The Dark Side Of The Moon – Pink Floyd

Madness, War, futility of existence… its Singalong Sartre!

Rock music’s ‘Kind of Blue’ moment. Following its release on St Patrick’s Day 1973 it went on to spend over 40 weeks in the Top Ten (yet interestingly never No.1) and stayed in the US Album Charts for 741 weeks. The Dark Side has sold over 50 million copies.

In contrast to Kind of Blue’s spontaneous creation over just 2 days in an Upper East Side Manhattan studio, Pink Floyd used the studio as an instrument in the same way as The Beatles and George Martin were doing at that same late 60’s early 70’s period, with the album recorded over a 7 month period at Abbey Road Studios, done simply with cutting and splicing reams of tape, and echo machine or other such now antiquated technology, before the digital age.

So what’s it all about? It begins with a heartbeat, and an invitation to ‘Breathe in the air’ and don’t be afraid to care and reach out for your fellow humanity. Because the danger is that ‘one day you’ll wake to find ten years have got behind you’ and you have wasted Time in pursuit of Money and selfishness (‘don’t give me that do goody good bullshit’), or the futility of war (Us and Them ‘after all we’re only ordinary men’) and hatred, or succumbed to madness!

And all told through the medium of some of modern rock’s greatest music.
For best effect listen in one sitting start to finish in a dark room, as millions have done before you………until in the end ‘the Sun is eclipsed by the Moon’.