The Dark Side of the Moon

contents
Introduction
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Piper at the Gates of Dawn
Saucerful of Secrets
Ummagumma
Atom Heart Mother
Meddle
The Dark Side of the Moon
Wish You Were Here
Animals
7
15
29
47
67
81
99
117
133
9
10
11
12
The Wall
147
The Final Cut
165
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
191
The Division Bell . . . and Beyond 209
Discography
Sources
Contributor Biographies
Acknowledgments
Index
221
227
229
233
235
CHAPTer 6
T he D ar k Sid e
of t he Moon
In early December 1971, just a couple of weeks after completing their 27-date
American tour and the release of Meddle, the band gathered around Nick
Mason’s kitchen table in Camden Town, London, to discuss their next album.
Their schedule for 1972 was already filling up; British dates had been announced
for February, a trip to Japan was being planned, and another U.S. tour was in
the pipeline, along with another soundtrack project.
The band wanted to take advantage of the touring to road-test and refine
some new material ahead of recording. It was Roger Waters who pushed for
a theme to the album that they could all work to. According to 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.” Gilmour confirmed that “Roger came up with the specific idea of
dealing with all the things that drive people mad.”
Waters then volunteered to write all the lyrics while the others agreed to
focus on songs and ideas.
At the beginning of January 1972 the band reconvened at a warehouse in
Bermondsey, south London, where they spent nearly three weeks knocking
the songs into presentable shape. “At the start we only had vague ideas about
madness being a theme,” said Richard Wright. “We rehearsed a lot, just putting
down ideas, and then in the next rehearsal we used them. It flowed really well.
There was a strong thing in it that made it easier to do.”
lEfT: November 10–11, 1972, KB Hallen, Copenhagen.
Jorgen Angel/Redferns/Getty Images
ABOVE: The Dark Side of the Moon press launch, Rainbow Theatre, London, February 17–20, 1972.
Michael Putland/Getty Images
Some songs were left over from earlier albums; Waters’ “Brain
Damage” was revived from the Meddle sessions while Wright’s
“Us and Them” dated back to the Zabriskie Point soundtrack
outtakes. But even new songs like “Money” came together quickly.
As Mason recalled, “When Roger wrote it, it more or less all came
up on the first day.”
They spent three more days at North London’s Rainbow
Theatre rehearsing the show with the production crew that
now had nine tons of sound and lighting equipment plus a
few gadgets-in-progress to entertain themselves and, by extension, the audience. They had a new lighting designer, Arthur
Max, who they lured from his job at New York’s Fillmore East
(he would later go on to be production designer for The Gladiator). From the Rainbow it was straight to Brighton for the
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PINK FLOYD: BEYOND THE WALL
opening night of their U.K. tour, ironing out the glitches as they
went along.
A month later they were back at the Rainbow, this time for four
sellout shows, and by now they were confident enough to invite
the media along. The new songs, under the working title of Eclipse,
were performed in the first half, pretty much in the same order they
would appear on the album a year later. Some songs, like “Money,”
“Time,” and “Us and Them” were already standing out. Others,
like “On the Run,” a guitar/keyboard jam, and “The Great Gig in
the Sky,” an electric piano solo accompanied by tapes of British
philosopher and TV personality Malcolm Muggeridge in full rant,
were still coming together. But even at this early stage there was
a clear, concise edge to the lyrics, in contrast to the spacey, often
whimsical ramblings they had sometimes come up with earlier.
Olympisch Stadion, May 22, 1972, Amsterdam.
Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns/Getty Images
In late February they decamped to the Chateau Herouville near Paris—
about to be immortalized by Elton John as the Honky Chateau—to record
the soundtrack for La Vallee directed by Bernard Shroeder, with whom
they’d worked on More. They spent an intense week applying their moodmusic skills to footage of a bunch of well-heeled hippies encountering a lost
tribe in a hidden valley in the Andes. The songs were mostly fairly lightweight
although they benefitted from Waters’ thematic approach and offered glimpses
of how the band would sound on The Dark Side of the Moon.. The soundtrack
album was released in June 1972 but was retitled Obscured by Clouds after a
dispute with the film company. Ironically the film was then retitled La Vallee
(Obscured By Clouds),, but not even that could save it from a critical mauling.
RIGHT: Pink Floyd’s soundtrack for La Vallee
was released under the title Obscured by Clouds.
lEfT: During two one-week sessions in February and March 1972, the band wrote and recorded the
score for the Barbet Schroeder film La Vallee. It was the second time the band worked with Schroeder,
having scored his 1969 film More (inset).
ClOCKWISE: The Dark Side of the Moon tour, London, 1972.
David Redferns/Getty Images ; Japanese concert poster,
March 6–7, 1972 , Tokyo-To Taiikukan, Tokyo ; LA Weekly ad for
September 22, 1972, show at the Hollywood Bowl.
March saw the band in Japan, playing
concerts in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, and Hokkaido,
and in April they started another lengthy U.S.
tour. By now some new effects had worked
their way into the show, like sheets of flame
rising from cauldrons at the back of the stage
and a gong that burst into flames during “Set the
Controls for the Heart of the Sun.” The crew was always up for a few
extras when they got the chance; at the Hollywood Bowl, searchlights
behind the famously domed stage scanned the night sky and the show
finished with a big firework display.
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PINK FLOYD: BEYOND THE WALL
THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
103
Sporthalle, Böblingen, West Germany, November 15, 1972.
Although Pink Floyd were routinely selling out American
tours Meddle had failed to dent the Top 40 album chart—it never
even got beyond No. 70—and Pink Floyd were beginning to
doubt the ability of EMI’s U.S. subsidiary label Capitol to deliver
what they felt was necessary. In the U.K. the album reached
No. 3, which might have been considered disappointing after
Atom Heart Mother’s chart-topping success, but it had already
outsold Meddle.
It wasn’t until June that Pink Floyd got to start recording their
new songs at Abbey Road Studios. But their timing was right.
They found the place hyped up by new technology. Sixteen-track
recording consoles had been installed, and who better to explore
the possibilities than Pink Floyd? There was also excited talk about
the new Dolby noise reduction system that would arrive shortly, as
well as new gizmos for the band to play with, notably a VCS3, the
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PINK FLOYD: BEYOND THE WALL
latest, albeit still-primitive, synthesizer. The whirring, helicopterlike noises that Wright discovered on it transformed “On the Run,”
along with Mason’s heavily treated hi-hat. Mason had an electronic
drum kit on hand but generally preferred the traditional approach.
The dynamic tom-tom beats at the beginning of “Time” were
recorded on a set of specially tuned roto-drums that happened to
be lying around the studio.
The band had now played the songs enough times know how
they wanted them to sound, something Gilmour believed made
a big difference: “You couldn’t do that now, of course. You’d be
bootlegged out of existence. But when we went into the studio we
all knew the material. The playing was very good. It had a natural
feel. And it was a bloody good package—the music, the concept,
and the cover all came together. And it was the first time we’d had
great lyrics.”
THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
105
By now the working title had changed from Eclipse to
The Dark Side of the Moon, so the band were not pleased
to discover that another British band, Medicine Head, had
just released an album with the same title. “We weren’t
annoyed at Medicine Head,” Gilmour explained. “We were
annoyed because we had already thought of the title
before the Medicine Head album came out.” When that
album sank with barely a trace, Pink Floyd reappropriated
the title.
There were more distractions along the way:
holidays, another American tour, and the premiere of the
Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii concert film. Director Adrian
Maben had twice come back to the band for more scenes
to supplement the Pompeii live footage. He lured them
to Paris to perform with a singing dog (really) and was
eventually allowed a brief shoot at Abbey Road. He found
the band at their most surly, highlighted by Mason in the
canteen, petulantly demanding a piece of apple pie “with
no crust.” Waters contemptuously blew smoke rings at
the camera and responded to questions like “Are you
happy?” with “What do you mean by ‘happy’?”
The Abbey Road filming did result in two illuminating
shots however: footage of Wright laying down a piano
part and of Gilmour adding an overdub. When Waters
queries the guitar tone over the intercom Gilmour
mutters, “Christ, where would rock and roll be without
feedback?”
Then there was the long running saga of the Roland
Petit Ballet. The band had expressed an interest in
writing a piece for the French troupe to perform. None
other than Rudolf Nureyev was on board, and none other
than Roman Polanski fancied filming it. Mason spoke
of “innumerable discussions, a number of lunches, a
number of dinners, and very high-powered meetings.”
The original project revolved around Marcel Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past but the band found that
magnum opus heavy going, some of them barely making
it to the second chapter, let alone the second volume.
Then it switched to the Arabian fable A Thousand and
One Nights, though nobody was quite sure how or why.
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PINK FLOYD: BEYOND THE WALL
ABOVE: Publicity photo, circa 1973.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
RIGHT: On November 25, 1972,
the band’s concert film, Live at
Pompeii, received a screening at the
Rainbow Theatre in London.
lEfT: “Money” b/w “Any Colour You Like,” 1973.
ABOVE: “Us and Them” b/w “Time,” 1973.
The project fell to earth after what Waters described as
“another great lunch. We all sat ’round until someone thumped
the table and said ‘What’s the idea then?’ and everyone just sat
there drinking this wine and getting more and more pissed, with
more and more poovery going on ’round the table [Note: this was
many years before the dead hand of political correctness spread
its grip.] until someone suggested Frankenstein and Nureyev
started getting a bit worried. And when Polanski was drunk
enough he started to suggest that we make the blue movie to
end all blue movies. And then it all petered out into cognacs and
coffees and we jumped into our cars and split. God knows what
happened after that.”
What happened was that Pink Floyd rerecorded some existing
pieces for the ballet to dance to and performed live with them on
selected performances in Paris and Marseilles.
But work on The Dark Side of the Moon continued unhindered.
Through the fall of 1972 the album took shape and it was while
Waters was thinking about ways of bringing more continuity to
the album that he had the idea of linking the tracks with bits of
speech. “I still glow with pleasure at how well that worked,” he
remembered. “I devised a series of about twenty questions on
pieces of card. They ranged from obscure questions like ‘What
does the phrase ‘the dark side of the moon’ mean to you?’ to
a series of questions that related to each other, like ‘When was
the last time you were violent?’ and then ‘Do you think you
were in the right?’ We asked people to just go into an empty
studio, look at the top card, respond to it, move on to the
next card and respond to that, and so on until they’d done all
the cards.”
Pink Floyd’s road crew were willing guinea pigs (that’s the
road manager’s voice you hear at the beginning of the album).
But passing strangers also took part. Paul McCartney, who was
recording at Abbey Road at the same time, was roped in along
with wife Linda, although their replies were not used. The final
snippet as the album fades—There is no dark side of the moon,
really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark—came from the doorman at
Abbey Road, Jerry Driscoll.
Only when they reached the mixing stage did problems occur.
THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
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Floyd lore
T he D ar k Sid e o f
t h e R ainb o w?
By Hugh Fielder
Forget Roger Waters’ bleak visions of paranoia, madness, and
death. The real meaning of The Dark Side of the Moon is to be
found within the Judy Garland movie The Wizard of Oz.
The connection between The Dark Side of the Moon and The
Wizard of Oz goes back to the mid-’90s when Pink Floyd fan sites
started getting excited about the synchronicities that happen
when you play the movie and the album simultaneously.
It works like this. Put The Dark Side. . . into your CD player,
or cue it on your MP3 player, and put The Wizard of Oz into your
DVD player. Start the movie but pause it when you get to the MGM
lion’s third roar. Turn down the sound on the TV and start the
movie and the music together.
Around a couple of minutes in, during “Breathe,” Gilmour
sings Look around and seconds later Dorothy turns around.
Spooky, eh? But that’s just the start. Depending on just how
much attention you’re paying, the synchronicities tumble forth.
Dorothy breaks into a trot just as the band sing No one told you
when to run. The chimes in “Time” coincide with the arrival of the
Wicked Witch of the West and stop when she dismounts from
her bike.
“The Great Gig in the Sky” starts just as the tornado begins
and lasts for the duration of the storm. When it finishes (and
bear in mind this was the end of side one of the vinyl album), the
black-and-white portion of the film also ends and the ker-ching
ker-ching at the start of “Money” heralds the color section of the
movie, with the Munchkins dancing in time (kind of) to the music.
The Scarecrow starts dancing just as the band sing The lunatic is
on the grass.
And, finally, as the album ends to the sound of fading
heartbeats, Dorothy is leaning over the Tin Man, banging on his
chest to see if he has a heart. These are just the highlights. More
than seventy examples of synchronicity have been found so far
and you can rest assured that the search continues.
Some of you may have already spotted a potential flaw in this
theory: namely that The Dark Side. . . doesn’t last as long as the
movie. The obvious answer is to play the album again. Opinion is
still divided on exactly when to press play again but you should be
able to notch up at least another thirty synchronicities, by which
time you’ll be on your third play of the album.
Mind you, some radical splinter groups have opted for playing
Animals or Meddle instead once The Dark Side . . . has finished.
They are now compiling an alternative gospel of latter-day
synchronicities but are largely ignored by the true believers.
That’s the evidence. And it can’t all be coincidence, can it?
There are two main conspiracy theories. One is that the whole
band was “in on it.” The other is that it was Roger Waters’ plot and
the rest of the band was unaware.
The search is now on for the smoking gun. The “Roger did it”
faction believe they have found theirs in an interview with engineer
Alan Parsons, who states categorically that at no point during the
recording of The Dark Side . . . did he ever hear anyone mention The
Wizard of Oz. With a logic that would satisfy any witch hunter, UFO
spotter, or crop-circle believer, this proves that Roger acted alone
. . . because he didn’t mention it to anyone else.
But wait. The “It was the band” brigade have found their
smoking gun, too. If you gaze closely (very closely) at the cover of
Pink Floyd’s 1995 Pulse live album, you’ll make out a girl wearing
a pair of red shoes. Dorothy’s red shoes! Look harder and you’ll
see the Wicked Witch of the West’s bicycle and the Tin Man’s axe.
The fact that these three icons are also associated with Pink Floyd
songs dating back to the ’60s is irrelevant. But the fact that Roger
had left the band long before Pulse proves that he could not have
done it alone.
Now that that’s been settled, the search has widened. Wish
You Were Here has been played to Blade Runner with satisfying
results. Meddle is doing well as a soundtrack to Fantasia. And
Echoes looks good on Contact. In fact, pick a Pink Floyd album,
choose your favorite movie, and there’s a website out there
waiting for you.
But what’s the word from the band themselves? David Gilmour
has spoken of “Some guy with too much time on his hands.” Roger
finds it “Amusing.” But it’s Nick Mason who has really let the cat
out of the bag. “It’s absolute nonsense,” he replied when asked
about it. “It has nothing to do with The Wizard of Oz. It was all
based on The Sound of Music.”
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