Pink Floyd
The eighth album from Pink Floyd emerged on 1 March 1973, ushering in a new era for rock music as an immersive, quadrophonic, and introspective experience. The album featured a mix of ethereal sounds, haunting vocals, and unsettling spoken word passages that touched on themes of violence, death, and insanity, all set against a backdrop of cash registers and ticking clocks.
With glum and contemplative tracks exploring madness, mortality, and greed, interspersed with tense instrumental pieces, it might not seem like a recipe for a chart-topping album.
And yet, Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon became one of the best-selling albums of all time, defying all expectations.
Despite being released during the analog era of vinyl LPs and record stores, the album remained on Billboard's Top 200 chart for almost 14 years, persevering through the rise of punk, disco, early hip-hop, and the MTV era. Despite its ubiquity on FM radio, listeners continued to purchase the album, often replacing worn-out copies with new ones.
In the digital age, The Dark Side of the Moon made a triumphant return to the charts, selling and streaming millions of copies.
From left: Nick Mason, David Gilmour, Roger Waters and Richard Wright of Pink Floyd. The group’s 1973 album, “The Dark Side of the Moon” has had a long life on radio playlists and the Billboard chart.
Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
It appears that we've landed on the dark side of Pink Floyd themselves, even 50 years after their monumental album.
The long-simmering tensions between the band's main members, Roger Waters and David Gilmour, have been the subject of pointed remarks and frank commentary to interviewers for decades. Despite leaving the band in 1985, Waters continues to express his disbelief that his former bandmates managed to keep a "faux Floyd" going without his dominant concepts and songwriting. He dismisses their subsequent albums as unworthy of the band's name, while accusing them of painting him as "autocratic." Gilmour, on the other hand, is generally hesitant to discuss Waters' attempt to dissolve the band through a High Court suit in 1986, but still resents the bassist's efforts to take full credit for the band's monumental accomplishments in the 1970s.
Following the departure of their enigmatic frontman Syd Barrett, who was suspected to have schizophrenia induced by drug use in 1968, Pink Floyd underwent a period of sonic experimentation.
Over the course of three years, the band tried to transform the psychedelic potential of their 1967 debut album "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" into something that wasn't quite ready for the music world yet. On albums such as "A Saucerful of Secrets" (1968), "Ummagumma" (1969), and "Atom Heart Mother" (1970), they delved even deeper into the type of long, multi-part musical journeys they had introduced with the 10-minute "Interstellar Overdrive" in their early shows.
Through the use of avant-garde orchestral pieces and found sounds such as dripping taps or their roadie eating toast, tracks like "Atom Heart Mother," "Sysyphus," and "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast" occupied entire sides of their albums, contributing to the development of prog rock's definitive feature: the "transportive song-cycle."
As per Waters, the idea for The Dark Side of the Moon, was established prior to the creation of much of the music or lyrics.
During a meeting in 1971 held in the kitchen of drummer Nick Mason's Camden home, Waters proposed that they write and perform an entire album centered around "the pressures and preoccupations that divert us from our potential for positive action" for their upcoming tour.
“The pressures of modern living... that conspire to send some people insane.”
A Synthi A synthesizer was fired up to add compulsive electronic momentum to “On the Run” and “Time”. The cash register noises on “Money” were pieced together from Abbey Road sound-effects records, recordings of Waters throwing coins into his wife’s industrial food mixer and the sound of the band dropping bags of cash onto the studio floor from six feet up.
Engineer Alan Parsons originally recorded the cascade of chiming clocks piece by piece in an antique clock shop to demonstrate the effects of quadrophonic sound. This recording was later used by Pink Floyd to open their song "Time."
During the recording process, a group of backing singers including Doris Troy, Lesley Duncan, Liza Strike, and Barry St John were brought in to add gospel-style vocals to songs such as "Brain Damage" and "Us and Them." Despite the band's supposed focus on human connection and empathy, the singers noted that Pink Floyd was reserved and unforthcoming during the sessions, with Duncan recalling that they were "cold" and "rather clinical." The band's interactions with the singers were minimal, with the most enthusiastic response being "that'll do."
“Pink Floyd weren’t very friendly... the most we got was ‘that’ll do’”
On release, The Dark Side of the Moon swiftly became a titan of 1970s rock music. Waters remembered playing the finished album to his wife and her “bursting into tears when it was finished… I thought, ‘This has obviously struck a chord somewhere.’” The chord it struck was global: the album swiftly ascended to the top of the US chart and, although only reaching No 2 in 1973, would spend 555 weeks in the UK Top 100 to date as it gradually racked up 45 million worldwide sales.
The Dark Side of the Moon was a landmark album for the emerging progressive rock scene, serving as both a culmination and an inspiration.
The album was thematically and musically cohesive, captivating millions of listeners while also sparking rumors that it was intended to synchronize with the film "The Wizard of Oz."
However, for Pink Floyd themselves, the album marked the beginning of the end. As they reached stadium-level success in America, they found that their respectful, attentive audience had been replaced by rowdy concert-goers shouting for their hit song "Money."
They were faced with the timeless dilemma of the rock industry: what do you do once you've achieved all of your goals?
According to Waters, "The Dark Side of the Moon finished off Pink Floyd once and for all. To be that successful is the aim of every group. And once you’ve cracked it, it’s all over."
Original recording released March 1, 1973
