In the 5.1 SACD format, it is a revelation.
It's brilliant.
I heard all sorts of things that I hadn't before,
or probably heard 30 years ago and forgotten about.
There are things that you'll hear in this mix
which you don't hear in the original mix.
Now you're really hearing it for the first time on record,
like it was originally in concert.
The original Dark Side Of The Moon
that everyone knows and loves so well
is actually third-generation tape, most of it.
Most of the drums and bass
and rhythm guitars were all bounced into a two-track mix,
and this mix, we've gone back to the very original tapes,
synchronized them all together,
and everything is original takes, and a better sound quality.
It's being remixed to be close to the original
but to be in the quadraphonic SACD format.
Meddle was the moment where
we did sort of find where we were going.
Echoes in particular...
...was a good step forward for us.
After we made Meddle,
which included Echoes, which was a whole side,
so it was moving towards...
doing something that was a complete piece, that was longer,
we then toured quite a lot.
We did a number of rehearsals somewhere up in West Hampstead,
and started working on pieces...
...which turned out in the end to be Dark Side Of The Moon.
We started off doing this as a piece called Eclipse.
There were probably three or four songs that were being played
on the road and they were simply...
...designed as individual songs.
This is live in Brighton in 1972.
In the Eclipse shows it was a completely different piece
before we came to the synthesizer. This was another guitar jam.
We were specifically trying to get a piece
to replace the On The Run piece that we had.
The technology, yeah. We had the VCS3.
We'd just got a new version of it.
We'd had the old wooden version for a little while
but this was a new version that had one of the very first sequencers in it.
That was the big innovation - the Synthi A had a sequencer,
which was the first sequencer I'd ever seen.
If you press this record button and do a little sequence...
and you take something like that, not quite in time,
and then speed it up,
then basically that's what you got.
Funnily enough, as is recorded for posterity
in Adrian Maben's film, Live At Pompeii,
he happened to be in the studio
when I was working on that.
Of course Rog came out to put his oar in and said that
the 8-note sequence which I'd put in,
which is not that one,
wasn't quite right, and he wanted to do a different one,
which he then did,
and irritatingly of course it was better.
And look, you can do this as well and make noises over the top of it.
So between us, that's how that piece germinated.
That loop had a kind of feeling of urgency about it,
which then, with the footsteps and the airport announcements
and Roger "The Hat", who is the roadie who laughs at the end of it,
it seemed to make sense.
All the explosions and whooshing noises
On Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here
are all generated on one of these machines.
The album is a lot about the stress of touring.
I think that's what inspired Roger to write the lyrics.
It's about travel and about fear of death through flying really.
Which I suffered from quite a lot early on in our career.
I think most people who fly as much as we did
go through cycles where you get scared of it
and then you reconcile yourself to it.
By this time we were on the road, we were recording,
we were just 18 hours a day just at it.
And that pressure...
was obviously affecting us all and affecting Roger quite deeply.
The big move forward on Dark Side Of The Moon,
was Roger's coming of age lyrically.
And having the ideas and the intelligence to...
...take a subject and examine it in all its parts,
in all those different songs.
You know the pressures of life on young pop people!
The pressures of life, the worries,
travel, mortality, money and so on.
It has some kind of universal appeal
in that it confronts a number of major psychological and emotional concerns.
In 1972, you know, we were...
all turning into adults, really, I mean gradually.
All of us at different rates.
And we were all changing.
I was 29 years old before I suddenly realized
that this was life, and it was happening,
and this was not a preparation for something.
I know the song talks about "kicking around on a piece of ground" and all of that,
but just before Dark Side Of The Moon,
it must have been at around the same time I suddenly realized
that this was not a rehearsal,
that this was life happening now, and one should grasp the nettle.
The Great Gig In The Sky is obviously about death
and it was kind of a play on the fact that we were doing gigs.
It was possibly even just a working title that stuck.
I'm very proud of this piece,
as a musician and the way the chord structure works.
It starts off in B minor and somehow,
I managed to go through this whole sequence,
and get to B flat.
It's a very weird change but it actually works, it actually flows.
And I thank Clare Torry for that magic day when she put the voice on.
I remember us all sitting and saying, "This is incredible,"
what's happening out there, what she did.
I was extremely excited in hearing this incredible voice.
Even today, I just can't believe the effect it has on me
and I guess everyone else.
I made up the rhythm tape
in a shed at the bottom of the garden.
My wife then was a potter,
and she had a pottery studio at the bottom of the garden,
and I had a little music studio next to it,
and she had a big metal mixing bowl for mixing up clay,
and so...
I went, "Oh, I know how to make the rhythm for this,"
and I had a Revox A77.
I only had two-track machines at the time at home.
And so I got a microphone out and put it by the mixing bowl
and threw a handful of coins into it. That's one noise.
Then tore some paper up, there's another one.
And searched around for a sound of a cash register or something.
It's in 7/8, OK, so I cut up seven pieces of tape
with those sound effects exactly the same length
and spliced them together and stuck it in the Revox
going round a mic stand to hold it like that
and press the button and that was it.
The album was definitely helped in quite a big way
by Money being a single, and Money was really the obvious choice.
While we were on tour the record was going up the Billboard chart like that.
And it eventually hit number one.
We were touring. We went on tour and there was a big, big buzz going on.
Our line of progress in America,
we were moving up and selling out quite good, large places.
Selling a lot of tickets.
The workload shot up, the tours shot up.
I went on to write Wish You Were Here,
so "Come in here, dear boy, have a cigar.
"You're gonna go far." It was all that.
By the way, which one's Pink?
The voices all over the record...
I wrote a number of questions on a set of cards,
on a set of white cards like that
and then we set up a microphone in Studio 3 at Abbey Road,
and the cards were just sitting there on a music stand,
and there were questions like, "When was the last time you were violent?"
And then, "Were you in the right?"
And I got everybody that I could think of... Henry McCullough, yeah.
Henry and his wife had had a terrible fight the night before,
and Henry said, "Were you in the right?"
and that was Henry, says, "I don't know, I was very drunk at the time."
I think it was also a dream fulfilled.
And if we'd been brave enough, we would probably have gone,
"Well, that's it lads, we've cracked it. Goodbye, it's been very nice."
And we could have all gone off.
And I'm glad we didn't, because out of all the enmities and anxieties
that were left behind
in the rubble of the explosion of that enormous success, came...
all kinds of wounded creatures that had their own story to tell.
I've always had a problem with Us And Them mix.
Although I love the song, I didn't quite like the way it was done.
But now, for me it sounds wonderful.
I think that's true for Dave and I think it's true for Roger actually.
I think about Us And Them...
I thought about it recently because I listened to the record because of this 5.1 mix.
I went to a studio with James in New York and listened to the whole thing.
I must say I think the mix he's done is terrific.
I hadn't sat down and listened to the piece from start to finish,
I wouldn't think, for 20 years.
It was fascinating to do that and to see how well it still holds together.
Us And Them probably stands the test of time
as well if not better than any of the other songs on the record.
You know, "With, without. And who'll deny that's what the fighting's all about?"
It's strange, 30 years later, to be...
seeing us about to embark on this punitive adventure in Iraq.
I find it hard to believe that it's about anything other than...
the oil.
It was the mix of things.
And one has to give credit to people like Storm as well.
The package was terrific.
The starting point, for Dark Side Of The Moon, was about their live show.
The style of it was related to Rick, who said...
Let's go for something very graphic
and very simple.
Storm, generally when he's presenting any ideas to us,
presents a whole bunch of stuff.
I think they produced about ten sleeves.
They were put round a room,
I think it must have been part of Abbey Road,
some storeroom or something.
The sleeve is so wonderful, for whatever reason.
Nobody even looked at any of the others.
It was just, "Yeah, yeah, that one."
That one... That one...
All of us absolutely went, "Brilliant, terrific, love it."
I was trying to make them stay in the room,
to persuade them, "Can you please consider this one,
"I've really spent a long time getting it together."
"No, no, no. That one."
It was sort of unanimous, just obvious.
Nearly anyone who wanted an album cover
without wanting themselves to be on it,
would have chosen that if they'd seen it, for almost any subject,
but it had seemed particularly appropriate for this one.
The triangle is the sign for ambition, so you've got a symbol.
And I think that that tied in with some lyrics that Roger was writing,
and this in itself tied in with pyramids,
and pyramids seemed to be really good symbols for madness and greed.
I think lots of people, if they see the pyramid now,
they will think Dark Side Of The Moon.
And Rog had a good idea for the inside, the heartbeat.
Everybody made gatefolds then if they thought a record was gonna be big.
So it's gonna be a gatefold and it's gonna have the lyrics on it.
And I suddenly realized that the spectrum ended there and there.
And you could run it across the first page and do that.
He's doing new artwork,
but using the same principle of the pyramid and the prism.
The visual of Dark Side is a piece of graphics. Very simple.
Easy to do.
And then when I reworked it in 1993
I took a photograph, so I made it photographic,
which I really liked. And it was dead real, very straightforward
and relatively easy.
So I was thinking, "How can I take this light game any further?"
I suggested to the band that we made a stained-glass window.
I was trying to represent the fullness, the purity, the clarity,
or the, what's the word I want... the distinctiveness of 5.1.
So when you do surround sound, good 5.1,
it is actually, pretty powerful,
so this is really refined sound, OK?
So I was trying to really refine the light quality.
So a stained-glass window seemed to be a really good idea
'cause it was about how light passes through
not only the prism but the ground upon which it sits, namely the glass.
So I kind of think it's pretty good
and I think it's got some interesting...
I don't know... I hope the band think this too... it's got some interesting...
...sort of ironic religious overtones.
I love Dark Side Of The Moon.
I will say that now, I think it's a brilliant mix, and brilliant songs.
I just love it.
Lots of magic happened when we made this album.
I think we were all motivated,
we were working at Abbey Road which was a really nice place to work.
We were such close friends, you know.
I can remember the moment of sitting down at Abbey Road
and listening to it. It was in control room number 3,
where we'd done a lot of that album...
and we'd been slaving over that mixing desk for weeks doing this mix,
sticking all this stuff together.
And that day, when you actually all sit back,
and listen to it from beginning to end,
it was very exciting.
You've got this piece of tape,
you know, on a couple of reels, 45-odd minutes long.
There were loads of bits of white editing tape
flashing through the thing as it goes round, and...
There is a day when you actually have finished and you sit down,
and you turn the speakers up to... pretty nice and loud,
and you listen to the whole thing through.
That is moment that is really magical.
The original Dark Side Of The Moon that everyone knows and loves so well
is actually third-generation tape, most of it.
And this mix... We've gone back to the very original tapes,
synchronized them all together
and everything is original takes of everything.
There are things that were really lost,
either because they were buried or because they'd got actually softened up
by endless... particularly, from my point of view, listening to drums.
The drums are much crisper.
There are things that you'll hear in this mix which you don't hear in the original mix,
which is actually quite exciting.
It's brilliant. I heard all sorts of things that I hadn't heard,
really haven't heard before, or probably heard 30 years ago
and forgotten about.
I've been listening to this Dark Side Of The Moon obviously quite a bit,
listening to the mixes of it in the 5.1 SACD format,
and...
it is a revelation.
I had forgotten that in...
Brain Damage,
there's some tubular bells in the background.
And in 5.1 they kind of... They're not loud, but you just are aware of them.
It was designed to be in that format.
All of the sound effects originally were in quadraphonic sound,
'cause we took a quadraphonic system wherever we went,
so all the footsteps going round the hall
and all that kind of stuff, we'd been doing for years.
Quadraphonic tapes.
We had quadraphonic pan pots for the keyboards,
for Rick to zoom his keyboards around a huge room.
Now you're really hearing it for the first time on record
like it was originally in concert.