THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

For those who have been hiding under a rock for the past four decades or so Pink Floyd`s masterwork Dark Side Of The Moon with it`s immediately recognizable cover of light refracting through a prism has become one of the most prolific rock albums ever released and is as enduring as anything ever penned by Lennon & McCartney and will continue to be discovered and re-discovered by successive generations of rock music fans.

The album was a result of a brainstorming session of the collective pet peeves of band members who were virtually invisible to the public at large at the time. Despite being hauntingly melodious the album was basically a sonic collage that alluded to the individual themes of money, time, madness and death and it wasn`t the music but rather the financial backing and publicity their record company EMI threw behind the record which finally broke them into the North American marketplace, at the same time setting it up to be one of the best selling rock records of all time with sales hovering at roughly 34,000,000 at last count. This includes a stupendous amount of repackaging as anniversary editions, picture discs, quad discs in every form of audio presentation immaginable from 8 tracks to laser discs. Posters, stickers and picture cards included also varied from country to country and one could spend an eternity collecting Dark Side Of The Moon merchansise and memorabilia. Oddly enough, the album never made it to #1 on the UK charts and only stayed at #1 for a very brief one week on the North American charts.

Musically, the album brought the group to new creative plateaus, putting to rest once and for all the convictions that they couldn`t match the creative level they had attained with Syd Barret on their debut Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. In fact, much of the material on the album was taken from leftover music from the period of `71-`72 in addition to a track ( which became Us & Them) from an abandoned `69 film project that keyboardist Richard Wright was working on. Originally entitied Eclipse: A Suite For Assorted Lunatics, the band played fragments of the work live on tour throughout the first half of `72 before commencing recording at Abbey Road studios in June `72. By the time budding engineering wizard Alan Parsons was finished with the master tapes effects included all kinds of voice samples and tape loops which deepened the album`s recurring atmospheres of delirium earning it a `74 grammy nomination for best engineered album. Although the band would continue to churn out imposing albums throughout the seventies culminating with The Wall in 1979, Dark Side Of The Moon remains their tour de force, if not musically but certainly by the numbers and certainly not their best overall effort by a long shot and I personally prefer Animals or Meddle as albums on the whole.

Unfortunately the omnipresence of Dark Side Of The Moon in the media has overshadowed the some of album`s moments of shear brilliance and essence and it is up there in the overfamiliarity club along with the likes of The Eagles` Hotel California, Fleetwood Mac`s Rumours and Led Zeppelin`s Led Zeppelin IV courtesy of FM radio. So the best thing to do is buy a copy, listen to it, cherish it for a while and then file it away in some dark recess in your record collection and try and forget about it because after all " there really isn`t a dark side of the moon really. In fact, it`s all dark." A classic tarnished by over exposure.

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