Pink Floyd – ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’
It all starts with a heartbeat. For an album that takes on the complete scope of life from birth to death, it’s as logical a place to start as any. But as a cacophony of noises and voices begins to filter in, that heartbeat acts as the guide to something more sinister. As it gets louder and louder, the idea of madness starts to float around like an inescapable inevitability. Creepy laughs and acknowledgements of going insane continue to build as a disembodied voice begins to scream. Just as it reaches its terrifying peak, everything melts away. That’s how Pink Floyd drops you into their greatest album, The Dark Side of the Moon.
Nobody saw The Dark Side of the Moon coming, but the people who were most surprised by the album were perhaps Pink Floyd themselves. After more than half a decade of searching for their identity in the wake of losing their creative leader, Syd Barrett, the remaining members of the Floyd pulled together to create something magical. After numerous albums of listless experimentation and directionless meandering, Pink Floyd put together an impeccably crafted masterpiece that was bursting with timeless themes, genius-level melodicism, woozy atmospherics, and a creeping sense of doom.
Pink Floyd needed an improbable set of circumstances to arrive at The Dark Side of the Moon. Their greatest tragedy had to be mined for inspiration. Roger Waters needed to discover his aptitude for philosophical and humanistic lyrics. David Gilmour and Richard Wright had to find their voices, both as singers and as music writers. Nick Mason was forced to bridge his rock-solid rhythms with his proclivity for tape loop experimentations. The band had to gel, combining their epic progressive rock compositions with more pop-friendly material. The Dark Side of the Moon, somewhat remarkably, accomplishes all of that and more.
Alternating between wild thematic excursions and surprising radio-ready singles, The Dark Side of the Moon is the rare album that can be experienced as a full piece or as individual songs without either being a compromise. Of course, you need to listen to Dark Side as an uninterrupted album: it remains perhaps the single most engrossing LP in the history of rock music. But if you heard ‘Money’, ‘Breathe’, or ‘Time’ outside of the album’s specific sequencing, it’s not difficult to understand what Pink Floyd was getting at. The Dark Side of the Moon is a perfectly crafted progressive rock concept album that just happens to be filled out with some of the best rock songs of the 1970s.
The first of those is ‘Breathe’, the spacey meditation of living for the moment that acts as the album’s first proper “song”. ‘Speak to Me’ is an essential sound collage/overture, but ‘Breathe’ is where Dark Side makes its first real statement. With a minor-to-major chord progression that would become a signature part of the Floyd’s sound, ‘Breathe’ lays out a stark command: “Don’t be afraid to care”. Waters had stumbled upon his interest in the human condition on ‘Echoes’, the same track where Gilmour and Wright figured out that their voices harmonised perfectly. Rather than being bitter or pessimistic, Waters embraces empathy on ‘Breathe’… at least until he drops a warning about racing towards an early grave.
With that, the race begins as ‘On the Run’ unfurls at a frantic pace. Originally titled ‘The Travel Sequence’, ‘On the Run’ came from a more personal place in Waters’ psyche: his fear of flying. Constant travel was and is a common concern among rock musicians, but ‘On the Run’ acts as more than just a complaint against not being home. With its looped synthesiser sequence and added sound effects, ‘On the Run’ is a sonic painting that represents one of the album’s major themes: death.
Death takes centre stage on the final two songs that close out side one of Dark Side. ‘Time’ blasts off with a cacophony of alarms, recorded by engineer Alan Parsons. The alarms are just one of the many non-musical effects that help give Dark Side its thematic resonance. ‘Time’ is filled with these sounds, whether it’s Waters’ muted bass strings mimicking the tick-tock of a clock or Mason’s rototoms adding a foreboding atmosphere. As the band launches into a funk-infused rhythm, Waters (via Gilmour and Wright) meditates on the fleeting aspects of life. To drive the point home, Waters crafts one of his finest observations ever put to tape: “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way”. While that might be true, that line has become more universal than Waters could have ever imagined.
While ‘Time’ tiptoes around the inevitability of death, ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ directly confronts it. Without a single lyric, Wright’s piano brings the gospel overtones of the track to the forefront. In order to take the listener through the clouds, singer Clare Torry recorded wordless wails that personified otherworldly ascension. Between Torry’s vocals, snippets of voices come to terms with the shared fate of death. While none of the subjects fear death, the intensity of Torry’s vocal performance might make the listener feel slightly differently.
The voices that appear scattered throughout the album mostly belonged to people around the band’s orbit. Road manager Peter Watts, Wings guitarist Henry McCullough, and roadie Roger ‘The Hat’ Manifold all lend their unique perspectives to the album’s themes. The various voices don’t narrate the album so much as they colour it with reality. When each of the participants is asked whether they were in the right after their most recent brush with violence at the end of ‘Money’, it’s highly entertaining to hear each and every soul defend their choices – with the exception of McCullough, who cops to being “really drunk at the time”.
‘Money’ acts as the somewhat ironic heart of The Dark Side of the Moon. Waters takes a sardonic position on moving up in the world, casually buying football teams and Lear jets without specifically condemning or condoning the capitalism at the song’s core. Of course, ‘Money’ helped make Pink Floyd rich: it was nearly a top ten hit in America and helped give Dark Side its initial push. Now that the album has sold more than 45 million copies around the world, it’s easy to take a more critical look at a song like ‘Money’. But with its hooky bassline, deft handoff between saxophone and guitar solos, and rollicking rock and roll rhythm, ‘Money’ is as impossible to resist as the monetary gains that it references.
Dark Side likely wouldn’t have sold anywhere close to the number of copies it did without its distinctive album cover. Designed by Storm Thorgerson, the co-founder of longtime Floyd collaborators Hipgnosis, the prism cover is a stark and immediately striking image. Combining elements of the band’s light show with themes of power and control, the front cover of The Dark Side of the Moon has a strange sort of magnetism to it, one that almost commands you to seek it out.
Pink Floyd fades out of the frantic funk of ‘Money’ and eases into the gentle opening tones of ‘Us and Them’, one of Waters’ most fascinating portraits of humanity. Backed up by a lovely piano progression from Wright, ‘Us and Them’ openly wonders how human beings lost their way, caught up in their differences to a violent and senseless breaking point. Waters’ greatest trick on Dark Side is that he never beats you over the head with his messages. Often utilising simplicity to render complex themes in a universal way, Waters is as deft and poetic as he would ever be on ‘Us and Them’.
From there, the album descends into its last sequence, covering one final concern that continuously haunted the band: madness. The themes of ‘Brain Damage’ and ‘Eclipse’ (coming after the transitionary instrumental ‘Any Colour You Like’) directly related back to their former singer-songwriter. Syd Barrett had completely isolated himself from the outside world by the time the Floyd were recording The Dark Side of the Moon, and Waters’ concern for his former bandmate kickstarted the creative process that eventually morphed into the album proper.
With Waters taking his first lead vocal on the album, ‘Brain Damage’ gives a direct nod to Barrett in the line, “and if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes”. With a final gospel push, ‘Brain Damage’ goes directly into one final crescendo with ‘Eclipse’, closing out the album with one final attempt at figuring out why humans act the way they do. As the final strains of the song fade, all that’s left is the heartbeat that opened the album and a comedically dark conclusion courtesy of Abbey Road doorman Gerry O’Driscoll: “There is no dark side of the moon, really. As a matter of fact, it’s all dark”.
With the album’s central heartbeat creating an infinite loop back to the beginning, The Dark Side of the Moon sets itself up for eternal replayability. Each time you return to it, the album pulls you right back into its rabbit hole. With timeless themes and impeccable craftsmanship elevating the album above convolution and pretentiousness, The Dark Side of the Moon still resonates in the decades since its original release.
It’s an album that transcends style and genre, yet it still represents the apex of progressive rock music, tapping into something that everyone can enjoy and obsess over. It’s an album by humans, about humans, and for humans. As long as there are still people listening to music, somebody will be spinning Dark Side. Even though they’re one of the biggest bands of all time, there will inevitably come a point when Pink Floyd will fade into the ether. But The Dark Side of the Moon never will.