The Dark Side Of The Moon
Pink Floyd’s masterwork, The Dark Side Of The Moon, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Although it remains one of the greatest studio albums of all time, Floyd’s opus began life as a live performance and it went on to be toured twice in Floyd’s career: once in the early to mid 1970s and again in 1994. In this special edition, we examine why the 20-year-evolution of Dark Side as a hypnotically powerful live performance was a longer and even more fascinating journey than the creation of the album itself. We also find out how the journey to The Dark Side Of The Moon shaped David Gilmour’s gear choices as he strove for the signature tone we know so well today, 50 years on
It’s tempting to think that there’s very little more that can be said about Pink Floyd’s 1973 masterpiece, The Dark Side Of The Moon, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. In fact, none of the remaining members of the band are prepared to talk about it, with the exception of Roger Waters, who has apparently re-recorded the entire album, according to interviews he has done in support of his forthcoming This Is Not A Drill European tour. And no, thus far we haven’t heard it.
Historically, Floyd had been heading towards more long-form pieces before the songwriting for Dark Side had even begun. Both the 23-minute-long Atom Heart Mother suite (from the 1970 album of the same name) and Echoes – which was around the same length – from the Meddle album had got the band thinking. So when the writing sessions began in the winter of 1971 at a rehearsal studio in Broadhurst Gardens, London, the first few songs began to emerge.
A few tracks were recycled from previous projects, including Breathe (In The Air), which was inspired by an idea that Roger Waters had for the Ron Geesin album Music From The Body (the soundtrack to the documentary The Body, 1970) and Us And Them – originally titled The Violent Sequence – was from the Antonioni film Zabriskie Point (1970). To begin with, the songs were standalone, but when the idea to segue them came about, the project began to crystallise.
Live rehearsals began in January 1972 and the piece as a whole received its first live performance later that month in Brighton.
Initially, the suite of songs had the working title Eclipse, the band changing the title to The Dark Side Of The Moon soon afterwards. Conceived as an audio-visual extravaganza, the album was to evolve through live performance before the band checked in at Abbey Road for the first recording sessions in June 1972.
LIVE & KICKING
But what about those live performances? Have we been listening to the album in the wrong context for the past 50 years? Maybe we should begin to consider it as a live performance suite first and foremost that was decanted i
