Dark Side of the Moon was an expression of political...
philosophical, humanitarian empathy that was desperate to get out.
I think it felt like the whole band were working together.
It was a very creative time. We were all 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 relevancies they had.
- Can you run back and drop in a bit? - Yeah, just turn it down a bit.
One of the successes of Dark Side is that it is very rich.
There are a lot of songs, a lot of ideas...
all compressed onto the one record.
I can clearly remember...
that moment of listening to the whole mix...
and thinking, "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, just not 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...
took you places if you wanted to listen to it in a darkened room.
It may be the ultimate concept record because the concept is there...
the songs are there, the spaces in the music are there...
but it doesn't take away any of the imagination.
After Syd went crazy...
in '68 and Davejoined, we were all of us...
searching...
Iooking for where do we go now because...
here was the guy who starts producing all these songs...
and was the sort of heartbeat of the band.
Syd cast a long and large shadow over events.
The band were very impressive to keep going...
after a loss of their main creative drive.
You wouldn't choose that, "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's a very good thing that we couldn't 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.
I saw the Floyd for the first time in the summer of'68.
It was the first American tour with David Gilmour...
and they were just extraordinary.
It was Let There Be More Light, Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.
It was total space rock.
I started...
falling out of love with that...
some of that psychedelic noodling stuff.
We were still then playing a lot of instrumental work...
and that would be half of the album.
But we were always searching for a direction.
Fighting a lit 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 are moving in.
The rest of Meddle as I recall was songs.
And so the flipside was a 20 minutes piece...
and so it was a construct and...
it was the beginning of all the writing about other people.
It was the beginning of empathy, if you like.
"Two strangers passing in the street By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you And what I see is me"
It's a thread that's gone through everything for me 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 Mark Bolan in T Rex and David Bowie with Ziggy Stardust...
peddling their sort of pop fantasies...
and the Floyd came along with an album with these weighty themes.
He created a story, a theatre piece...
about what it was like to live in the modern world.
All of us were there and there was a discussion about...
putting the album together and making it into this themed...
what is now called a concept album.
There are a number of things that impinge upon an individual...
to the color his view of existence.
There are pressures capable of pushing you in 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 this is what this record is about.
It was one of those good moments that most bands do experience...
where everyone likes the idea...
and there's some agreement as to who is going to do what.
Dark Side started in a rehearsal room in Bermondsey...
a warehouse that belonged to the Rolling Stones...
where we did some...
sort ofjamming, writing, whatever you want to call it.
I'm not sure how much writing happened there.
"Let's play E minor and A for an hour or two...
and that sounds alright, that'll take up five minutes."
A lot of the musical ideas just came up...
just sort ofjamming away in these rehearsal rooms.
Roger brought in the lyrics.
Because he had things to say...
and it was the first time that he wrote all the lyrics.
Roger was our sort of pushing, driving force.
The way Dark Side articulates some sense...
of early adult disenchantment is absolutely timeless.
I listened to it again recently and it always amazes me...
that I got away with it, 'cos it's so sort of lower sixth...
"Breathe, breathe in the air Don't be afraid to care"
Within the context of the music and of the piece as a whole...
people are prepared to accept that simple exultation...
to be prepared to stand your ground...
and attempt to live your life in an authentic way.
I came from...
jazz basically and that's my favorite...
that's my inspiration...
and the interesting thing about this song...
there's a certain chord which is...
That is totally down to a chord...
I heard on Miles Davies album, Kind of Blue, which is...
That chord I just love...
and when we're doing Breathe...
I got to G and how do you get to E again?
Again normally you go...
But I remember listening to the record and I just thought...
Dave was brilliant at double tracking vocals.
You could do it with machines but there was a difference.
There's also a harmony part.
That's it on its own.
Back to the band...
There are two organ parts which come in now.
They had been performing this work known as Eclipse...
for a few months...
before even coming into Abbey Road to start the first recordings.
Which meant that the performances were pretty tight...
and not so hard to get.
When you are in a band and you're performing something willy-nilly...
it develops and changes.
In pre-bootlegging days...
this was a far more effective way of doing things...
because you went into the studio rehearsed up.
We had been playing it live that way for quite some time...
as a sort of guitarjam.
We were none of us that happy with it as a piece...
and when we also had this synthesizer.
The Synth EA which had a little built-in keyboard...
it was the first sequencer I think.
I just plugged this up and started playing one sequence on it...
and Roger thought that sounded good and...
we started mucking with it together and...
then he put in a new sequence of notes and it all...
- developed out of that. - A series of notes played...
slowly.
Triggering in a noise generator and oscillators...
and then just speed up.
There you've got it basically.
That sounded more exciting and newer than what we were doing.
They were the first band...
to really go out and try to make music of the future.
We were doing a lot of things with tape loops and sounds effects.
There wasn't sampling in 1972 when they put that album together...
but that's basically what they were doing. They were...
giving you a preview of the sound pictures of the future.
There are some very clever...
and highly listenable pieces of sonic experimentation.
So this is the mains synthesizer. It was the high element built in...
then we treat it with filters and with other oscillators...
to give it that sort of vibrato noise...
and we bring in this backwards guitar...
with echo stuff on it and it's being played with a mike stand leg...
and that whizzes left and right across the stereo.
Then there is these synthesizers...
which are creating futuristic vehicle noises which you...
take the pitch down a little bit and pan it at the same time...
and that creates an artificial Doppler sound...
a bit like ambulances whizzing past it, bring in some footsteps...
some heartbeats for extra tension.
As you see there is an awful lot going on there.
The Travel section, the On the Run section...
was pretty complicated, a lot of hands on deck.
You'd always want to put more things on that you had tracks for...
so tracks would very suddenly change from one thing to a different thing.
All of us are on the desk with our fingers on the faders.
But that's the way it was because we didn't have automation.
A mix in those days was a performance...
every bit as much as doing a gig.
It's one thing that we've lost in the modern age.
It was very well engineered and very carefully constructed.
Everything was well recorded.
Dark Side was the first proper engineering job...
that I had been given with the Floyd...
so I was pretty much put in at 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 a sound effects record...
for the very early days of quadraphonic.
And when we were doing Time...
he suggested we might like to add these clocks.
My memory of it isjust this room full of tapes rolling round 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, and that was a process of...
just finding a particular moment of the multi-track tape...
where all the chiming would happen and then back timing to there...
on the quarter inch originals which contained each of the clocks.
The very critical thing of tapes starting at specific moment...
which is all done with hand signs...
and stop watches.
We've got the...
girls making their first appearance here.
That's unprocessed.
And we put this effect called a frequency translator on...
there which made them sound like this.
Here's the solo.
This one had probably taken some shape live...
before we ever got to do it.
But usually in the studio...
you just go out and have a play over it and see what comes...
and it's mostly the first takes that are the best one...
and you find yourself repeating yourself thereafter.
The 1970s was the era of the guitar...
and he had that...
It's a bluesy sound but then also he had that other sound...
that sort of spacey, crystalline, almost ethereal quality.
I suddenly realized then that year...
that life was already happening.
I think it was because my mother was so obsessed with education...
and the idea that childhood and adolescence...
was about preparing for a life that was going to start later.
I realized that life wasn't going to start later...
that it starts at dot and it happens all the time...
and that at any point you can grasp the reins...
and start guiding your own destiny...
and that was a big revelation to me. It came as quite a shock.
One of the greatest lines is Roger's line about...
"Hanging on in quite desperation Is the English way"...
a sort of line that you could imagine Evelyn Waugh or Somerset Maugham...
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.
Home
Home again
I like to be here When I can
When I come home Cold and tired
It's good to warm my bones Beside the fire
Far away across the fields
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear The softly spoken magic spells
It expresses my feelings about things very simply...
and I think that...
musically...
the music is to some extend driven...
by that emotional commitment.
The band wanted another 4, 5 minutes of music...
and we thought it could be an instrumental.
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...
are fabulous chord sequences and wonderful pieces of music.
No idea whose idea it was to get a female singer in...
but Alan Parsons knew Clare Torry and had been working with her.
Shejust improvised over it...
and that was amazing. That was done while we were in mixing.
We knew what we wanted, not exactly musically...
but we knew that we wanted someone tojust...
improvise over this piece, so we directed her.
We said, "Think about death, about horror, whatever...
and just go and sing."
She went out of the studio and did it very quickly...
and then came back in and said, "I'm really sorry."
She started this, very embarrassed...
and we were in the studio saying, "This is wonderful."
It's absolutely brilliant.
Both Rick's...
piano and organ work and Clare's...
singing isjust incredible moving.
At the end of this we increased the echo slowly.
We always wanted to kind of...
not be on our covers ourselves, not have pictures.
It's probably the most recognizable album cover of all time.
It's something that you can look at for a long time...
without getting fed up with it.
The prism is the logo that defines the record.
Dark Side prism design comes from three basic ingredients...
one of which is the light show that the band put on...
so I was trying to represent that...
also one of the themes of the lyrics which is about ambition and greed...
and it was in answer to Rick Wright who wanted something...
Simple and bold and dramatic.
The presentation, as we call it, of the design to the band...
was a fairly brief affair.
Hejust brought in three or four ideas.
I do remember instantly seeing the pyramids.
They looked around and they went, "Humm, that one."
Everyone went, "Terrific. Let's do that."
As epitomized by their ability to choose it so quickly...
I just took it as somehow very fitting.
It's hard to imagine it without it, isn't it?
The story in America had been a sort of disaster...
that we hadn't sold records...
and the first thing you do is blame the record company.
But in this particular case we might get a few more people to agree...
that they hadn't performed properly...
and so they brought in a man called Bhaskar Menon...
and he decided that 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 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 which was quite remarkable...
and I knew we'd have get onto 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 need...
a hit single and we had a sort of hit single with Money.
I would have remembered...
writing Money as a sort of very bluesy...
thing. I can't sing it up in that register...
Money
Get away
Get a good job with more pay And your OK
Money
Get back
I'm alright, Jack Keep your hands off my stack
New car, caviar Four-star daydream think
I'll buy me a football team
There's a very kind of transatlantic bluesy sort of twang to it all.
The original demo it's not like that. It's all very kind of prissy...
and very English.
The one thing about Money that I think people forget...
is that it's one of the biggest hits with the weirdest time signature.
Very unusual, seven/eight time...
good riff.
Money
Get back
I'm alright, Jack Keep your hands off my stack
Money
It's a hit
Don't give me That do goody good bullshit
I'm in the hi-fidelity First class traveling set
And I think I need a Lear Jet
I had played in a band with Dick...
when we were sort of teenagers in Cambridge.
Dick was sort of part of the Cambridge mafia.
I didn't know any other sax player...
and probably too nervous to ask anyone who we had heard of.
He was terrific.
Dick did sax solo in the seven time...
and then we sort of sat and worked out...
a different sequence for the guitar solo...
so I didn't have to think about the timing.
I love the fact that it does change...
and lots of things happen in Dark Side for me, are kind of magical...
without us intentionally making them happen.
Itjust happened and one of the great things about Money...
is that it does change time signatures.
The thing is goes back into four/four and all of a sudden it's rock city.
Money is an amazing single. It's about the thing that it became...
it's about success.
Something did the trick and it moved us up into super league...
I suppose you might say...
which brought with it...
some greatjoy, some pride...
and some problems.
Of course it changed our life.
We were now a big rock band playing in stadiums.
You don't know what you are in it for any more.
You know you were in it to achieve massive success...
and get rich and famous and the things that go along with it...
and when they are all suddenly done, you are going...
"Why? What next?"
The good work that we did was all about...
a lot of negative aspects of what went on after we had achieved...
- the goal. - That obviously informed...
what's turned out to be the next album quite deeply...
Wish You Were Here...
'cos we weren't most of us most of the time.
They were a platinum monster and...
it's not a lot of fun.
It's 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 Atom Heart Mother...
Obscured by Clouds album, the Meddle album...
we didn't dig it out and use it. It's 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.
We were all getting a big frustrated at what does he want.
I was in the studio sitting at the piano...
and they have this violent sequence up and I was watching it...
and because I was tired, I just started the chord sequence.
At the time, everyone thought this is really good.
When we thought we had got something brilliant for his movie...
Antonioni would say...
"It's beautiful but it's too sad!
It makes me think of church."
It was 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 the song is...
the leaving of the gaps for the repeat echo.
It's kind of strange hearing it without the echoes.
I find myself over the years working with people...
having very often as a producer having to say to people...
"No, leave a hole...
just play for half a bar and then leave a bar and a half free, empty."
And that's what that song is, that's the way it works.
The simplicity of the Floyd is almost hard to talk about...
because it is so simple.
Nick Mason playing very slowly...
exact, without a lot of...
overly frilly percussion flourishes.
Richard's touch on piano and 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 very effecting.
Funnily enough they have very similar voices...
both their voices are a big factor in Dark Side in the way they blend.
That's Dave and Rick together.
And then Rick does another part below that...
and then the girls are alsojoining in.
They're not gonna kill ya. So if you give 'em a quick short...
sharp, shock, they won't do it again. Dig it?
I mean he get off lightly. I only hit him once!
It was only a difference of opinion.
I mean good manners don't cost nothing do they, eh?
It seemed to me really important that I can't...
I've no idea why it did to have voices on this thing.
The only thing clever about it was how to do it so not...
not to have an interview.
Devised probably in the canteen and...
done later that evening.
So I wrote out a bunch of cards with questions on them.
What the voices did on the record was they brought out the dark side.
They were in a way the dark side of the record.
We used a number of people who were in the studio with us...
so we used 3 or 4 of our road crew.
I ain't frightened of dying at all...
'cos when you've got to go, you've got to go.
The Irish door man here, Gerry.
Why should I be frightened of dying?
I see no reason for it. You've got to go sometime.
Wings were recording here at the same time...
so we actually used Paul and Linda, Henry McCullough.
I was really drunk at the time.
It's the people who are not used to being interviewed...
who come up with the stuff.
They started off with what is your favorite color...
food and none of which, it wasjust to get people.
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 answer it...
and then take the next card, and it said, were you in the right?
I was in the right.
Yes, I absolutely in the right.
I certainly was in the right.
Definitely. That geezer was cruising for a bruising.
And this remarkable roadie called Roger the Hat.
If I participate in this fucking effort...
I hope I'm going to get my gold disc at the end of it, imagine that?
They were trying to track him down through the cards...
and the cards had gone missing. I don't know where they had gone...
so Roger Waters did do that one as an interview.
Do you ever think that you are going mad, Roger?
I once reached a stage in my life where I was completely convinced...
that I had gone over the brink. That's what I cared to call it.
It was a bit to do with Syd and...
I think it's about...
defending the notion of being different.
The lunatic is on the grass
Remembering games
And daisy chains and laughs
Got to keep the loonies On the path
The lunatic is in the hall
The paper holds Their folded faces to the floor
And every day The paperboy brings more
And if the dam breaks open Many years too soon
And if there is no room Upon the hill
And if your head explodes With dark forebodings too
I'll see you On the dark side of the moon
The lunatic is in my head
You raise the blade
You make the change
You re-arrange me 'til I'm sane
The fundamental question which is facing us all is whether or not...
we are 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 in their own lives.
There is no question in my mind. The Dark Side...
was one of the most important artistic statements of the last 50 years.
It's touched very many people all over the world...
in ways that could not simply be put down, "They were nice tunes"...
and, "I like that bit at the end." This was a complete experience.
It was a really grim time.
He wrote a very grim record...
but did it with music that was extremely...
up-lifting, compelling and bewitching.
It was a very happy and creative and enjoyable time...
when we made this album.
It was the most focused moment in our career...
in terms of all of us working together as a band.
I'd love to be a person...
who could sit back with his headphones on...
and listen to that all the way through for the first time.
I never had that experience...
but it would have been nice.
The thing that is often missed is the fact that basically...
people were responding to it on an emotional level...
and that is what makes great records.
It's driven by emotion...
there is nothing plastic about it.
There is nothing contrived about it...
and that is what has given its...
or maybe one of the things that has given it its longevity.
All that you touch
And all that you see
All that you taste
All you feel
And all that you love
And all that you hate
All you distrust
All you save
And all that you give
And all that you deal
And all that you buy
Beg, borrow or steal
And all you create
And all you destroy
And all that you do
And all that you say
And all that you eat
And everyone you meet
And all that you slight
And everyone you fight
And all that is now
And all that is gone
And all that's to come
And everything under the sun Is in tune
But the sun Is eclipsed by the moon
That's not to say that the potential for the sun to shine doesn't exist.
Walk down the path towards the light...
rather than walking to the darkness.
There is no dark side in the moon really.
Matter of fact it's all dark.