The big “problem” that David Gilmour had with ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’
There was no question in David Gilmour’s mind that The Dark Side of the Moon was going to work.
The Pink Floyd guitarist had been with the band for just under half a decade by the time he started working on the album. In that time, he saw the Floyd flail in a number of different directions as they desperately tried to find an identity separate from their original songwriter and bandleader, Syd Barrett. Nothing had really stuck until Waters leaned into the human condition with the Meddle album closer ‘Echoes’. From there, the groundwork for Dark Side was in place.
“As soon as Roger came in with the idea of its central themes of how the pressures of modern life can affect your sanity, it started taking a shape from there on I would say,” Gilmour told Glenn Povey, later reprinted in the July 2023 edition of Guitar Player magazine celebrating the 50th anniversary of Dark Side. “But that feeling that we were on to a real magical ‘something’ came a bit later down the line I think.”
While he felt that the band were on an interesting path, nobody could have predicted the impact that The Dark Side of the Moon would have on popular music. With more than 45 million copies sold worldwide, it remains one of the best-selling albums ever. With nearly 1,000 non-consecutive weeks on the Billboard album chart, Dark Side has remained at the centre of pop culture continuously and uninterrupted for five decades. To Gilmour, that kind of staying power was unimaginable in 1973.
“Longevity in pop music, in terms of me as a 20-whatever – I was 27 years old when we did Dark Side of the Moon – was measured in maybe five, possibly 10 years,” Gilmour claimed. Little did he know that the scope of Dark Side would be so universal that even multiplying that estimate by five wouldn’t be enough.
All that being said, Gilmour isn’t completely taken with the reputation and acclaim that has followed the album. The guitarist has one specific complaint that comes with the record as a whole, something that would prove to be a major crux in his ongoing feud with bandmate Roger Waters. “My problem with Dark Side – and I’ve said it before and I’ll no doubt say it again – was that I thought that Roger’s emergence on that album as a great lyric writer was such that he came to overshadow the music in places.”
“There were moments when we didn’t concentrate as hard on the music side of it as we should have done – which is what I voiced to all the band after the making of Dark Side,” Gilmour added. “That was absorbed into an effort to try and make the balance between music and the words a better one on Wish You Were Here.”
Did the album suffer?
Well, not really. Artists are born perfectionists in many ways. They can always find an issue with what other fans might consider to be immaculate pieces of work. And, for most listeners, Dark Side of the Moon is exactly that.
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.” That openness created one of the best albums the world has ever known.
