Pink Floyd Dark Side Of The Moon Lyrics
Mica Withington
The Dark Side of the Moon is the eighth studio album by the English rock band Pink Floyd, released on 1 March 1973 by Harvest Records in the UK and Capitol Records in the US. Developed during live performances before recording began, it was conceived as a concept album that would focus on the pressures faced by the band during their arduous lifestyle, and also deal with the mental health problems of the former band member Syd Barrett, who had departed the group in 1968. New material was recorded in two sessions in 1972 and 1973 at EMI Studios (now Abbey Road Studios) in London.
The record builds on ideas explored in Pink Floyd's earlier recordings and performances, while omitting the extended instrumentals that characterised the band's earlier work. The group employed multitrack recording, tape loops, and analogue synthesisers, including experimentation with the EMS VCS 3 and a Synthi A. The engineer Alan Parsons was responsible for many of the sonic aspects of the recording, and for the recruitment of the session singer Clare Torry, who appears on "The Great Gig in the Sky".
The Dark Side of the Moon explores themes such as conflict, greed, time, death, and mental illness. Snippets from interviews with the band's road crew and others are featured alongside philosophical quotations. The sleeve, which depicts a prismatic spectrum, was designed by Storm Thorgerson in response to the keyboardist Richard Wright's request for a "simple and bold" design which would represent the band's lighting and the album's themes. The album was promoted with two singles: "Money" and "Us and Them".
The Dark Side of the Moon is among the most critically acclaimed albums and often features in professional listings of the greatest of all time. It brought Pink Floyd international fame, wealth and plaudits to all four band members. A blockbuster release of the album era, it also propelled record sales throughout the music industry during the 1970s. The Dark Side of the Moon is certified 14x platinum in the United Kingdom, and topped the US Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart, where it has charted for 990 weeks. By 2013, The Dark Side of the Moon had sold over 45 million copies worldwide, making it the band's best-selling release, the best-selling album of the 1970s, and the fourth-best-selling album in history.[3] In 2012, the album was selected for preservation in the United States National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999.[4]
The band approved of Waters' concept for an album unified by a single theme,[8] and Waters, Gilmour, Mason and the keyboardist Richard Wright all participated in writing and producing new material. Waters created the early demo tracks in a small studio in a garden shed at his home in Islington.[9] Parts of the album were taken from previously unused material; the opening line of "Breathe" came from an earlier work by Waters and Ron Geesin, written for the soundtrack of The Body,[10] and the basic structure of "Us and Them" was borrowed from an original composition, "The Violent Sequence" by Wright for Zabriskie Point.[11] The band rehearsed at a warehouse in London owned by the Rolling Stones and at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, London. They also purchased extra equipment, which included new speakers, a PA system, a 28-track mixing desk with a four channel quadraphonic output, and a custom-built lighting rig. Nine tonnes of kit was transported in three lorries. This would be the first time the band had taken an entire album on tour.[12][13] The album had been given the provisional title of Dark Side of the Moon (an allusion to lunacy, rather than astronomy).[14] After discovering that title had already been used by another band, Medicine Head, it was temporarily changed to Eclipse. The new material was premiered at The Dome in Brighton, on 20 January 1972,[15] and after the commercial failure of Medicine Head's album the title was changed back to the band's original preference.[16][17][nb 1]
Dark Side of the Moon: A Piece for Assorted Lunatics, as it was then known,[7] was performed for an assembled press on 17 February 1972 at the Rainbow Theatre, more than a year before its release, and was critically acclaimed.[18] Michael Wale of The Times described the piece as "bringing tears to the eyes. It was so completely understanding and musically questioning."[19] Derek Jewell of The Sunday Times wrote "The ambition of the Floyd's artistic intention is now vast."[16] Melody Maker was less enthusiastic: "Musically, there were some great ideas, but the sound effects often left me wondering if I was in a bird-cage at London Zoo."[20] The following tour was praised by the public. The new material was performed in the same order in which it was eventually sequenced on the album. Differences included the lack of synthesisers in tracks such as "On the Run", and Clare Torry's vocals on "The Great Gig in the Sky" replaced by readings from the Bible.[18]
Pink Floyd's lengthy tour through Europe and North America gave them the opportunity to make improvements to the scale and quality of their performances.[21] Work on the album was interrupted in late February when the band travelled to France and recorded music for the French director Barbet Schroeder's film La Valle.[22][nb 2] They performed in Japan, returned to France in March to complete work on the film, played more shows in North America, then flew to London and resumed recording in May and June. After more concerts in Europe and North America, the band returned to London on 9 January 1973 to complete the album.[23][24][25]
The Dark Side of the Moon was built upon experiments Pink Floyd had attempted in their previous live shows and recordings, although it lacked the extended instrumental excursions which, according to the critic David Fricke, had become characteristic of the band following the departure of the founding member Syd Barrett in 1968. Gilmour, Barrett's replacement, later referred to those instrumentals as "that psychedelic noodling stuff". He and Waters cited 1971's Meddle as a turning point towards what would later be realised on the album. The Dark Side of the Moon's lyrical themes include conflict, greed, the passage of time, death and insanity, the last inspired in part by Barrett's deteriorating mental state.[11] The album contains musique concrte on several tracks.[7]
"Money", the first track on side two, opens with the sound of cash registers and rhythmically jingling coins. The song mocks greed and consumerism with sarcastic lyrics and cash-related sound effects. "Money" became the band's most commercially successful track and was covered by other artists.[28] "Us and Them" addresses the isolation of the depressed with the symbolism of conflict and the use of simple dichotomies to describe personal relationships. "Any Colour You Like" tackles the illusion of choice one has in society. "Brain Damage" looks at mental illness resulting from the elevation of fame and success above the needs of the self; in particular, the line "and if the band you're in starts playing different tunes" reflects the mental breakdown of Syd Barrett. The album ends with "Eclipse", which espouses the concepts of otherness and unity, while encouraging the listener to recognise the common traits shared by humanity.[29][30]
The Dark Side of the Moon was recorded at EMI Studios (now Abbey Road Studios) in approximately 60 days[31] between 31 May 1972 and 9 February 1973. Pink Floyd were assigned the staff engineer Alan Parsons, who had worked as the assistant tape operator on their fifth album, Atom Heart Mother (1970), and had gained experience as a recording engineer on the Beatles albums Abbey Road and Let It Be.[32][33] The Dark Side of the Moon sessions made use of advanced studio techniques, as the studio was capable of 16-track mixes which offered greater flexibility than the eight- or four-track mixes Pink Floyd had previously worked with, although the band often used so many tracks that second-generation copies were still needed to make more space available on the tape.[34] The mix supervisor Chris Thomas recalled later, "There were only two or three tracks of drums when we came to mixing it. Depending on the song, there would be one or two tracks of guitar, and these would include the solo and the rhythm guitar parts. One track for keyboard, one track for bass, and one or two sound effects tracks. They had been very, very efficient in the way they'd worked."[35]
The first track recorded was "Us and Them" on 31 May, followed seven days later by "Money".[1] For "Money", Waters had created effects loops in an unusual 7
4 time signature[36] from recordings of money-related objects, including coins thrown into a mixing bowl in his wife's pottery studio. These were re-recorded to take advantage of the band's decision to create a quadraphonic mix of the album, although Parsons later expressed dissatisfaction with the result of this mix, which he attributed to a lack of time and a shortage of multitrack tape recorders.[33]
"Time" and "The Great Gig in the Sky" were recorded next, followed by a two-month break, during which the band spent time with their families and prepared for a tour of the United States.[37] The recording sessions were frequently interrupted: Waters, a supporter of Arsenal F.C., would break to see his team compete, and the band would occasionally stop to watch Monty Python's Flying Circus on television while Parsons worked on the tracks.[34] Gilmour recalled, "...but when we were on a roll, we would get on."[38][39]
After returning from the US in January 1973, they recorded "Brain Damage", "Eclipse", "Any Colour You Like" and "On the Run", and fine-tuned work from previous sessions. Four female vocalists were assembled to sing on "Brain Damage", "Eclipse" and "Time", and the saxophonist Dick Parry was booked to play on "Us and Them" and "Money". With the director Adrian Maben, the band also filmed studio footage for Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii.[40] The album was completed and signed off at Abbey Road on 9 February 1973.[41]
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