Classic Albums: Pink Floyd The Making of 'The Dark Side of the Moon'

*** Subtitles by dylux ***

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 heartbeat 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 was the first time you choose, isn't it,

I mean you wouldn't sit around say, "Okay, let's get rid of our song writer."

After Syd had gone the music became more kind of soundscapes than songs.

You have to watch your strengths,

and, um, it was a very good thing that we could not write singles.

We might not have done some of the very 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, um, 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.

A 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, and "Echoes"

shows the direction that we were moving in.

The rest of "Meddle" as I recall was songs,

and so in 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.

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, um, eruption in Dark Side.

You have to remember that 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 to...

that color his view of existence.

There are pressures that are capable of pushing you one direction or another,

and, uh, these are some of them, and, whether they push you towards

insanity, death, empathy, greed, um, whatever.

Uh, there's something about the Newtonian view of that physics

that might be interesting and may be there could be...

this is what this record is about.

There 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 jamming, writing, whatever you want to call it.

Not sure how much writing happened there.

You know, let's play in E minor or in 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 the 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 all sorts of a pushing, driving force.

The way Dark Side of the Moon articulates some sense of

early adult's disenchantment is absolutely timeless.

I've listened to it again recently, and, uh, it always amazes me

that I c-- that I got away with it really, 'cause it was so

lower sixth, and, you know, um...

"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 pieces at 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... I love it...

That's my favorite... that's my inspiration.

And the interesting thing about this song is, we're talking about the jazz,

is this 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, um, 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 machines, but there's a difference.

There's also a harmony part.

And that's it how it's sung.

Back to the band.

There's two organ parts which come in now.

They had been performing this work known as "Eclipse"

um, 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, it

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 in the studio and rehearsed up.

We'd been playing it live that way for quite some time

as a sort of guitar jam, that 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 said, "That sounded good."

And came up, and we started mucking with it together

and he put in a new sequence of notes, and 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.

You've got it basically...

And that, of course, immediately sounded

much more exciting than what we were currently doing.

They were the first band to really go out

and try to sort of make music of 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.

There's 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 get this sort of vibrato noise.

And we bring in this guitar, which is a backwards guitar with echo stuff on it,

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 this track.

This section in particular,

"The Travel" section or "On the Run" section,

um, I think was pretty complicated.

A lot of hands on deck.

You do 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, uh,

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-- everything was well recorded.

Dark Side was really the first