211. Pink Floyd / The Dark Side Of The Moon. 1973. 1.5/5.

If you are not a diehard Pink Floyd fan, it may surprise you that “The Dark Side of the Moon” is Pink Floyd’s eighth studio album, and while they were successful, it was by no means a band that had outstanding success, not that you would have imagined looking back from today. Coming out of the 1960’s, their early work had a lot of the instrumentation freeform progressive exploration on stage and then on their albums that many of the same types of bands fiddled with at that point in their careers. Rather than have structured verses, choruses and instrument breaks, the songs would flow in such a way that the structure was very loose and fluid, and what was put down on vinyl was not necessarily how they were played on stage.
Most of this album was written and then performed on stage for almost 12 months before it was finally brought into the studio and committed to vinyl. Now that’s not unusual for bands in the 1970’s to play new material in concert well before they actually release it on an album. It rarely happens in the modern age, and as a concert goer I’d be ambivalent about going to see a band play the material I know, and then get hit with several songs that I didn’t know. But, certainly in the instance of this album, the band wanted to find a way to get the songs right, and the best way to do it was to playing them on stage, and finding a way to tighten them to the point that they were happy.
They then spent a period of 8 or 9 months in the studio at different times recording the album. It utilises many different concepts and recording techniques, as well as spoken word in places throughout to help connect tracks and ideas. It acts as a concept album, and according to Roger Waters, who provided all of the lyrics on the album, the five tracks on each side reflect various stages of human life, beginning and ending with a heartbeat, exploring the nature of the human experience and, according to Waters, empathy. And then, once recorded and released, it began its climb to immortality.

Is the psychedelic 1960’s and early 1970’s more your scene of music? Is it something you have to have lived through, in order to get the most out of the music? Are there forms of music that you really probably needed to be on LSD or something similar to be able to see the colours an album releases to enjoy it in its best light? Or does it simply come down to the fact that there are genres of music you will love, and others that you will be ambivalent to?
For a start, this album has a lot synths, and keyboards, and looped effects going on. “Speak to Me”, “On the Run” and “Any Colour You Like” are the instrumentals on the albums, all of them a bit ‘spacey’ for wont of a better term. They are connectors between the other songs, adding (I guess) the colour of the music to the album, but even the songs have similar effects to them. Richard Wright switches between the Hammond organ, electric piano, normal everyday piano and various synths that tend to dominate most of the album. And this is what Pink Floyd had always done well in their previous albums.
And the fact is that the effect on the album when David Gilmour’s guitar does come in, and Nick Mason’s drums, and Roger Waters bass guitar, then it booms through your speakers and makes an immediate impact on what has been produced.
And as I mentioned earlier, there are songs, or at least partial songs from this album, that just about everyone would recognise, even if you don’t know the album itself. The clocks from the start of “Time”, and that initial impact of guitar and Gilmour’s vocals in the middle of the track. The cash registers and the opening lyrics from “Money”, the vocals of Clare Torry on “The Great Gig in the Sky”, and the middle serenading of “Brain Damage”, that makes you feel you are floating in outer space while listening to it. These are iconic pieces that have infiltrated popular culture to the point that they are recognisable.
It is an album that still sells, and no doubt will again with the 50th anniversary editions being released in all formats. And it will continue to be held up as one of the greatest albums ever released, for its innovation and uniqueness in a time where these types of albums could be a dime a dozen, but missing the obvious time and energy spent in shaping the design of the album, from beginning to end, ensuring each piece flowed into the next, with lyrics discussing the topics they faced being expertly formed and drawn by the music written to highlight them.
But... despite all of this... what if you just are not attracted to it? What if despite what all the so-called experts say about this album that has sold more than 45 million copies worldwide, you just can’t hear it?

I’ll admit right here that I have never owned a copy of this album, and will only ever own a copy of this album if someone gifts it to me. And I have never been a Pink Floyd fan, even though whenever I meet people I don’t know and they discover the range of bands that I love and listen to, they say “yeah, how about Pink Floyd, hey? The Wall, Dark Side of the Moon! Awesome!!” And once I state my ambivalence towards the band and this album, I tend to be derided heavily and then they move on. Which is always for the best.
Zeppelin and Sabbath and Purple from this same era had the guitar, the iconic guitars of Page, Iommi and Blackmore. And that was what drew me to those bands. For the most part, Pink Floyd didn’t have that, though Gilmour has shown he can play when he needs to, and it is those moments on this album that really prick my ears up, when he actually plays a riff. But those are the small highlights that pop up along the way, rather than dominating the album and being the driving force. And I know full well that the acquaintances of mine who listened to this album constantly during my high school years were either tripping on acid or smoking bongs in dim basements somewhere, which is not something I spent any time doing. But, listening to the album, I can only hazard a guess that it would be a different experience listening to this while under that kind of influence.
So given that this is all the case, you can probably imagine that “The Dark Side of the Moon” is not up there with my favourite albums. And over the last month, leading up to this anniversary and this episode, I would have listened to this album more than the previous fifty years combined. And I haven’t had a problem with it being on and listening to it. It isn’t an album that I hate or loathe, or am even ambivalent to. Simply put, it just isn’t my style of music. It doesn’t hold a great deal of interest for me. I can’t think of any situation where I would want to grab this album and put it on, to salvage a bad day or enhance a good one. It just isn’t in my ballpark of music style or genre.
So – happy anniversary to an iconic album, one that millions around the world will be celebrating. An in the long run was an excuse for me to discover if my thoughts on this album had changed in any way. Spolier alert – they haven’t.