If there is one album you had to chose to represent what 70's rock was all about (up to Punk at least) 'Dark Side of the Moon' (DSOTM) would be that album. It propelled Pink Floyd from popular art-house kings of English psychedelia to be one the best known and most successful rock bands in the world.
BACKGROUND (or Psychedelia, drugs and a bloke called Syd)
Pink Floyd had been one of the major influences of the drug inspired Psychedelic rock of the late 60's under the guidance of slightly unhinged but enormously talented Syd Barrett. With the album 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' and their extraordinary live shows that used film projections and light effects at key underground venues, like the UFO club in London, Pink Floyd had become one of the most innovative and critically acclaimed British bands. Just as the band was expanding it's fan base Barrett's increasing use of LSD finally caught up with him, becoming more withdrawn and increasingly unreliable he was sacked from the band in April 1968. David Gilmour who had been brought in to cover for Barrett in some live shows then became a fulltime member. The loss of Barrett was a big blow for the band but they managed to recover and with Roger Waters gradually becoming the main song writer Pink Floyd did have success with their next few albums 'A Saucerful Of Secrets' (Barrett appears on 3 of the 7 tracks) 'More' and 'Ummagumma'. None of these or later releases 'Atom Heart Mother', 'Meddle' or 'Obscured by Clouds' managed to break the band on to the wider international stage. But the music scene was changing the hippie summer
of love was quickly fading and the music world was still suffering a post-Woodstock hangover. The time was right for a band to seize the initiative.
DSOTM was released in March 1973 but was in fact recorded in the summer of 1972. This was a time of great technological leaps in the music industry. The recording made use of the new 16-track equipment at the Abbey Road studios and used the new Dolby sound reduction system. Even before it was released there was internal wrangling as to how the final record should sound. The record company EMI wanted to do a quadraphonic mix but the band objected. In the end the EMI hired Alan Parsons then a humble engineer to carry out the mix without the permission of the band. The band retaliated by not attending the launch of the record at the London Planetarium and cardboard cutouts of the band members were displayed instead.
The band had written and toured the album before recording it under the name 'Eclipse', and this allowed a more polished product to finally be brought back to the studio for Waters and Gilmour to argue over. The artistic conflict between Waters and Gilmour finally led the record company to bring in Chris Thomas (who went on to produce the Sex Pistols) to act as arbitrator between the two.
The most noticeable thing about DSOTM is the new musical direction the band takes. The hippy optimism had gone and with the downbeat lyrics of Waters a new darker more despairing tone had taken over.
'Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day…' 'Shorter of breath one day closer to death' (Time)
This cynical view of the world and close examination of the potential insanity in everyday life (possibly a reference to Barrett's mental illness) was finely matched by Gilmour's inspired instrumentals and gave the songs a cohesiveness and depth that had been lacking in earlier more ethereal work.
The record is now regarded as a prime example of the progressive rock concept album and while it is true that strong themes run through all the songs; the inevitable passing of time, aging, the pointlessness of materialism and mental instability, the album was not completely written as one single project. 'Us and Them' had been a single track and was going to be used as the part of the soundtrack to a TV documentary about student demo violence. The song was to accompany slowed down images of Policemen charging and beating protesters in the street. For some reason the track was never used and instead found its way on to the album where it matches the mood and tone of the rest of the songs. In contrast to many other concept albums many of the tracks can be heard independently of the rest Time, Brain Damage, Money and Us and Them are all self-contained musical compositions. Money was even released as a single in the US reaching no13 in the billboard charts
The record has a number of highly distinctive features the track 'On the Run' represents some early experimentation with the use of the VCS3 synthesizer. There is also extensive use of sound effects integrated in to the music, the clock chimes and alarms at the beginning of the track 'Time', the cash register on 'Money'. The songs are linked by the use of fragments of speech (recorded by asking questions of the recording studio doorman) in themselves unrelated to the tracks but in a surreal way perfectly binding together the disparate elements of the album.
The surreal aspects of the album, the subject matter and the audio effects all lend themselves to a drug induced appreciation of the music but in contrast to their earlier work this album is not simply for the LSD popping, pot smoking generation it reached a far wider audience and really put the concept album and progressive rock back into the mainstream (not all good considering the other Prog. Rock self-indulgent offerings that subsequently appeared by other bands such as Yes, Hawkwind and Emerson Lake and Palmer!)
If nothing else the release and success of DSOTM advanced the standards of studio record productions just like the Beatles' Revolver and Sgt Pepper had done in the 60's.
AFTERMATH
DSOTM is 30 years old and it that time it has sold over 25million copies making it one of the best selling albums ever. It doesn't seem to age, which is a testament to the great care and artistry which the band employed in recording it. With the advent of CD technology the albums sales increased once again (20% of total sales are post CD release), many people considering the album a benchmark to test early CD sound technology and quality by, and again in recent years with the re forming of Pink Floyd by Gilmour and Nick Mason the album has continued to sell up to the present day. It still sounds good today!
In retrospect I think that DSOTM represent the pinnacle of Pink Floyd's output. I believe that the 'rot' set in at this time. The following releases 'Wish You Were Here', 'Animals' are excellent records but gradually even in these Waters stranglehold on the groups artistic output was beginning to affect the music for the worse. This finally led to the group's musical demise which in my opinion became apparent with the release of 'The Wall'.
There are few records that can really claim to be indispensable to any record collection but DSOTM is definitely one of them.
SOME DETAILS
Tracks: 1.Speak To Me/Breathe 2. On The Run 3. Time 4. The Great Gig In The Sky 5. Money 6. Us And Them 7. Any Colour You Like 8. Brain Damage 9. Eclipse
Record Company: Harvest Records Cat Number: SHVL 804 Release Date: March 24, 1973 Original vinyl edition Included the blue pyramid poster, a six-panelled group shot poster and two separate Pink Floyd self-adhesive stickers.
A CD version was released in March 1983 and a CD re-mastered version was released in 1993 by Capitol records.
One of the most famous albums of all time,Dark Side Of The Moonsold 25 million copies in ... more
its first 25 years of release. It continues to be a favourite, with 20 per cent of those sales occurring in the period since it first came out on CD, a medium to w...
Postage & Packaging: £1.21 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Advantages: Put Prog Rock On The Map, Introduced The World To Sound Effects As Music Disadvantages: A Decent Set Of Headphones Is Needed For The Full Sensory Effect
Advantages: A musical watershed; Your CD player will biodegrade before these tracks become yesterday's noise... Disadvantages: Hazardous to listen to if you're prone to contemplating suicide...
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