The news is brief: exactly half a century ago today, the British group Pink Floyd released The Dark Side of the Moon, the eighth album of their recording career and the most transcendental of it. And not only that, but it was a complete revolution in the rock scene of the time, turning its well-known progressive sound into a fundamental and distinctive element that could also reach a wide audience.
After the departure of Syd Barrett, one of the co-founding souls of the formation, a few years earlier due to his drug addiction, the British band already had his replacement, guitarist and vocalist David Gilmour, fully integrated into its bosom, and had Roger Waters as musician more restless and that he wrote part of the lyrics. Some of the albums they had released before already had fascinating appeal – especially Atom Heart Mother (1970) and Meddle (1971) – and now they wanted to go one step further.
Pink Floyd’s intention was to make an album about mental health and the fragility of life. The phrase “dark side of the moon” was a more than apt metaphor for both the unknown and the old and often outdated concept of “lunatic” (a term derived from the Latin “moon” and the idea that a person’s state of mind person fluctuated around the phases of the moon).
Another of the indisputable hallmarks of the album was, is, its cover. Hipgnosis, the also legendary artistic collective, were in charge of designing it. Specifically, the graphic artist George Hardie, who materialized the band’s desire for “a simple and daring design”: a ray of white light that passes through a prism and fragments it into its component colors (even if one color of the spectrum is missing: the indigo)
And the perhaps fundamental idea behind the project was that it had to be fully playable music, which meant that new material was tested live long before the band entered the studio. Some of the new songs had their live premiere at the Brighton Dome in January 1972, while all the tracks performed over four nights at Finsbury Park’s Rainbow Theater in February 1972. The weekly Melody Maker called the work “ devoid of framework and conception”.
Recorded at London’s Abbey Road Studios from May 1972 to January 1973, the aficionado was met with a splendid piece of work, complete with surprises and ingenious devices. The deranged laugh that sounds in Speak to me and Brain damage is from Peter Watts, a road manager for the band who appeared on the back cover of the album Ummagumma and father of the later actress Naomi Watts. The noise of coins in the hit single Money was achieved by Roger Waters recording the ones that were introduced into a blender for sale to the public.
Or the extraordinary voice that dazzles in The great gig in the sky is that of Claire Torry, an employee of Emi who was recommended to the band by producer Alan Parsons. Years later, she sued her for not paying her a proportional part of her royalties. She won. And without forgetting the extraordinary saxophone, with feverish muscle, played by Dick Parry, an old friend of Gilmour’s, who shakes him up in Money and revolutionizes him in Us and them.
Along with the commemoration of the half century of its publication, the album has also aroused controversy very recently. And it is that Roger Waters has been re-recording a new and complete version of the historic album, according to he revealed two weeks ago to The Telegraph. A new version that will be released next May and that he would have secretly recorded in recent months without his former colleagues from the legendary band David Gilmour and Nick Mason having participated or been aware of it (His relationship with the rest of the band is rather tense since its departure in the early nineties).
In the same interview, the bassist, singer and composer justified his decision by saying that “there are not enough people who understand what it is about, what was told then.” But perhaps the most controversial thing about his decision is the tranquility with which he has taken it in relation to his former accomplices in his former band that “I wrote The Dark Side of the Moon. Let’s end this ‘us’ thing. Of course we were a band, there were four of us, we all contributed, but it’s my project and I wrote it. So… blah!”
Let everyone draw their own conclusions, but the fact is that in the credits of the album Waters only appears as the sole composer in three of its ten songs (Money, Brain damage and Eclipse), and in five of them he doesn’t even exist.
