50 reasons why 1973 music rocks, Part 3: The Dark Side of the Moon
#26: The era’s greatest rock album: The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd’s defining statement on greed, madness and death.
26. Pink Floyd — The Dark Side Of The Moon
The Dark Side Of The Moon first eclipsed my teenage view of 1993’s musical landscape on its 20th anniversary.
UK music paper Melody Maker commemorated the event via a front page cover and interview with Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour.
And their celebration expanded to a double-header with The Orb’s ambient house boffin Alex Paterson, as if passing the torch to the next generation.
The cover shot boasted their not especially flattering profile pictures, positioned either side of that iconic album cover, looking in on it all.
White light refracting from a prism into a rainbow laser beam against the darkness. A blinding flash of life amid a vast ocean of dead space.
Right there and then I knew I had to get this album, no matter how warm their words and tributes, which I glazed over and cannot now remember.
So I zoomed straight from the newsagent’s to the record shop, blasting off from a humdrum launchpad towards lunacy and hidden mysteries.
As soon as I got home, I rocketed up the stairs to my room and plugged in.
To music quite unlike anything I’ve heard before now, back in March 1993.
Ten soundscapes, some lacking lyrics yet conveying intense emotion, of fear, insanity and greed in the shadow of death.
A sinister intro speaks to me at once. A heartbeat fading in, dislocated speech and laughter heightening a feeling of madness amid metallic clinks, disorienting whirrs and banshee wails.
Tension ebbs majestically on Breathe’s smooth landing, where every single beat and note fall in exactly the right place.
Slide guitar and organ flourishes serve as an exquisite cushion for lyrics that conclude with a chilling bleakness:
“Balanced on the biggest wave, you race towards an early grave.”
Terror of an untimely death keeps me off balance and feeling On The Run, claustrophobic, like trying to escape from a darkened hall of mirrors.
Yet just as I think I’ll stay forever trapped in reflections of frightened mortality, an explosion of alarming clocks jolts me free.
Into a cavernous space of portentous echoes, setting up the earthy groove of Time, accepting the inexorable passage of years with a resigned shrug.
“Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say.”
Tapping into our deepest fears of dying while feeling we haven’t accomplished as much as we might.
But if we pass on to a place that sounds like The Great Gig In The Sky, then I’ll take that any day.
Richard Wright’s piano, rich in pathos, assures us even as a disembodied voice dispels fear of death in a disarmingly stoic manner.
And only the wordless wails of Clare Torry could express something so ineffable, imbuing it with more meaning than poetry ever could.
From these celestial heights we return to more earthbound distractions.
Money, ringing with its 7/4 cash register and coins sound-effects loop intro, rails against selfish greed. The sax solo’s fruity filth somehow captures the mood along with that doom-laden riff descending in an avaricious spiral.
Divisive themes continue on Us & Them, a song underpinned with an unusual chord progression on the organ, blending sadness with ambiguity.
Restrained verses and smooth sax lay a bed for grim lyrics about war, society and poverty, preserving the undercurrent of tension before the eruption of huge choruses steeped in anguish.
Now a segue into Any Colour You Like feels most welcome. This palette cleanser of an instrumental drifts along with synth loops and astringent bursts of phase-shifted guitar, ahead of an ending that echoes Breathe.
Allusions to the mental disintegration of former bandmate Syd Barrett surface on Brain Damage, along with “the dark side of the moon” as a metaphor for madness, bubbling away yet concealed from view.
And we complete our journey on Eclipse’s implacable waltz into darkness. As the moon can obscure the sun, so can bad feelings overshadow good, thwarting our will to thrive in the light before our heartbeat fades away.
It’s a rare record that makes you feel differently after you’ve first heard it.
Of course, I couldn’t grasp everything at once.
But I knew my perspective had widened somehow. To make sense of it all would require further explorations, deeper immersions.
In a space suspending time — our focus on those granular units for allocating everyday activities — while revealing what time really is to us. Our most precious resource, a unique gift that cannot be replenished.
No wonder this became the biggest record of 1973, of that entire decade, now accumulating 45 million sales across the world — and counting.
For The Dark Side Of The Moon distils aspects of the human condition into 43 minutes of sublime music and messages, time-bound yet timeless.
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