"If you like rock 'n' roll music and you like beautifully written songs well executed then this record deserves its place in history," Naylor said. Any colour you likeĪussie musician Ash Naylor, best known for his band Even and as a guitarist with Paul Kelly and The Church, said "no matter which way you slice it, Dark Side Of The Moon is just gorgeous music". State-of-the-art synthesisers combine on the breathless travel-inspired On The Run, while snippets of interviews with the people who were hanging around the studio reinforce some of the themes of madness and violence.Īnd among it all are some of the most beautiful songs Pink Floyd ever wrote. Rather than write words for a song intended to be about religion and dying, they brought in singer Clare Torry to perform a wordless improvisation on the ecstatic track and album highlight that closes Side A, The Great Gig In The Sky. Making the most of then-cutting-edge 24-track technology, which made it easier for them to layer and experiment with sounds, the band used sound effects, tape loops, and interview fragments in between songs to accentuate the themes of the album.Ī collection of chiming clocks leads into a doom-laden intro on the track Time, which examines mortality, while a tape loop of coin and cash register sounds forms the basis of the track Money, which is believed to be one of the first examples of a band using a tape loop as a kind of "click track" or backing track for their live playing in the studio.
Such universal themes make the album relatable, but part of the album's status as one of the greatest of all time also comes from Pink Floyd's adventurous approach in the studio. It can also be viewed as an examination of life from start to finish, kicking off with a heartbeat, some screams and the opening lyric "breathe", and finishing with a summation of basically everything you do in life, courtesy of the lyrics of album closer Eclipse. The songs deal with money, death, time, madness, travel, choice, war, and violence, among other things. Keyboardist Richard Wright told a 2003 documentary that "the stress of touring" directly influenced the themes and concept of the album, while Waters described it as "an expression of political, philosophical, humanitarian empathy that was desperate to get out".Īs a result, the album "has some kind of universal appeal in that it confronts a number of major psychological and emotional concerns", as Waters put it. In early 1968, five years prior to The Dark Side Of The Moon, Pink Floyd parted ways with their frontman and chief songwriter Syd Barrett in a fairly straight-forward manner - tired of his increasingly unreliable and adversarial nature due to a drug-induced mental breakdown, the band simply decided not to pick up Barrett on the way to a gig. So what is it about The Dark Side Of The Moon that has made it one of the biggest albums of the last half a century? 'And if the band you're in starts playing different tunes …' In fact, the album - which has been certified platinum 14 times in Australia - was still in the ARIA vinyl top 20 last week. The album's mythic nature also contributed to the urban legend it was made to synchronise with the 1939 film The Wizard Of Oz.Īnd despite 50 years of ever-changing musical fads and phases, the album has endured like few others of its era, continuing to sell tens of thousands of copies around the world each week. Legend has it that a factory was set up in Germany for the express purpose of printing Dark Side Of The Moon CDs in order to keep up with demand. Few albums are as big as Pink Floyd's 1973 blockbuster The Dark Side Of The Moon.Įstimated to be one of only four albums to have sold over 45 million copies worldwide, it's spent more than 970 weeks, or the equivalent of over 18-and-a-half years, in the Billboard top 200 album charts in the US, which is a record.
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