The best album Pink Floyd ever made, according to David Gilmour: “The strongest whole record”
No artist should concern themselves with which one of their albums is a masterpiece. It’s all about capturing the music that was right for the time, and if it happens to line up with what the rest of the world thinks, that may as well be an added bonus. However, David Gilmour could be more diplomatic regarding which Pink Floyd albums stand out, and as a body of work, he still thought nothing could beat Dark Side of the Moon.
By the time Floyd got to work on their magnum opus, they were ahead of the game for the first time in their careers. The last few projects had seen them slowly digging themselves out of the Syd Barrett-shaped hole in their group, and it wasn’t clear that they were going to fill it until they hit upon ‘Echoes’ off of Meddle.
That’s not to say that everything before then was terrible. There was a lot of great sonic imagery spread across albums like Atom Heart Mother, but there was also a lot of meandering as the rest of the group figured out just what the hell they were trying to do. Once the band descended upon Pompeii to play their now iconic shows, they realised they had hit on something huge.
In the accompanying film, the group had already begun work on what would become Dark Side of the Moon, which was initially described as a descent into lunacy. When you listen to the versions of the album that made it to the live stage at first, it is like night and day once they are brought into the studio.
After cleaning up a lot of the jamming sections, the entire album feels like it should be played in one continuous movement. Even for a song that seemingly doesn’t go anywhere like ‘Speak to Me’, it serves as the grand overture for the harrowing journey through the internal layers of the mind of someone struggling with their own humanity.
If anything, this is the kind of album that proves why the age of playlists doesn’t really apply to prog rock. This is a project that’s meant to work as a whole rather than broken up into bits and pieces, so when you’re listening to a song like ‘Money’, for example, it’s easier to think of it as an episode as it transitions into the strains of ‘Us and Them’.
Although the band would reach for greater heights on albums like The Wall or Animals in the coming years, Gilmour still believed that Dark Side of the Moon was the sturdiest concept they had ever attempted, saying, “I’ve always thought it was a good overall package. The lyrics came to the fore on that record and made a big difference. Areas of it, musically, are a bit weak. But it was the strongest whole thing we’d ever done. There was no doubt in any of our minds when it came out that it would do better than anything we’d done before. But we didn’t expect it to still be in the charts now.”
Gilmour probably didn’t imagine that the album would become one of the biggest watermarks in the history of rock music, but that kind of distinction doesn’t come to just any old album. It comes from people putting something authentically human down on vinyl and getting legions of others to embrace it with open arms.
Is he right?
Simply put: yes.
The album isn’t only a conceptual masterpiece but also sees the band provide some of their best singular songs too. As well as ‘Money’, ‘Time’ and ‘Breathe’, the album holds perhaps one of their most beloved tracks of all time in ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’. They are individually brilliant, but when the songs are sewn together, the tapestry created is that of legend.
There’s a lot of iconography attached to The Dark Side of the Moon, and it would seem all of the band members also agree on its validity as their greatest album. “I think that when it was finished, everyone thought it was the best thing we’d ever done to date, and everyone was very pleased with it,” remembered Nick Mason.
Wright said of the album, “It felt like the whole band were working together. It was a creative time. We were all very open.” It is this openness and reflective sound that turned Pink Floyd from prog-rock pioneers into bona fide rock icons.
