So, you would think that, growing up marvelling at big sounding stereo that could be played as big as you liked in a place far enough away from the neighbours that no one would complain, that a record celebrated for the brilliance of its execution would be a local hit. I can honestly say that, even though the album had seemed to have been there for the balance of time, I had never heard it. This was in the mid '70s when the album was only about three years old but that was as long as I'd got into rock music from a bigot-grade love of classical music. So we should have been friends. I'd forced myself into rock music after I started high school for survival reasons and, while I could happily sit through Countdown every weekend, my itch for something more developed sent me back to the late '60s for inspiration.
I could claim that I found out that Pink Floyd had a crazy genius at the helm in the psychedelic era whom they cast out to become a stadium monolith was the reason for not choosing to listen to the record but I'd be lying. It was just that little bit out of my scope, enough to join The Faces, Slade, Humble Pie, Canned Heat and a host of others in the deaf spot shelf. Also, none of my elders talked about them. That made me wonder where this copy had come from. I could think of one brother and one sister who might have left it there but neither of those ever mentioned it or anything else about Pink Floyd. Had my father bought it to demonstrate the strength of his homebuilt marvel? He might have heard about its audio excellence which would have appealed to him but all that stuff about the futility of the salary man in the modern world really wouldn't have had him singing along after toking on a blunt. Dad barely drank alcohol and had given up cigarettes before I was born, so it wasn't him, either. I wondered if it just appeared in record collections everywhere through spooring.
Once, I gave it the stylus sampler routine. I'd get the record rolling and drop the needle gently for a few seconds of every track to see if anything stood out. There was some jangle, droning synthesisers, saxes and a woman screaming. Not for me. No, this is not a fair test of anything. I'd done the same thing to my brother Michael's copy of the White Album and declared it dull before a few kids at school found it in their family collections and started whisper campaigns that led me straight to it. Dark Side of the Moon didn't have that demographic. That would have to wait until those kids were old enough to beg their own tokes off their more worldly siblings and hail the disc as a religious experience. That was after punk happened and I wasn't going to ask a hippy for directions to anywhere.
To the end of high school and beyond it through university in a different town, the album was jeered as the work of dinosaurs. A music press that acted younger than its age and the kind of taunting that happened among musicians in the local band scene effectively barred the record from the curious listener under the age of twenty-five. So, after decades of ignoring it but enjoying other Pink Floyd albums like Meddle, I Napstered Dark Side and then bought it on CD for real. Then I bought the SACD to have it in surround sound and listened to it on something like a monthly basis. More recently, I bought the Blu-Ray with the Atmos mix. The higher res you get with this one, the more deluxe it gets. Not just as a demonstration of sumptuous audio but as a deathless concept album, one of the few that works as well as it did to its original listeners (let alone one that worked well at all). And it goes like this:
A heartbeat approaches through the dark. Other sounds slide in around it in the stereo field. Running footfalls, clockwork bells and whirrs, a thick synthesiser doing doppler passes, metallic clinks and clanks and then over a reversed piano chord, a woman screaming with escalating horror. The cacophony rages until ...
The heavenly arpeggiated chords of David Gilmour's Stratocaster, heavily phased, burst in and bring us to the surface of the opening song and as we float upon the easy motion he sings: Breathe, breath in the air. Don't be afraid to care..." Sounds nice until the lyric moves us towards the difference between experiencing life and merely living it with the promise of an early grave. The song alternates between the buoyant verse and a slightly more strident chorus but if you're not paying attention, it will just feel like opiation. And that is the album in short. Some songs match the aggression lyrics to music but most of it mixes smooth fluidity with thoughts of struggle, insanity and death.
On the Run is an instrumental but really more of a soundscape. The running feet and shortness of breath cross the sound field as that travelling synthesiser growls back and forth until it sounds like vehicles, helicopters or aeroplanes. Underneath a busy electronic bubbling persists, constant, urgent. The heartbeat reappears with laughter and what could be a distant gale or bombing. A final pass of the electronic plane sounds like it's swooping in aggression. Then the near silence after the shock.
Ticking is interrupted by a loud burst of clanging, bells and tolls as timepieces announce the next concept. Then a series of gigantic bass notes. Two notes on the Strat's low E string supported by Waters' Precision bass and synthesis, a massive tolling bell. An electric piano answers these high on the board until the bluesy shouting rocker starts with Gilmour in big voice declaiming the futility of time. A chorus calms it down with Rick Wright's clean and clear vocals. This works well until you realise, again, that both musical sides are saying the same thing. the last line before the briefly reprised Breathe is "the time has gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say" which still grinds, especially as it's sung in Wright's gentle voice, so easy on the ear.
Wright is the initial star of the next track, The Great Gig in the Sky which begins with a spacey piano figure, joined by an easy bass and Gilmour's ethereal lap steel (and another of the many spoken word recordings, this time about fear of death) which rises as the piano intensifies, the drums begin and the track's real star emerges in the form of Clare Torry's vocals. These wordless improvisations almost seem to go through the five stages of grief until they just sound like bargaining and fear, impassioned, pitch perfect but also raw and penetrating, Torry rises to the unbounded scream of horror heard in the opening overture. Now, in context, it sounds both more musical and unrestrained. After this, and a woman's voice telling us that she said she didn't fear death, Torry's vocal falls and assumes the TS Eliot whimper appropriate to this album as the piano eases to softness and silence. End of side one.
A strident musique concrete rhythm sequence opens the second side with sound of coins jingling, money bags dropping, cash registers ringing. an old adding machine rattling, all in a tight loop. When the thick picked bass comes in you get that something's been wrong from the off. Though the riff is bluesy, this is no four on the four twelve bar. The verses of this song are played in 7/8. It flows but try dancing to it. Gilmour's vocal is shouted and cool, giving a jivey ode of hatred to greed. Because he couldn't play his solo in that time signature, Gilmour interpolated a 4/4 section and filled it with first a fiery turn and then a dry, more sobering staccato finish before the sax gets a blasting go and then, in an old Yardbirds gallop it finds its way back to the 7/8 verse. The tracks fade begins more voice samples in, including the woman from Great Gig (Naomi Watts's mother, btw) talking about a fight she got in. And then something even more violent from one of their roadies.
This retreating storm gives way to soothing organ chords and more of Gilmour's headache-curing broken chords. This is joined by a jazzier and bereezier sax than on Money. Gilmour comes in with his voice on calm to sing about Us and Them. It's a meditation on lifelong futility and the depression that can build around that to ease pain by smothering. The chorus sections are harder and fuller but mixed distant to allow for both a tonal difference and ease of transition. Also, their relative quietness expresses the kind of emotional compression. While they prevent the song from being all comfortable numbness you could turn yourself off at a few points and float like you did with Breathe.
A final distraught chorus breaks to reveal Any Colour You Like, a gorgeous synthesiser improvisation by Wright that does in a few minutes what the likes of fellow proggers Genesis or ELP would have taken a side to play. Gilmour takes over in a kind of staccato non-solo, a kind of funk for the mental facility. Wright re-enters to save the track from dementia with more of the beautiful synth from the opening.
The track calms to the guitar arpeggio of Brain Damage (D to G7 but it sounds like major to minor) lilting before Waters comes in with his indefatigably English voice to tell us that the lunatic is on the grass. After a chorus that gives us the album title in a line the insistent guitar figure returns with another spooky vocal augmented by a demented laugh (by Naomi Watts's father, btw). The next chorus is bigger and benefits from Clare Torry's second appearance. An instrumental verse with voice samples and more of the last tracks lovely synth and, also wordless, another chorus and we're straight into the album's coda, Eclipse. The full band in chorus, with Torry and lists of life experiences as packages ("all that you love and all the you hate") are drawn as one into the lunar eclipse of the madness of the whole damn thing. We lead out on the heartbeat that led us in and the Irish doorman from Abbey Road Studios who tells us that there's no dark side of the moon as it's all dark. Boom-boom boom-boom boom-boom.
By which time, if you have, as you should, listened to this all the way through without a break, you are left stunned with a strange elation that, after all this sorry observation you share the planet with this music. What helps you out there is the same thing would have helped out way back in 1973: the facelessness of Pink Floyd. The poster that came with the original LP included photos of all four members but they were of little help. They were swathed in stage lights, clear featured but really just a quartet of long haired blokes. This was Ziggy Stardust's time, flamboyance reigned and the glittering divas of the new rock paraded through tours, generating uncountable glamour photos. Even the prog rockers, like Genesis with their million costume changes or ELP with E's literally inflammable performances or Yes's medieval electric splendour, were joining in. Pink Floyd walked on stage in jeans an T-shirts and let the lights do the magic. It would've been like crowding around to hear the record with thousands of others all at once. They might as well have been their own roadies.
What this means is that when you heard a Floyd record it was really just you and the music and the increasingly sharp observations of life, the universe and the rest of it. While there was warmth and humanity to all of it, however angry it could get, it wasn't served up as Mick Jagger's strut or Ozzie Osborne's demonism, it was just a suite of songs about real things delivered with clear definition and care. This is why you can listen as freshly in 2023 as the first fans did fifty years ago. The statements still stick. Sure, no one plays blues based guitar solos like that any more but those things only prevent this music from the kiss of death that comes with being written off as timeless. It is the '70s quality of the record that lets us marvel. It is the failure of the world to improve beyond these accusations that sober the listener. That's why when you hear the latest attempt by a subsequently formed band to emulate this statement they will just sound like they're playing musical dressups.
Where does that put Roger Waters' re-recording of the album with the voice of the accumulated wisdom of the decades. It puts it with Roger Waters, he can do what he wants with what he has. The only thing he won't be able to do is eclipse this.
But I don't want to end with a downer. If you are reading this while still young, please take the time to find a continuous sequence of this whole album, whether on vinyl, legit download, streaming or any physical medium. Take the time and take care to sit in front of it in the dark. It's less than an hour of your life and you will thank yourself for the act of it. And then, you can get up and go for a round of dodgeball for all I care because it's less this particular record than any like it that can compel you to stop and listen and think about your life. It's not the only one, it's just one of the best.
Listening notes: to really get into this before writing, I immersed myself in the recently released standalone blu-ray with a Dolby Atmos mix which is completely sumptuous. For more local references to moments like fades or moments of voice material. I played sections of the original stereo mix form the '90s CD. This album is pretty much everywhere so you have no excuse.
