set of the British tour - a new piece, tentatively titled "The Dark Side Of The Moon," showed that their writing had taken on a new and again innovatory form.

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. The Leslies on stage sounded like a cage full of monkeys, because they were sharing a common earth. It was the very first show that 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 it was he said, but it had a staggering effect. Waters removed his guitar, and both he and Gilmour left the stage.

Up until then the music had been fine. A mood had captivated the audience, and now they didn't quite know what to make of it.

Nick Mason : In that situation, you have to decide whether the show must go on, or whether it's better to stop the show and sort things out - which is what we decided to do.

Jan 21 : A sixteen-date UK tour begins, featuring full performances of DSOTM.
Roger Waters : The actual song, Eclipse, wasn’t performed live until Bristol, Colston Hall on February 5, 1972. 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 Theatre, 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.

David Gilmour : The big difference for me with this album was the fact that we'd played it live before we recorded it.

Feb 23, 1972 : Work on Dark Side is inconveniently derailed by the obligation to record a soundtrack, Obscured By Clouds, for the film La Vallee, followed by sporadic touring, plus work on a ballet score for French choreographer Roland Petit.

May 24, 1972 : A month of recording begins at EMI’s Abbey Road studios, London, UK. Working titles for the songs that will make up DSOTM include Travel (instead of Breathe), Religion (instead of The Great Gig In The Sky) and Lunatic (instead of 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 : The recording was lengthy but not fraught, not agonised over at all. We were working really well as a band,

David Gilmour : When we went into the studio we all knew the material. The playing was very good. It had a natural feel.

Roger Waters : When we were making Dark Side Of The Moon I was definitely less dominant than I later became. We were pulling together pretty cohesively.

We all fight small battles between the positive and the negative in our everyday lives, and I'm obsessed with truth and how the futile scramble for material things obscures our path to a more fulfilling existence. That's what Dark Side Of The Moon is about. And despite the rather depressing ending with Brain Damage and Eclipse, there is an allowance that all things are possible, that the potential is in our hands.

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. You'd just say, 'How does that sound in your range?'

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 that sometimes he might give it up and come back another day.

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 : 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 : I can't remember when I wrote the top line and the lyric, but it was certainly during the making of Dark Side Of The Moon because it seems that the whole idea, the political idea of humanism and whether it could or should have any effect on any of us, that's what the record is about really - conflict, our failure to connect with each one another.

Rick Wright : It’s a very melancholic, emotional piece. 

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.

I was always taken with those stories of 'the First Christmas' in 1914, when they all wandered out into no man's land, had a cigarette, shook hands and then carried on the next day. 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 the song Money, which Waters had originally demoed in his garden shed.
David Gilmour : Roger presented it as a complete demo.  I added a guitar to the riff to make it more punchy.  Then I had fun adding all sorts of other parts.

Roger Waters : Yeah, it was just a tune around those sevenths. I knew that there had to be a song about money in the piece, 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, and that’s why it sounds good.

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 used for her pottery, the tearing paper effects was created very simply in front of a microphone and the faithful sound library supplied the cash registers. Each sound was first measured out on the tape with a ruler before being cut to the same length and then carefully spliced together.

Jun 8 : Work begins on the song Time, whose music is credited to the whole band but with lyrics by Waters.
David Gilmour : Alan (Parsons) was the EMI staff engineer assigned to our project.  He 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. 

David Gilmour : 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.

Jun 25 : Work begins on the song The Great Gig In The Sky but once again, work is derailed soon after because of touring, holidays and other commitments that keeps the band occupied until the end 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 DSOTM recording sessions are held in EMI Studio 2, during the first of which they draft in Dick Parry, an old friend from Cambridge, to overdub 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 : There were several big names we could have gone to, but it can be tedious bringing in these brisk, professional session men. A bit intimidating.

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 EMI Studio 2, Abbey Road, focussing on the tracks Brain Damage, Eclipse and Any Colour You Like.

David Gilmour : 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.

Jan 21 : Session singer Clare Torry overdubs her improvised vocals to the song The Great Gig In The Sky at Abbey Road. Work continues on the album throughout the month.
Nick Mason: It was called The Mortality Piece originally.  We wanted that keening wailing.

Roger Waters : I don't remember whose idea it was to get Clare in, but once she sang it was great. One of those happy accidents.

Alan Parsons (engineer) : I had worked on a session before with Clare and suggested that we tried her out on this track.

Clare Torry : I received a phone call to come in and do a session for Pink Floyd. It didn't mean much to me at the time, but I accepted and was booked: 7-10pm, Sunday, January 21, Studio 3.
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.
Alan Parsons : I think one has to give Clare credit; she was just told to go in and 'do your thing', so effectively she wrote what she did. She wailed over a nice chord sequence. There was no melodic guidance at all apart from 'a bit more waily here' or 'more somber there'. The vocal was done in one session - three hours - no time at all, then a couple of tracks were compiled for the final version.

David Gilmour : We recorded four or five tracks of Clare.  One belted and another was soft.  We mixed bits from each to make the final version.

Rick Wright : Clare did this incredible screaming and was then very apologetic.  We said, “It’s wonderful!”  It was a magical improvisation; you could never repeat it. 

Roger Waters : The slide guitar was just something that Dave was into at the time. A brilliant sound.
Alan Parsons (engineer) : The song sounded very good even before vocals were added to it. It was recorded with Rick in Studio 1 while the rest of the band were in Studio 2. We put a little practical joke over on Rick, making him think the band were playing live when he was actually listening off tape, and when he looked up at the end of the song all of us were standing watching him from the door. They were great ones for carefully planned practical jokes.
David Gilmour : The stereo mix was Roger and myself and Chris Thomas and Alan Parsons engineering, mostly, with other people dropping in and putting their oar in at various times.  We struggled and sweated and argued and fought over every bar, all the way through the whole album.  We really, really worked to get that as near perfect as we could get it.

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 On The Run, Any Colour You Like, Brain Damage and Eclipse.

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 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 (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. They loved it when they heard it the next day.

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 : A little instrumental fill…

Rick Wright : Lyrically, it (Brain Damage) was the one I could least relate to.  Possibly, for me then, it was the weakest link.  Now I feel differently.  I think it’s great.  It’s very simple, and also it has the mini-Moog.  It’s got a hotel orchestra kind of sound.  I love the chorus, and the girls blended in so beautifully.

Roger Waters : I wrote that at home. The grass [as in 'The lunatic is on the grass'] was always the square in between the River Cam and Kings College chapel. I don't know why, but when I was young that was always the piece of grass, more than any other piece of grass, that I felt I was constrained to 'keep off '. I don't know why, but the song still makes me think of that piece of grass. The lunatic was Syd, really. He was obviously in my mind.


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, as I’ve said, I think there’s hope in it, because of the music.

Roger Waters : It was something that 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 Roger Waters hit on the idea of asking Abbey Road staffers, Floyd crew members and assorted other visitors to the studio a series of questions. Their answers would then be edited and woven into the sonic tapestry at various points throughout the album.

Alan Parsons : All those voices and speech were added during the last few days. Actually, those were the freshest things of all. They were put on almost as part of the mixing process.

David Gilmour : 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.

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.


Feb 1 : The final Abbey Road session for DSOTM 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.

Rick Wright : Actually sitting down listening to it for the first time in the studio, I thought, 'This is going to be big. This is an excellent album.'

Roger Waters : When the record was finished I took a reel-to-reel copy home with me and I remember playing it for my wife then, and I remember her bursting into tears when it was finished. And I thought, "This has obviously struck a chord somewhere", and I was kinda pleased by that. You know when you've done something, certainly if you create a piece of music, you then hear it with fresh ears when you play it for somebody else. And at that point I thought to myself, "Wow, this is a pretty complete piece of work", and I had every confidence that people would respond to it

Feb 27 : When Pink Floyd, with the exception of keyboardist Rick Wright, boycott a press reception for their album Dark Side Of The Moon, at the London Planetarium, London, UK, guests are presented with life-sized cardboard cut-outs of the band.

Mar 4 : Pink Floyd begin a North American tour for their album Dark Side Of The Moon, 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 reaches out and grabs 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!

David Gilmour : Money was the single that helped to really break us in America.  It was the track that made us guilty of what it propounds, funnily enough.

Pete Watts (road manager) : The trucks usually hit the hall about ten in the morning and we catch a plane to meet the trucks and then it takes all day from ten to four to set the equipment up, at least! So the whole day is just spent making sure all the equipment is working and the band usually come in about four for a sound check.

Mar 17 : DSOTM released in USA
David Gilmour : We were fantastically busy in the run-up to the release of the album, going on tours, and when the quadraphonic mix became a possibility, we just didn’t have the time or the energy or really the belief that the system was going to take off and be in general use by people –as turned out to be the case.  And so we let Alan Parsons do the quadraphonic mix of the whole album.

Mar 24 : DSOTM released in UK
David Gilmour : 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.

Apr 28 : Dark Side Of The Moon reaches No1 in the Billboard albums chart in the USA.
Nick Mason : It wasn't only the music that made it such a success. EMI/Capitol had cleaned up their act in America. They put money behind promoting us for the first time. And that changed everything.

Nick Mason : There was a point after Dark Side where we might easily have broken up - well, we've reached all the goals rock bands tend to aim for... perhaps we were a bit nervous about carrying on - problems of a follow-up...

Nick Mason : When it was finished, everyone thought it was the best thing we'd done to date, but we didn't think it was five times as good as Meddle or eight times as good as Atom Heart Mother which is how it sold... a question of being in the right place at the right time.


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