Classic Albums : PINK FLOYD - The Dark Side Of The Moon DVD
"Dark Side Of The Moon" was an expression of
political, philosophical, humanitarian empathy
that was desperate to get out.
Dark Side, I think... I felt like the whole band were working together.
It was a very creative time. We were very open as well...
...I think because we still had a common goal
which was to become rich and famous.
The ideas that Roger was exploring
apply to every new generation.
They still have very much the same relevance as they had.
I think one of the successes of Dark Side is the fact
that actually it's very rich: there's a... there are a lot of songs,
a lot of ideas all compressed onto the one record.
I can clearly remember that moment
of sitting and listening to the whole mix all the way through...
and thinking: my God, we've really... done something fantastic here...
I think it has the all-time record,
constantly on the charts for nearly 750 weeks, about 14 years.
It was a huge album,
and huge not just in terms of its sales, but in terms of its influence.
This was where underground music,
progressive rock, whatever, really went mainstream.
It was a record that had lots of traditional pop values,
you could sing along to these songs, but
it also was a kind of thing that took you places
if you wanted to listen to it in a darkened room.
It may very will be the ultimate concept record,
because the concept is there, the songs are there,
the spaces and the music are there,
but it doesn't take away any of the imagination.
After Syd went crazy in '68 and Dave joined
we were, all of us, searching, fumbling around,
looking for... "what are we gonna do now?",
because here was the guy who starts producing all these songs,
and was the sort of heartbeats of the band.
Syd casts a long and large shadow of events.
I think that the band was very impressive to keep going,
actually, after loss of their main creative drive,
I mean it's not something you choose, isn't it,
I mean you wouldn't sit around say, ok, let's get rid of our songwriter.
After Syd had gone the music became more kind of soundscapes than songs.
You have to work to your strengths,
and it was a very good thing that we could not write singles,
we might not have done some of the interesting work that we did.
Once Syd was out of the picture, the Floyd just went glacial;
they just let it all spread out.
When I saw the Floyd for the first time it was the summer of '68,
it was actually their first American tour with David Gilmour,
and they were just extraordinary, you know, it was
"Let There Be More Light", "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun",
it was total space rock.
I started fully out of love with
that... some of that psychedelic noodling stuff.
We were still then playing a lot of instrumental work, if you like,
and that would be half the album.
But we were always searching for a direction.
Fighting a little bit between
wanting to push boundaries back a little bit
and move forward in an experimental way,
but also to retain melody.
When you get to "Meddle", quite clearly "Echoes"
shows the direction that we were moving in.
The rest of "Meddle" as I recall was songs,
and so, you know, the flip side was a 20-minute piece
a) and so was a construct, and
b) it was the beginning of all the writing about other people.
# Strangers passing in the street,
# by chance two separate glances meet,
# and I am you and what I see is me
It was the beginning of empathy, if you like, you know,
"two strangers passing in the street, by chance two passing glances meet,
and I am you and what I see is me"
is a sort of thread that has gone through everything for me ever since then...
... and had a big eruption in Dark Side.
You have to remember the context of the time.
This was the height of glam rock: there was,
you know, Marc Bolan, and T.Rex, and David Bowie with
Ziggy Stardust peddling there, sort of pop fantasies,
and the Floyd came along with an album that was about these weighty themes.
He created a story, he created a... basically a theater piece
about what it was like to live in the modern world.
All four of us were there, and there was a discussion about
putting the album together and making it into this "themed",
this... I mean what is now called a "concept", album.
There are a number of things that impinge upon an individual
that colour his view of existence.
There are pressures that are capable of pushing you one direction or another,
and these are some of them... and... whether they push you towards
insanity, death, empathy, greed, whatever
there's something about the Newtonian view of that physics
that might be interesting and maybe there could be...
this is what this record is about...
It was one of those really good moments
that most bands do experience where everyone is on sight,
and everyone likes the idea, and there's some sort of agreement as to
more or less who's going to do what.
Dark Side Of The Moon started in a rehearsal room in Bermondsey
I think, that belongs... a warehouse that belongs to The Rolling Stones
where we did some... sort of jammy writing, whatever you want to call it.
I'm not sure how much writing happened there.
You know, let's play in E minor or A for an hour or two,
oh that sounds all right, that will take up 5 minutes.
A lot of the musical ideas just came up
just to ... of jamming away in these rehearsal rooms...
obviously the lyrics Roger brought in...
...because he had things to say.
And it was the first time he wrote all the lyrics...
Roger was our sort of pushing, driving force...
The way "Dark Side Of The Moon" articulates some sense of
early adult's disenchantment is absolutely timeless...
I listened to it again recently, and it always amazes me
that I got away with it really, 'cause it was a sort of
lower-sixth, and... you know... uhm...
"breathe, breathe in the air, don't be afraid to care".
In fact, I think, within the context of the music
and within the context of the piece as a whole,
people are prepared to accept that simple exhortation,
to be prepared to stand your ground and
attempt to live your life in an authentic way.
I came from jazz basically... I love it...
That's my favorite... that's my inspiration.
And the interesting thing about this song is, we're talking about jazz,
is a certain chord... which is...
that is totally down to a chord I had heard on actually
Miles Davis album "Kind of Blue",
which is a... that chord!.. that chord I just loved!
And when we're doing "Breathe",
we got to G - I got to G - and how'd you get to E again?
Well, again, normally you go...
but... uhm... I remember this chord and I remember
working it out at home listening to the record, and I just thought...
Dave was brilliant at double tracking vocals.
And we could do it with machines, but there's a difference.
There's also a harmony part...
That's it on its own...
Back to the band!
There's two organ parts which come in now...
They had been performing this work known as "Eclipse"
for a few months I think, before actually even coming in to Abbey Road
to start the first recordings...
...which meant that the performances were pretty tight and not so hard to get.
When you're working in a band and you're performing something
...willy-nilly, it develops and changes...
In pre-bootlegging days this of course was
a far more effective and better way of doing things,
because you went into the studio rehearsed up.
We'd been playing it live that way for quite some time,
as a sort of guitar jam sort of a piece.
I think we were none of us that happy with it as a piece,
and when we also had this synthesizer...
...this Synth EA which had a little built-in keyboard
and had a sequencer... it was the first sequencer I think...
...I just plugged this up and started playing one sequence on it,
and Roger immediately pricked up his ears and thought that sounded good,
and came out, and we started mucking with it together...
and he put in a new sequence of notes, and it all developed out of that...
A series of notes played in slowly...
triggering a noise generator and oscillators,
and then just speed it up, you know...
There you've got it basically...
And that, of course, immediately sounded
much more exciting and near what we were currently doing.
They were the first band to really go out
and try to sort of make music off the future.
We were doing a lot of things with tape loops
and curious sounds and sound effects...
There wasn't something in 1972 when they put that album together.
But that's basically what they were doing.
They were... in a sense they were giving you a preview
of the sound pictures of the future.
You know, there are some very very clever
and highly listenable pieces of sonic experimentation.
So this is the main synthesizer, it has the high-hat element built-in.
Then we treat it with filters and with
other oscillators to give it that sort of vibrato noise.
And we're bringing this guitar, it's a backwards guitar with echoes...,
it's been played with a mike stand leg, just sliding up...
That was left-to-right across the stereo. And there's these synthesizers,
Morph synth's, which are creating sort of futuristic vehicle noises,
which you take the pitch down a little bit, and pan it at the same time...
That creates an artificial Doppler sound,
what looks like ambulance is whizzing past you...
bringing some footsteps... and some heartbeats for extra tension...
As you see there's an awful lot going on in this track...
This section in particular,
"The Travel" section, the "On The Run" section,
I think was pretty complicated.
A lot of hands on deck...
You'd always want to put more things on than you had tracks for...
So tracks would very suddenly change from one thing to a different thing.
All of us were on the desk,
with our fingers on the faders...
But that's the way it was, because
we didn't have automation in those days...
A mix in those days was a performance,
every bit as much as doing a gig.
It's one thing actually that
we've kind of lost in the modern age.
Very very well-engineered,
it was also very very carefully constructed.
So there was no sort of... you know, everything was well-recorded.
Dark Side was really the first
proper engineering job I'd been given with the Floyd.
So I was pretty much put into the deep end.
He was very good musically as well.
He also came up with a couple of good ideas.
I was commissioned to record some clocks for sound effects,
record for the very early days of quadrophony.
And when we were doing "Time"
he suggested we might like to have these clocks.
My memory of it is just this room full of tapes rolling around,
because it was without any sort of computer help,
everything had to be done manually.
Getting all the clocks to chime at the right time - that was a process
of just finding a particular moment on the multi-track tape
where all the chiming would happen, and then
back-timing the quarter-inch originals
which contained each of the clocks...
And then the very critical thing of tapes starting at a specific moment,
which was all done with hand signs and stop-watches.
We got the girls making their first appearance here...
That's un-processed...
And we actually put this effect called a frequency translation on,
which made them sound like this...
Here is the solo...
This one had probably taken some shape live
before we ever got to do it,
but usually in the studio on this sort of thing
you just have a player over it and see what comes,
and it's usually and mostly the first take that's the best one,
and you find yourself repeating yourself thereafter.
The 1970s was the era of the guitar.
And he had that sort of very "bluesy" sound
but then also he had that other sound,
that sort of spacey, very crystalline, almost ethereal quality.
I suddenly realized then that year that life was already happening.
I think it's 'cause my mother was so obsessed with education
and the idea that childhood and adolescence and...
well, everything was about preparing for a life that was going to start later.
And I suddenly realized that life wasn't going to start later,
that it is... you know, it starts at dot and it happens all the time, and then...
at any point you can grasp the reins and start guiding your own destiny.
And that was a big revelation to me, I mean, it came as quite a shock.
One of the greatest lines I think on "Dark Side Of The Moon"
is Roger's line about "hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way",
which is a sort of line you could imagine - I don't know -
Evelyn Waugh or Somerset Maugham or someone writing
as an observation on the English character.
And I think that character does permeate the whole record,
and indeed the whole of Pink Floyd's career.
It expresses my feelings about things very simply.
And I think that musically...
I think that the music is to some extent
driven by that emotional commitment.
The band basically wanted another 4 or 5 minutes of music,
and we thought it could be an instrumental.
I think I just - as I always have done - is I sat at the piano...
and I... and those first two chords came.
"Us And Them" and "The Great Gig In The Sky",
you know, are fabulous chord sequences,
are really truly wonderful pieces of music.
I've no idea whose idea it was to get somebody as a female singer and...
but Alan Parsons knew Clare Torry and had been working with her,
and said why don't you try her...
She just went in there and improvised over it.
Yeah, that was amazing, that was fantastic!
But that was done while we were mixing.
We knew what we wanted, not exactly musically,
but we knew that we wanted someone to just
improvise over this piece. So we directed her,
we said, well, "think about death, think about horror,
think whatever, and just go and sing".
And my memory is, that she went out in the studio
and did it very very quickly, and then came back in and said:
"I'm really sorry about this", very embarrassed.
And we in fact were sitting in the studio saying: "This is wonderful".
And of course it's absolutely brilliant,
both Rick's piano and organ work,
and Clare's singing is just incredibly moving.
At the very end of this, I remember,
we increased the echo slowly.
We always wanted to kind of
not be on our covers ourselves, not have pictures.
It is probably the most recognizable album cover of all time.
It's something that you can sit and look at
for a long time without getting fed up with it.
The prism is the logo that absolutely defines the record.
Dark Side Of The Moon prism design comes from 3 basic ingredients,
one of which is the light show
that the band put on tour trying to represent that, also
one of the themes of the lyrics which was, I think,
about ambition and greed; and the third
it was an answer to Rick Wright
who said that he wanted something...
...simple and bold, and dramatic...
The presentation, as we call it,
of the design to the band was a fairly brief affair.
He just brought in 3 or 4 ideas...
I do remember instantly seeing the pyramid...
They came in and they looked around,
and they went: "mmm, that one!"
Everyone immediately went:
"Terrific! Great! Let's do that".
As epitomized by their ability to choose it so quickly and so easily,
I just think it is somehow very fitting,
I mean, it's hard to imagine it without it, isn't it really?
The story in America had been a disaster that
really we hadn't sold records. And like all good artists
the first thing you do is blame the record company.
But in this particular case, I think we might get a few more people to agree
that they hadn't performed properly.
And so there was... they brought in a man called Bhaskar Menon,
who was absolutely terrific.
And he decided he was going to make this work
and he was going to make the American company
sell this record. And he did!
We devised a marketing campaign for this, which was
far more extensive than anything that the company had ever done.
It was an album that came after virtually a year of touring.
There was a tremendous amount of credible press.
We had, by this time, without a single, got this album tremendous sales,
close to about a million albums by that stage,
which was quite remarkable.
And I knew that the time would come when
we would have to get on to the next stage,
to get to the next category or level of audience.
We really would need some single-like material.
They always say, you know, you need a hit single
and we had a sort of hit single with Money.
You know, I would have remembered
writing Money as a sort of very "bluesy" thing.
I can't sing it up in that register of that...
And there's a very kind of transatlantic,
bluesy sort of twang to it all. Listening to the original demo,
it's not like that at all, it's all very kind of prissy and very English.
The one thing about Money that
I think people forget is that it's got the weirdest...
it's one of the biggest hits with the weirdest time signature.
Very unusual 7/8 time. Good riff.
I'd played in a band with Dick when we were
sort of teenagers in Cambridge.
Dick was...
was sort of a part of the Cambridge mafia.
I didn't know any other sax players and probably
too nervous to ask anyone that we'd heard of.
He was terrific.
Well, Dick did his sax solo in the 7/8 time.
And then we sort of sat and worked out
a different sequence for the guitar solo,
probably to make my life easier
so I didn't have to think about the timing.
I love the fact that it does change.
Lots of things happen on Dark Side that for me are kind of magical...
without us intentionally making them happen.
It just happened. And I think that's one of the great things
about Money is that it does change time signatures.
And that's the thing: he goes back into the 4/4
and all of a sudden - man, it's rock city!
Money is an amazing single because it's about
the very thing that it became - it's about success.
Something certainly did the trick and it
moved us up into a super league, I suppose you might say,
which brought with it some great joy, some pride and some... problems.
Of course it changed our life and we were now
a big rock-n-roll band playing in stadiums.
You don't know what you're in it for anymore.
You know, you're in it to achieve massive success and
get rich and famous and all these other things that go along with it.
And when they're all suddenly done
you're going... mhm huh well... why... what next?
It's not to say we didn't do some good work,
but the good work we did was actually all about
a lot of the negative aspects of what went on after we'd achieved...
...the goal.
I mean that obviously informed what
turned out to be the next album quiet deeply
"Wish You Were Here" - because we weren't,
most of us most of the time.
They were a platinum monster
and it's not a lot of fun.
Sort of amazing to me now that we had that piece of music
in 1969 when we recorded the music for Zabriskie Point.
And throughout, I guess, Atom Heart Mother,
the "Obscured By Clouds" album, the "Meddle" album
we didn't dig it out and use it, such a lovely piece of music.
Antonioni didn't really know what he wanted.
He needed desperately to have control.
So even if you did the right thing and it was perfect
he couldn't bear to accept it because there wasn't a choice.
All he really wanted was
"Careful With That Axe, Eugene."
I think we were all getting a bit frustrated of "what does he want?".
I think I was just sitting in the studio and
I was seeing the piano and I happened
to have that Violent Sequence up
and I was watching it and perhaps I felt a bit tired or whatever,
I just started the chord sequence.
At the time I think everyone thought: this is really good.
When we thought we'd really got something brilliant for his movie,
Antonioni would say...
"It's beautiful, but is too sad", you know,
"It makes me think of church".
It was obviously waiting to be reborn in this album.
The lyrics are so direct and linear:
those fundamental issues of whether or not
the human race is capable of being humane.
What's good about the writing of this song, from my point of view,
is the leaving of the gaps for the repeat echo.
It's kind of strange hearing it without the echoes in it.
I find myself with instrumentalists over the years working with people
having very-very often as a producer in my capacity
for producing records having to say to people:
now leave the whole, now just play for half a bar
and then leave a bar and a half free, empty.
And that's kind of what that song is, that's the way it works.
The simplicity of Floyd is really almost hard to talk about
because it is so simple. Nick Mason playing very slowly, you know,
exact, without a lot of overly freely percussion flourishes.
Richard's touch on piano, on organ - very gentle,
very soft, but also exact, and just hitting the notes right.
It was always about leaving space.
I think, Dave and Rick -
their harmony vocals on it are really very affecting.
Funny enough, they have similar voices,
both their voices are a big factor in Dark Side Of The Moon
the way they blend.
That's Dave and Rick together.
Then Rick does another part below that, which you can hear now.
And then the girls are also joining in.
"I mean, they're not gonna kill ya,
so if you give 'em a quick short sharp shock
they don't do it again. Dig it? I mean he got off lightly,
'cos I could've given him a thrashing. I only hit him once!
It was only a difference of right and wrong, ain't it?
I mean good manners don't cost nothing, do they, eh?"
It seemed to me really important... I can't...
I've no idea why to have voices on this thing.
And so the only thing that was clever about it at all
was how to do it, so not to have an interview.
Devised probably in the canteen
and done later that evening.
So I wrote a bunch of cards
with the questions on them.
I think what the voices did on the record was
they actually brought out the dark side,
they were in a way the dark side of the record.
First, we used a number of people
who worked in the studio with us,
so we used 3 or 4 of our road crew.
I ain't frightened of dying at all,
'cause when you gotta go - you gotta go
Irish doorman Gerry:
"Why should I be frightened of dying?
There's no reason for it, you gotta go some time".
"Wings" were recording in here at the same time
so we actually used Paul and Linda, Henry McCullough:
"I don't know, I was really drunk at the time".
It's the people who are not used to being interviewed,
who come up with the stuff.
I think they started off with
"what's your favorite color?", and "your favorite food?"
And when none of which was just to get people there...
and then they went into "when was the last time you were violent?"
This was the good bit: "when was the last time you were violent?"
and then you'd take... you'd answer it and take the next card,
the next card said: "were you in the right?"
"Yeah, heh heh, I was in the right"
"Yes, absolutely in the right!"
"I certainly was in the right!"
"Yeah, I was definitely in the right,
that geezer was cruising for a bruising"
And this remarkable roadie called Roger the Hat
"If I participate in this fucking effort, I'm gonna get
my gold disc at the end of it, imagine that, ahhh!"
They were trying to track him down to do the cards.
By the time they got hold of him, somebody...
the cards had gone missing, I don't know where they'd gone.
So Roger Waters actually ended up doing it...
he actually did do that one as an interview.
So, do you ever think you're going mad, Roger?
And, I once reached a state in my life where I was completely convinced
that I had gone over the brinkle, but that�s why I care to call it...
It was obviously a bit to do with Syd, and
I think it's about defending the notion of being different.
The fundamental question that's facing us all is
whether or not we're capable of dealing
with the whole question of "Us and Them"
What he was feeling as an individual
mirrored almost exactly what a lot of other people
were feeling at the time of their own lives.
There's no question in my mind that
Dark Side of the Moon was one of the most important
artistic statements of the last fifty years probably.
It touched very many people all over the world
in ways that could not simply be put down to the fact that:
"oh, the nice tunes" and "oh, I like that bit at the end"
I mean, this was a complete experience.
It was actually a really grim time,
and he wrote a very grim record but did it with music
that was extremely uplifting and compelling and bewitching
I think it was a very, very happy and creative
and enjoyable time when we made this album.
It was probably the most focused moment in our career
in terms of all of us working together as a band.
I'd love to have been a person who could sit back with his headphones on,
listen to that the whole way through for the first time,
I mean I had never had this experience,
but it would've been nice.
The thing that's often missed is the fact
that basically people respond to it
on an emotional level, and that's what makes great records.
It is driven by emotion,
there's nothing plastic about it, you know,
there is nothing contrived about it,
and, I think that's what has given it its...
or maybe one of the things that's given it its longevity.
But that's not to say that potential for the sun to shine does not exist, you know,
walk down the path towards the light
rather than walking to the darkness.
There is no dark side on the moon really,
matter of fact it's all dark...
Text written down by YPAL Subtitled by TFR
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Corrected by Fry