The Dark Side of the Moon: The Making of the Pink Floyd Masterpiece
A behind-the-scenes, in-depth look at the making of one of the greatest sonic masterpieces and most commercially successful albums of all time.Over three decades after its release, Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ remains one of the most acclaimed albums of all time. Its sales total around 30 million copies worldwide. In its first run, it took up residence in the US charts for a mind-boggling 724 weeks. According to recent estimates, one in five British households owns a copy.This, however, is only a fraction of the story. ‘Dark Side’ is rock’s most fully realised and elegant concept album, based on themes of madness, anxiety and alienation that were rooted in the band’s history – and particularly in the tragic tale of their one – time leader Syd Barrett.Drawing on original interviews with bass guitarist and chief songwriter Roger Waters, guitarist David Gilmour, and the album’s supporting cast ,‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ is a must-have for the millions of devoted fans who desire to know more about one of the most timeless, compelling, commercially successful, and mysterious albums ever made.
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JOHN HARRIS
THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
THE MAKING OF THE PINK FLOYD MASTERPIECE
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
This edition published by Harper Perennial 2006
First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Fourth Estate
Copyright © John Harris 2005
John Harris asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007232291
Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2012 ISBN 9780007383412 Version: 2016-03-18
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Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue January 2003
CHAPTER 1 The Lunatic Is in My Head: Syd Barrett and the Origins of Pink Floyd
CHAPTER 2 Hanging On in Quiet Desperation: Roger Waters and Pink Floyd Mark II
CHAPTER 3 And If the Band You’re in Starts Playing Different Tunes:The Dark Side of the Moon Is Born
CHAPTER 4 Forward, He Cried from the Rear: Into Abbey Road
CHAPTER 5 Balanced on the Biggest Wave: Dark Side, Phase Three
CHAPTER 6 And When at Last the Work Is Done: The Dark Side of the Moon Takes Off
Appendix Us and Them: Life After The Dark Side of the Moon
Bibliography/Sources
Acknowledgements
Index
About the Author
About the Publisher
For Hywel, who was right.
‘I don’t miss Dave, to be honest with you,’ said Roger Waters, his voice crackling down a very temperamental transatlantic phone line. ‘Not at all. I don’t think we have enough in common for it to be worth either of our whiles to attempt to rekindle anything. But it would be good if one could conduct business with less enmity. Less enmity is always a good thing.’
He was speaking from Compass Point Studios, the unspeakably luxurious recording facility in the Bahamas whose guestbook was filled with the signatures of stars of a certain age and wealth bracket: the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker. Waters was temporarily resident there to pass final judgement on the kind of invention with which that generation of musicians were becoming newly acquainted: a 5.1 surround-sound remix, one of those innovations whereby the music industry could persuade millions of people to once again buy records they already owned.
No matter that Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon had already been polished up to mark its twentieth anniversary in 1993; having been remixed afresh, it was about to be packaged up in newly designed artwork, and re-released yet again. Its ‘30th Anniversary SACD Edition’ would appear two months later, buoyed by an outpouring of nostalgia, and the quoting of statistics that had long been part of its authors’ legend.
The fact that they had the ring of cliché mattered little; Dark Side’s commercial achievements were still mind-boggling. In the three decades since it appeared, the album had amassed worldwide sales of around thirty million. In its first run on the US album charts, it clocked up no less than 724 weeks. In the band’s home country, it was estimated that one in five households owned a copy; in a global context, as Q magazine once claimed, with so many copies of Dark Side sold, it was ‘virtually impossible that a moment went by without it being played somewhere on the planet’.
That afternoon at Compass Point, Waters devoted a couple of hours to musing on the record’s creation, and its seemingly eternal afterlife. ‘I have a suspicion that part of the reason it’s still there is that successive generations of adolescents seem to want to go out and buy The Dark Side of the Moon at about the same time that the hormones start coursing around the veins and they start wanting to rebel against the status quo,’ he said. When asked what the record said to each crop of new converts, he scarcely missed a beat: ‘I think it says, “It’s OK to engage in the difficult task of discovering your own identity. And it’s OK to think things out for yourself.”’
As he explained, Dark Side had all kinds of themes: death, insanity, wealth, poverty, war, peace, and much more besides. The record was also streaked with elements of autobiography, alluding to Waters’s upbringing, the death of his father in World War II, and the fate that befell Syd Barrett, the sometime creative chief of Pink Floyd who had succumbed to mental illness and left his shell-shocked colleagues in 1968. What tied it all together, Waters said, was the idea that dysfunction, madness and conflict might be reduced when people rediscovered the one truly elemental characteristic they had in common: ‘the potential that human beings have for recognizing each other’s humanity and responding to it, with empathy rather than antipathy’.
