‘Dark Side of the Moon’: The Pink Floyd album that took a “quantum leap”, according to David Gilmour
Most musicians aren’t looking to have their lives changed in a single moment. Even though some bands are fortunate to have that one album that sends them over the top, it’s usually better to have a career where things build over time rather than having to suddenly acclimatise to being the biggest band on the planet when in your more tender years. Even though it eventually took Pink Floyd years to make their most commercially successful albums, David Gilmour was the first to admit when they moved beyond their progressive rock roots.
Then again, Floyd were never progressive in the same way that we think of when talking about Yes or King Crimson. They had their moments of complexity, but a lot of their best songs and scenarios were based around them trying to find the optimum mood for their music, whether that meant using the best tones that they could or basing their albums around one singular concept throughout its runtime.
And for all of the squabbling they have done over the years, without the other members of the group, Pink Floyd simply wouldn’t have achieved the level of success they did. A lot of their early material seemed to flounder once Syd Barrett, but despite Roger Waters later claiming that he was Pink Floyd, it took a true team effort to make all of the moving parts of ‘Echoes’ work or turning ‘One of These Days’ into one of the greatest jams they ever put out.
‘Echoes’ may have started the ball rolling, but Dark Side of the Moon was the moment they hit on their signature magic. Waters had already started working on a concept of what drives someone to madness. Still, while Gilmour may have served as the frontman during this stage, his solos were a big reason why the album worked so well, having two faces on both solos of ‘Money’ and capturing the moment where we realise that the world is passing us by on ‘Time’.
Although the album is now known as one of the best-selling albums ever and the poster of far too many college dorm rooms, it wasn’t supposed to be aces right out of the gate. The band had a great track record at this point, but it wasn’t until they sunk their teeth into the US promotional cycle that people started to realise what they were hearing when songs like ‘Us and Them’ hit the airwaves.
Gilmour was already ready for anything, but he said that he could never have predicted that everything would come to fruition so quickly, saying, “We knew that it was going to do better than anything we had previously done because it was obvious. But I, for one, didn’t quite foresee the quantum leap that it made in popularity.”
But that’s all down to the structure of the piece. The whole thing might work best when being played from back to front on vinyl, but listening to all of the album’s themes, everyone is going to have to deal with each song at some point in their lives, whether it’s struggling with their own sanity, facing growing older, or wondering how the hell they are going to make ends meet for the rest of their lives.
So, while Pink Floyd may have been writing for a certain audience at the time, Dark Side of the Moon is proof of what happens when they come up with something universal. Anyone can talk about their innermost feelings, but the true power of any song is getting everyone else in the world to look at your words and see a bit of themselves in them.
