It was the right record at the right time.Įven so, I find myself at least a little puzzled by the record’s incredible staying power. But Pink Floyd managed to plug straight into that untapped vein of disaffection, alienation and corporate-rock burnout, which would fuel punk-rock’s rock ‘n’ roll putsch later that decade. The early 1970s were a time when new anxieties were replacing the utopian naivete of the 1960s but few big records released in 1973 reflected that change (Iggy Pop’s Raw Power and Black Sabbath’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath being notable exceptions). Even the closing suite of Brain Damage and Eclipse-songs about going insane and dying, respectively-thrum with church organs and arena-rock major chords.ĭSOM also had the distinct advantage of coming out at a time when rock was struggling to deal with the fallout of the hippies’ failure. Gilmour’s wavy, reverb-laden guitar in Breathe (In The Air), On The Run’s wobbly space-synth freak-out, Clare Torry’s soaring vocal improvisation on The Great Gig In The Sky-this is music that is exhilaratingly, life-affirmingly joyous, revelling in the drama and melodrama of life. If anything, the sounds on the record invoke cosmic wonder, situating humanity’s struggles within the context of an infinite universe. What makes DSOM work is that the music that accompanies these heavy, dour themes is anything but morbid. The album cover of ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’. Elsewhere, there’s the “ Money, it’s a crime” line on… you guessed it, Money. In Time, Gilmour sings about how every sunrise makes you “older, shorter of breath and one day closer to death”. In fact, his lyrics were often blunt to the point of banality. Nor did Waters hide that fact under psychedelic allusions, as the band was wont to do in earlier albums. This is, after all, a record about madness (that’s what the title refers to, not space), alienation, greed and death. And 50 years to the week from its release, it’s still on the Billboard Top 200 charts, having spent a record-setting total of 973 non-cumulative weeks there.ĭSOM’s success is undeniable and well-deserved but it’s also a little baffling. Any herb-smoking college student with fantasies of being cool has it in his records collection (or these days, Spotify playlists). Tune in to any AOR (album-oriented rock) radio station and you can bet you will hear Money or Time within the hour. Walk about in any major city in the world for half a day and you will almost certainly come across the album’s rainbow-prism cover worn on a T-shirt or sneakers, or even as tattoos.
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DSOM, as it would come to be referred to by fans, went on to become one of the iconic records of all time, beloved by everyone from ageing hippies to decadent investment bankers. Those were the ingredients that Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright assembled into an album called The Dark Side Of The Moon, released on 1 March 1973. That included a rudderless Pink Floyd, now stuck creating bloated, self-indulgent clunkers like 1970’s honestly awful Atom Heart Mother.Ī friend lost to drugs and mental illness, the bitter, paranoid remains of a failed revolution, and a musical career mid-stall.
The hippie wave itself would crash against the Hells Angels at the Altamont concert in 1969, where one of them stabbed dead a gun-wielding teenager, leaving behind assorted flotsam and jetsam. But Barrett’s excessive use of psychedelic drugs and apparent mental health issues would soon take their toll and he was kicked out of the band in 1968. The band’s main songwriter, Syd Barrett, channelled that utopian euphoria through his childlike, off-kilter sensibilities to create a record that aligned perfectly with the heady, lysergic mood of the counterculture.
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When Pink Floyd released their debut album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, in 1967, the “Summer of Love” was in full swing.
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