A Lengthy Gestation
The album would come together in various stages, starting with rehearsals at Decca Studios in Broadhurst Gardens (West Hampstead, London) between November 29 and December 10, 1971, when the Floyd started writing and making demos, although Roger Waters questions “[…] how much writing happened there. You know, let’s play E minor or A for an hour or two and oh, that sounds alright, that’ll take up five minutes or so.”83 New themes emerged out of the many songs they worked on. The future “Breathe,” “Us and Them,” and “Brain Damage” already existed, but the group did not really know what to do with them. The breakthrough occurred when Roger Waters came up with the ingenious idea of linking all the songs together in order to turn each side of the (vinyl) album into a single track, creating a musical unit that embodied the unifying concept behind the album. In David Gilmour’s words: “When Roger walked into Broadhurst Gardens with the idea of putting it all together as one piece with this linking theme he’d devised, that was a moment.”82
From this time on, all the members of the group started to pull in the same direction. Between January 3 and 15, 1972, the songs continued to take shape in a rehearsal room in Bermondsey (London) belonging to the Rolling Stones. This also provided the London-based quartet with an opportunity to test their new equipment before going on tour: new lighting, designed by Arthur Marx, and above all an ultra-sophisticated WEM sound system with a twenty-four-channel Allen & Heath mixing desk and 360-degree quadraphonics. And then it was time for the tour, which kicked off in the United Kingdom (January 20 to February 20). From February 23 to 29, the Floyd was at the Château d’Hérouville, not far from Paris, recording the soundtrack to the movie La Vallée (Obscured by Clouds). They then flew off to Japan, where they toured between March 6 and 13. Another spell of a few more days at the Château d’Hérouville between March 23 and 27 in order to finish work on Obscured by Clouds was followed by the mixing of the soundtrack at Morgan Sound Studios in Willesden, London. The tour then moved to the United States from April 14 to May 4 and thereafter continued in Europe (West Germany and the Netherlands) from May 18 to 22.
The Album’s Unsung Stars
To help them make The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd called upon the services of the very best studio technicians, and consequently the album’s success owes an enormous amount to three engineers. Alan Parsons had been an assistant engineer at Abbey Road since the age of nineteen and had worked on the Beatles’ last two albums. Chris Thomas, the mixing supervisor, had taken part in the sessions for the White Album (1968) and would go on to produce some of the major albums of the seventies, such as For Your Pleasure (1973) and Siren (1975) by Roxy Music, Grand Hotel (1973) by Procol Harum, Paris 1919 (1973) by John Cale, and Never Mind the Bollocks (1977) by the Sex Pistols. Peter James was the assistant sound engineer and would work with the Floyd again on Wish You Were Here.
One of the external musicians who contributed to the album was the saxophonist Dick Parry, an old friend of David Gilmour’s. The two of them had played together during their Cambridge days, and Parry went on to play sax on albums such as J. J. Jackson’s Dilemma (1970) by J. J. Jackson, Bring It Back Home (1971) by Mike Vernon, and London Gumbo (1972) by Lightnin’ Slim. Then there were the backing singers Lesley Duncan, Doris Troy, Barry St. John, and Liza Strike, not to forget Clare Torry, the extraordinary voice on “The Great Gig in the Sky.”
An Album of Superlatives
On February 27, 1973, EMI held a press reception at the London Planetarium on Marylebone Road for the launch of The Dark Side of the Moon. Rick Wright was the only member of Pink Floyd to attend. Roger Waters, David Gilmour, and Nick Mason boycotted the event for two reasons: firstly the quadraphonic mix was not yet ready, and secondly they judged the sound system installed by the record company in the planetarium to be of inferior quality.
The group’s eighth studio album went on sale in the United Kingdom on March 23, exactly thirteen days after its US release. Critics on both sides of the Atlantic gave it rave reviews. “It took nine months to make at Abbey Road and it is worth every second of studio time. A spacey trip, continuing the formula set by Atom Heart Mother,” the Melody Maker reported on April 7, 1973; while the NME of March 17, 1973, called the album the “Floyd’s most successful artistic venture”; and Rolling Stone claimed on May 24 that “There is a certain grandeur here that exceeds mere musical melodramatics and is rarely attempted in rock.”
The Dark Side of the Moon rapidly became an album of superlatives, despite not doing quite as well in the United Kingdom as it did in the rest of the world. Pink Floyd’s masterpiece would never get to number 1 in Britain, despite some seeing it as the musical embodiment of a nation that had started to doubt itself. Having risen to second place on the British charts by March 31, the album dropped back to number 5 the following week. In the United States it was a very different story. The album was an absolute sensation. Not only did it reach number 1 on the Billboard chart as early as March 17, Saint Patrick’s Day, it was to remain on and off the charts (that is to say for nonconsecutive periods) for a total of more than eight hundred weeks, the equivalent of more than fifteen years. It would also reach number 1 in Canada and Austria, and number 2 in West Germany and Norway. In France it would go on to achieve double platinum certification (400,000 copies). It is estimated that between forty-five million and fifty million copies of Dark Side have been sold to date (sixty-four million according to some sources), making it the third-best-selling album of all time (behind Michael Jackson’s Thriller and AC/DC’s Back in Black). The Dark Side of the Moon currently occupies forty-third place on the Rolling Stone list of the best five hundred albums.
The Sleeve
Ever since A Saucerful of Secrets, Pink Floyd’s album sleeves had been designed by Hipgnosis. For The Dark Side of the Moon, the quartet persisted in not wanting to see the band’s name on the cover, and now rejected the idea of a photographic montage as well. It was Rick Wright who steered Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell in the right direction. “Richard Wright, the organist, said, ‘Come up with something simple, a simple graphic, like a chocolate box,’” recalls Aubrey Powell. “This was insulting to us, but we said, ‘Okay, we’ll think about it.’”84 Thorgerson and Powell would draw their inspiration from a French book of color photographs from the fifties. “In this book was a photo of a prism on a piece of sheet music and sunlight coming in through the glass window,” explains Powell. “It was creating this rainbow effect.”84 Thorgerson explains that the sleeve 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 was, I think, about ambition and greed, and thirdly was an answer to Rick Wright, who said that he wanted something simple and bold… and dramatic.”83 “Hence the prism, the triangle and the pyramids. It all connects, somehow, somewhere,”65 adds the graphic designer in his book.
The final result is as striking as the music on the album. An equilateral triangle (or optical prism) is penetrated from the left by a white beam that disperses on the right into six colors of the spectrum (from top to bottom: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet). On the reverse of the cover we see the same diffracting prism, but this time inverted. Inside are the words to all the songs (for the first time on a Pink Floyd album), through the middle of which the six spectral colors also run, with the difference that the green line now takes the form of a sinusoidal wave, which was Roger Waters’s idea. As a bonus, the LP was accompanied by two posters, the first depicting the Pyramids of Giza (in blue or green depending on country), and the second portraying each of the members of the group in concert. Rounding off the package were two stickers (yellow and brown) featuring a deconstructed graphic of the same pyramids.
The Recording
The first recording session devoted to The Dark Side of the Moon was held on May 30. For this, Pink Floyd returned to the Abbey Road Studios, which they had more or less abandoned for their
two previous albums, Meddle and Obscured by Clouds. Although the album was recorded over a period of nine months, due to the group’s various commitments, it took only forty or so sessions (in Studios Two and Three, and Studio One for a single piano part!), not including various remixing, editing, and cross-fading sessions (which took place in Room Four). This is not a particularly large number for an album of such complexity. Recording was made easier as a result of the band having played the album live for several months before entering the studio, as David Gilmour would later acknowledge: “When we went into the studio, we all knew the material. The playing was very good. It had a natural feel.”39 Roger Waters recalls, “It sounded special,” adding that “When it was finished, I took the tape home and played it to my first wife, and I remember her bursting into tears when she’d finished listening to it. And I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s kind of what I expected,’ because I think it’s very moving emotionally and musically. Maybe its humanity has caused Dark Side to last as long as it has.”3
However, this relative rapidity of execution is also explained by the perfect harmony that reigned within the group. “We were stuck in a small room for days on end and we did work very well together as a band,”82 remembers David Gilmour. Mason concurs: “We approached the task assiduously, booking three-day sessions, sometimes whole weeks, and would all turn up for every session, everyone anxious to be involved in whatever was happening. There was an air of confidence in the studio. Since Meddle we had been our own producers, and so we could set our own schedule; at this point we were tending to work on the album track by track until we were happy with each piece.”5
The atmosphere was so positive, in fact, that Alan Parsons was unable to distinguish any leader as such: “They produced each other—Roger would produce Dave playing guitar and singing and Dave would produce Roger doing his vocals.”82 And Waters would concede that he had been less dominant than he would later be: “We were pulling together pretty cohesively.”82
By the time they recorded The Dark Side of the Moon, the members of Pink Floyd were leading more or less settled family lives, with the exception of David Gilmour, the only bachelor among them. Mason and Wright had even become fathers not long before. The sessions followed a relaxed rhythm, to such an extent, in fact, that they came to be organized around two important events: “Football League” soccer matches, which Waters did not want to miss at any price, and episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus on television. On such occasions Alan Parsons found himself left to his own devices, tasked with doing a mix: “That was quite fulfilling for me. I got to put my own mark on what we were doing.”45
However, the four members of Pink Floyd were no less perfectionists for this apparent calm, and spent as long as it took to come up with the right sound or idea. They dedicated hours to tracking down the perfect note, sonority, or sound effect and took an entire day over the loop for “Money.” David Gilmour became famous for spending an eternity on his guitar settings, only to record his contributions very quickly once he had found the right sound. They were calm, highly reserved, and very British, as Alan Parsons has observed: “They would never be jumping up and down with joy when something was working. After an amazing take on a guitar solo, Roger would say something like, ‘Oh, I think we might be able to get away with that one, Dave.’ It was very low-key.”45
The same observation was made by the backing singers, in particular Liza Strike, who was used to more of a fun atmosphere during recording: “This was very quiet; there was no interchange between us as people.”45 Nevertheless, the Floyd were able to get the best out of everyone, including themselves, and create a stunning album full of human warmth and emotion.
Alan Parsons, in Charge of Putting the Album into Orbit
As we have seen, the person responsible for recording the new Pink Floyd album was Alan Parsons. Nick Mason recalls that “At the beginning of the Dark Side recordings, we were assigned Alan Parsons, who had been assistant tape operator on Atom Heart Mother, as house engineer. […] He was a bloody good engineer. But he also had a very good ear and was a capable musician in his own right.”5 Parsons would have to cope with numerous technical constraints. Although benefiting from sixteen tracks, this format was too limited for the group’s ambitious music. He was therefore forced to transfer the sixteen tracks on the first tape recorder onto a second machine, premixing certain tracks, such as the drums and bass, in stereo, in order to create more space in the form of spare tracks. The drawback of this procedure was that it created a second generation of original takes, the signal inevitably being degraded each time. The final mixing of the album would therefore be done using the second or even third generation of recorded tracks. Parsons also had to come up with appropriate solutions for the group’s numerous demands: “The Floyd were famous for using every machine in the studio, with wires trailing down the corridors and mangled tape strewn over the studio floor.”82 He even had to invent an original device to create a sufficiently long delay for the repetition of the words in “Us and Them.”
The Mixing
Chris Thomas’s services were called upon during the final stages of the album, that is to say the mixing. Although this is what he is credited for on the sleeve, it is a definition of his role that he disputes: “I was brought in at the end of the record, but as producer. It wasn’t just mixing—it was mixing and recording.”45 He claims to have added new guitar parts to “Money” and helped to put “Speak to Me” together. Either way, his assistance was vital, although the underlying reason for his presence is interpreted differently by the different members of the group. David Gilmour has the most clear-cut views on the subject. According to him, Thomas’s role was above all to arbitrate between the different visions for the mix that Gilmour and Waters now had. “I wanted Dark Side to be big and swampy and wet, with reverbs and things like that. And Roger was very keen on it being a very dry album. I think he was influenced a lot by John Lennon’s first solo album [Plastic Ono Band], which was very dry.”29 This is also Nick Mason’s recollection. Roger Waters, however, is not as categorical, the episode being less cut and dried in his memory. The bassist is more inclined to think that they were all exhausted and that what they most needed was a fresh pair of ears. Chris Thomas himself, the subject of contention, provides yet another version: “There was no difference of opinion between them. I don’t remember Roger once saying that he wanted less echo. In fact, there were never any hints they were later going to fall out. It was a very creative atmosphere. A lot of fun.”45
Ultimately, the mix would favor Gilmour’s inclination toward an enormous sound with plenty of reverb. Although comprising ten numbers, the pieces that make up each side of the album are cross-faded to provide for uninterrupted listening. In order to achieve this, Alan Parsons and the group did their editing directly onto the two-inch master tape! And listening to the results, it is difficult to believe that this is the second—if not third—generation recording. So mind-blowing is the outcome that from the day of its release the album would serve as a test disc in hi-fi stores—and indeed still does. As it happens, the release of The Dark Side of the Moon coincided with a new affordability of music systems.
Martin Nelson, who worked in the promotions department at EMI and was given the task of carrying a copy of the master to Los Angeles, remembers the moment when everyone was able to savor the result of so many months of work: “Dave Gilmour was doing the editing with a razor blade and there were piles of tape all over the floor. Finally, at about 4 a.m., they turned the lights down in the studio and played the whole album. Unbelievable. Absolutely fantastic!”85 David Gilmour has a similar recollection: “Eventually we’d finished mixing all the tracks, but until the very last day we’d never heard them as the continuous piece we’d been imagining for more than a year. […] Finally you sit back and listen all the way through at enormous volume. I can remember it. It was absolutely… It was really exciting.”82 Years later, Roger Waters would ask himself whether he was happy when he heard it an
d he comes to the conclusion: “Yeah. I remember hearing it and thinking, ‘Christ, that sounds really good.’”45
The Keys to Success
What is the reason for the phenomenal success of The Dark Side of the Moon? There are clearly a number of factors. The first is the outstanding quality of Roger Waters’s lyrics. David Gilmour has declared that it was with this album that his partner came into his own as a writer. According to him, Waters’s writing came from the heart, and it was this sincerity that gave his lyrics a universal dimension. The guitarist would also be hugely appreciative of the way in which Waters devoted himself to the task: “Roger worked all sorts of hours on the concept and the lyrics while the rest of us went home to enjoy our suppers.”82 But Gilmour himself played no small part in the album’s success. With his inspired guitar playing, his warm and immediately identifiable voice, he lent the music a particular character that would make it widely accessible. According to a Floyd insider, Gilmour gave people enjoyment, while Waters made them stop and think. But then, no discussion of Dark Side would be complete without mentioning Rick Wright’s brilliant compositional work, Nick Mason’s inimitable drumming (for example the sound of his Rototoms on “Time”), and all the sound effects and voices that are an integral part of the album. Then there is the extraordinary packaging by Storm Thorgerson and the Hipgnosis team, and Alan Parsons’s and Chris Thomas’s dazzling sound… All these elements conspired to make The Dark Side of the Moon one of the best-selling albums of all time.
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