Original subtitles

Dark Side of the Moon was an expression

of political, philosophical,

humanitarian empathy that was desperate to get out.

Dark Side, I think, felt like

the whole band were working together.

It was a very creative time. We were all very open, as well.

I think because we still had a common goal,

which was to become rich and famous.

The ideas that Roger was exploring

apply to every new generation.

They still have very much the same relevance as they had.

Can we run back and drop it a bit?

Yeah, you can if you like. Just turn it down a bit.

I think one of the successes of Dark Side

is the fact that, actually, it's very rich.

There's a lot of songs, a lot of ideas,

all compressed onto the one record.

I can clearly remember

that moment of sitting and listening

to the whole mix, all the way through,

and thinking "My God.

"We've really done something fantastic here."

I think it has the all-time record.

Constantly on the charts for nearly 750 weeks.

About 14 years.

It was a huge album.

Huge not just in terms of its sales,

but in terms of its influence.

This was where underground music,

progressive rock, whatever, really went mainstream.

It was a record that had lots of traditional pop values.

You could sing along to these songs. But...

it also was the kind of thing that took you places,

if you wanted to listen to it in a darkened room.

It may very well be the ultimate concept record,

because the concept is there, the songs are there,

the spaces and the music are there,

but it doesn't take away any of the imagination.

After Syd went crazy in '68 and Dave joined,

we were all of us searching.

Fumbling around, looking for "well, where do we go now?"

Because here was the guy who starts producing

all these songs,

and was the sort of heartbeat of the band.

Syd casts a long and large shadow over events.

I think that the band were very impressive to keep going,

actually, after the loss of their main creative drive.

I mean, it's not something you'd choose, is it?

You wouldn't say "Okay, let's get rid of our songwriter".

After Syd had gone, the music became more

kind of soundscapes than songs.

You have to work to your strengths.

And it's a very good thing that we couldn't write singles.

We might not have done some of the interesting work we did.

Once Syd was out of the picture, The Floyd just went glacial.

They just let it all spread out.

When I saw The Floyd for the first time,

it was the summer of '68.

It was the first American tour with David Gilmour.

And they were just extraordinary.

You know, it was Let There Be More Light,

Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,

it was total space rock.

I started falling out of love with that,

with some of that psychedelic noodling stuff.

We were still, then, playing

a lot of instrumental work, if you like,

and that would be half the album.

But we were always searching for a direction.

You're fighting, a little bit, between...

Wanting to push boundaries back a little bit

and move forward in an experimental way,

but also to retain melody.

When you get to Meddle, quite clearly,

Echoes shows the direction that we're moving in.

The rest of Meddle, as I recall, was songs.

And so, you know, the flipside was a 20-minute piece.

A, and so it was a construct,

And B, it was the beginning

of all the writing about other people.

It was the beginning of empathy, if you like.

You know, "Two strangers passing in the street,

"By chance two passing glances meet,

"And I am you and what I see is me."

It's a sort of thread that's gone through everything,

for me, ever since then,

and had a big irruption in Dark Side.

You have to remember the context of the time.

This was the height of glam rock.

There was, you know, Marc Bolan in T-Rex,

and David Bowie with Ziggy Stardust,

peddling their sort of pop fantasies.

And The Floyd came along with an album

that was about these weighty themes.

He created a story. He created...

Basically, a theatre piece

about what it was like to live in the modern world.

All four of us were there, and there was a discussion

about putting the album together

and making it into this themed...

I mean, what is now called a "concept album".

There are a number of things that impinge upon an individual,

that colour his view of existence.

There are pressures that are capable of pushing you

in one direction or another.

And these are some of them,

and whether they push you toward insanity, death, empathy,

greed, whatever...

There's something about

the Newtonian view of that physics

that might be interesting, and maybe that could be

what this record is about.

It was one of those really good moments

that most bands do experience,

where everyone is onside and everyone likes the idea

and there's some sort of agreement

as to more or less who's going to do what.

Dark Side of the Moon started in a rehearsal room

in Bermondsey, I think, that belonged...

A warehouse, belonged to the Rolling Stones,

where we did some sort of jamming,

writing, whatever you want to call it.

I'm not sure how much writing happened there.

You know. "Let's play E minor and A for an hour or two.

"That sounds all right. That'll take up five minutes."

A lot of the musical ideas just came up

just sort of jamming away in these rehearsal rooms.

Obviously, the lyrics Roger brought in.

Because he had things to say.

And it's the first time that he wrote all the lyrics.

Roger was our sort of pushing, driving force.

The way Dark Side of the Moon articulates some sense

of early adult disenchantment is absolutely timeless.

I listened to it again recently, and it always amazes me

that I got away with it, really, 'cause it's so lower sixth.

You know,

"Breathe, breathe in the air, don't be afraid to care..."

In fact, I think, within the context of the music

and within the context of the piece as a whole,

people are prepared to accept that simple exultation.

To be prepared to stand your ground

and attempt to live your life in an authentic way.

I came from jazz, basically.

I love... That's my favourite... That's my inspiration.

And the interesting thing about this song,

talking about jazz, there's a certain chord...

That is totally down to a chord

I had heard on, actually, Miles Davis' album

Kind of Blue, which is...

That chord. That chord, I just love.

And when we were doing Breathe, we got to G, I got to G,

and how do you get to E again?

Well, again, normally, you'd go...

But I remembered this chord,

and I remembered working it out at home,

listening to the record. And I just thought...

Dave was brilliant at double-tracking vocals.

You could do it with machines, but there's a difference.

There's also a harmony part.

That's it on its own.

And back to the band.

There's two organ parts which come in now.

They had been performing this work known as Eclipse

for a few months, I think,

before actually even coming in to Abbey Road

to start the first recordings.

Which meant the performances were pretty tight,

and not so hard to get.

When you're working in a band and you're performing something

willy-nilly, it develops and changes.

In pre-bootlegging days, this, of course,

was a far more effective and better way of doing things.

You went into the studio rehearsed up.

We'd been playing it live that way for quite some time,

as a sort of guitar jam piece.

I think we were none of us that happy with it

as a piece, and when we also had this synthesiser.

The Synth EA, which had a little built-in keyboard,

and it had... it was the first sequencer, I think.

I just plugged this up

and started playing one sequence on it.

Roger immediately pricked up his ears. "That sounded good."

And he came out and we started mucking with it together.

And then he put in a new sequence of notes,

and it all developed out of that.

A series of notes, played in slowly...

...triggering a noise generator and oscillators,

and then just speed it up, you know.

Now you've got it, basically.

And that, of course, immediately sounded much more exciting

and newer than what we were currently doing.

They were the first band to really go out

and try to, sort of, make music of the future.

We were doing a lot of things with tape loops

and curious sounds and sound effects.

There wasn't sampling in 1972, when they put this together,

but that's basically what they were doing. In a sense,

they were giving you a preview of sound-pictures of the future.

There are some very, very clever and highly listenable

pieces of sonic experimentation.

This is the main synthesiser.

It has the hi-hat element built in.

Then we treat it with filters and with other oscillators

to give it that sort of vibrato noise.

And we bring in this guitar,

which is a backwards guitar with echo stuff on it,

and it's being played with a mic-stand leg,

just sliding up it...

And that whizzes left and right across the stereo.

Then there's these synthesisers, morph synthies,

which are creating sort of futuristic vehicle noises,

which you take the pitch down

a little bit, and pan it at the same time,

and that creates an artificial Doppler sound

like ambulances whizzing past you.

Bring in some footsteps and some heartbeats

for extra tension.

As you see, there's an awful lot going on in this track.

This section in particular, the travel section,

the On the Run section,

I think, was pretty complicated.

A lot of hands on deck.

You'd always want to put more things on

than you had tracks for.

So tracks would, very suddenly,

change from one thing to a different thing.

All of us are on the desk with our fingers on the faders.

But that was the way it was, because

we didn't have automation in those days.

A mix, in those days, was a performance,

every bit as much as doing a gig.

It's one thing, actually, that we've kind of lost

in the modern age.

It was very, very well-engineered.

It was also very, very carefully constructed.

So there was no sort of... Everything was well-recorded.

Dark Side was really the first proper engineering job

I'd been given with The Floyd.

So I was pretty much in at the deep end.

He was very good musically, as well.

He also came up with a couple of good ideas.

I was commissioned to record

some clocks for a sound effects record,

for the very early days of quadraphonic.

And when we were doing Time,

he suggested we might like to add these clocks.

My memory of it is just this room

full of tapes rolling round, because it was...

Without any sort of computer help,

everything had to be done manually.

Getting all the clocks to chime at the right time,

that was a process of...

Just finding a particular moment

on the multi-track tape where the chiming would happen,

and then back-timing all the quarter-inch originals

which contained each of the clocks.

And then, the very critical thing

of the tapes starting at a specific moment,

which is all done with hand-signs and stopwatches.

We've got the girls making their first appearance here.

That's unprocessed.

And we put this effect called a frequency translator on them,

which made them sound like this.

Here's the solo.

This one had probably taken some shape live

before we ever got to do it.

But usually, in the studio, on this sort of thing,

you just go out and have a play and see what comes,

and it's usually mostly the first take that's the best,

and you'll find yourself repeating yourself thereafter.

The 1970s was the era of the guitar.

And he had that sort of very blues-y sound.

But then, also, he had that other sound,

that spacy, very crystalline, almost ethereal quality.

I suddenly realised then, that year,

that life was already happening.

I think it's because my mother was so obsessed with education

and the idea that childhood and adolescence and everything

was about preparing for a life that was going to start later.

And I suddenly realised that life wasn't gonna start later,

that it, you know... It starts at "dot".

And it happens all the time.

At any point, you can grasp the reins

and start guiding your own destiny.

And that was a big revelation to me.

I mean, it came as quite a shock.

One of the greatest lines, I think,

on Dark Side of the Moon is Roger's line about

"Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way".

Which is the sort of line you could imagine, I don't know,

Evelyn Waugh, or Somerset Maugham or someone,

writing as an observation on the English character.

And I think that character does permeate the whole record,

and indeed the whole of Pink Floyd's career.

It expresses my feelings about things very simply,

and I think that...

Musically... I think that the music is to some extent

driven by that emotional commitment.

The band basically wanted

another four or five minutes of music,

and we thought it could be an instrumental.

I think I just, as I always have done,

I sat at the piano and I...

And those first two chords came.

Us and Them and The Great Gig in the Sky,

you know, are fabulous chord sequences,

and really, truly wonderful pieces of music.

No idea whose idea it was to get a female singer in.

Alan Parsons knew Clare Torry and had been working with her,

and said "Why don't you try her?"

She just went in there and improvised over it.

Yeah, that was amazing, that was fantastic.

That was done while we were mixing.

We knew what we wanted.

Not exactly musically, but we knew

that we wanted someone to just improvise over this piece.

So we directed her. We said, "Well, think about death.

"Think about horror. Think whatever,

"and just go and sing."

And my memory is that she went out

in the studio and did it very, very quickly.

And then came back in and said "I'm really sorry", in fact,

"about this." Very embarrassed.

And we were in the studio saying "This is wonderful."

And of course, it's absolutely brilliant.

Both Rick's piano and organ work

and Clare's singing is just incredibly moving.

At the end, at the very end of this

I'm going to increase the echo slowly.

We always wanted to, kind of,

not be on our covers ourselves, not have pictures.

It's probably the most recognisable cover of all time.

It's something that you can sit and look at for a long time

without getting fed up with it.

The prism is the logo that absolutely defines the record.

Dark Side of the Moon prism design

comes from three basic ingredients,

one of which is the light show

that the band put on. I was trying to represent that.

Also one of the themes of the lyrics, which was,

I think, about ambition and greed.

And thirdly it was an answer to Rick Wright,

who said that he wanted something...

Simple and bold. And dramatic.

The presentation, as we call it, of the design to the band

was a fairly brief affair.

He just brought in three or four ideas.

I do remember instantly seeing the pyramid.

They came in, and they looked around,

and they went... "That one."

Everyone immediately went

"Terrific. Great. Let's do that."

As epitomised by their ability to choose it so quickly

and so easily, I just think it's somehow very fitting.

I mean, it's hard to imagine it without it, isn't it, really?

The story in America had been a sort of disaster,

that, really, we hadn't sold records.

And like all good artists, the first thing you do

is blame the record company.

But in this particular case,

I think we might get a few more people to agree

that they hadn't performed properly.

And so they brought in a man called Bhaskar Menon,

who was absolutely terrific,

and he decided he was going to make this work,

and he was going to make the American company

sell this record. And he did!

We devised a marketing campaign for this

which was far more extensive

than anything that the company had ever done.

It was an album that came after virtually a year of touring.

There was a tremendous amount of credible press.

We had, by this time, without a single,

got this album tremendous sales.

Close to about 1,000,000 albums by that stage,

you know, which was quite remarkable.

And I knew a time would come when we would have to

get onto the next stage.

To get to the next category, or level, of audience.

We really would need some single-like material.

They always say, you know, "You need a hit single,"

and we had a sort of hit single with Money.

You know, I would have remembered writing Money

as a sort of very blues-y thing.

I can't sing it up in that register, but...

And it's a very kind of transatlantic,

you know, blues-y sort of twang to it all.

Listening to the original demo, it's not like that at all.

It's all very, kind of, prissy and very English.

The one thing about Money that I think people forget

is that it's got the weirdest...

One of the biggest hits, with the weirdest time signature.

Very unusual, 7/8 time.

Good riff.

I'd played in a band with Dick

when we were sort of teenagers in Cambridge.

Dick was sort of part of the Cambridge Mafia.

I didn't know any other sax players,

and I'm probably too nervous to ask anyone we'd heard of.

He was terrific.

Well, Dick did his sax solo in seven-time.

And then we sort of sat and worked out

a different sequence for the guitar solo.

Probably to make my life easier,

so I didn't have to think about the timing.

I love the fact that it does change.

And, you see, lots of things happen on Dark Side

that, for me, are kind of magical,

without us intentionally making them happen.

They just happen.

And I think that's one of the great things about Money,

is that it does change time signatures.

And that's the thing. It goes back into the 4/4,

and all of a sudden, man, it's rock city.

Money is an amazing single, because it's about

the very thing that it became. It's about success.

Something certainly did the trick,

and it moved us up into a super-league,

I suppose you might say.

Which brought with it some great joy, some pride,

and some problems.

'Course it changed our life.

We were now a big rock 'n' roll band

playing in stadiums.

You don't know what you're in it for any more.

You know, you're in it to achieve massive success,

and get rich and famous and all those other things

that go along with it.

And when they're all suddenly done, you're going

"Well, why? What next?"

It's not to say we didn't do some good work.

But the good work that we did was actually all about

a lot of the negative aspects of what went on

after we'd achieved the goal.

I mean, that obviously informed

what turned out to be the next album, quite deeply.

Wish You Were Here.

'Cause we weren't, most of us, most of the time.

They were a platinum monster, and...

It's not a lot of fun.

It's sort of

amazing to me now that we had that piece of music

in 1969, when we recorded the music for Zabriskie Point.

And throughout, I guess, Atom Heart Mother,

the Obscured by Clouds album, the Meddle album,

we didn't dig it out and use it. It's such a lovely piece.

Antonioni didn't really know what he wanted.

He needed, desperately, to have control.

So even if you did the right thing,

and it was perfect, he couldn't bear to accept it

because there wasn't a choice.

All he really wanted was Careful with that Axe, Eugene.

And I think we were all getting a bit frustrated.

"What does he want?"

I think I was just sitting in the studio,

and I was sitting at the piano,

and they happened to have this violent sequence up,

and I was watching it.

Probably because I was feeling a bit tired, or whatever,

I just started the chord sequence.

At the time, I think, everyone thought

"This is really good."

When we thought we'd really got something brilliant

for his movie,

Antonioni would say

"ls beautiful, but is too sad."

You know? "It makes me think of church."

It was obviously waiting to be reborn in this album.

The lyrics are so direct and linear.

Those fundamental issues

of whether or not the human race is capable of being humane.

What's good about the writing of this song,

from my point of view,

is the leaving of the gaps for the repeat echo.

It's kind of strange, hearing it without the echo, isn't it?

I find myself, with instrumentalists,

over the years working with people,

having very, very often, as a producer,

in my capacity for producing records,

having to say to people "No, leave a hole.

"You know, just play for half a bar,

"and then leave a bar and a half free. You know, empty."

And that's kind of what that song is.

You know, that's the way it works.

The simplicity of Floyd is almost hard to talk about,

because it is so simple.

Nick Mason playing very slowly. You know, exact,

without a lot of

overly frilly percussion flourishes.

Richard's touch on piano and organ,

very gentle, very soft.

But also exact, and just hitting the notes right.

It was always about leaving space.

I think Dave and Rick,

their harmony vocals on it are really very affecting.

Funnily enough, they have very similar voices.

Both their voices are a big factor in Dark Side,

the way they... The way they blend.

That's Dave and Rick together.

And then Rick does another part below that,

which you're gonna hear now.

And then the girls are also joining in.

It seemed to me really important,

I've no idea why it did,

to have voices on this thing.

The only thing that was clever about it was how to do it,

so not to... Not to have an interview.

Devised, probably, in the canteen,

and done later that evening.

So I wrote out a bunch of cards with questions on them.

I think what the voices did on the record was,

they actually brought out the "Dark Side".

They were, in a way, the Dark Side of the Record!

First of all, we used a number of people

who were in the studio with us. So we used

three or four of our road crew...

I aren't frightened of dying at all,

'cause when you've gotta go, you've gotta go.

The Irish doorman here, Gerry.

Why should I be frightened of dying?

See no reason for it. You've got to go sometime.

Wings were recording in here at the same time,

so we used Paul and Linda, Henry McCullough...

I don't know. I was really drunk at the time.

It's the people who are not used to being interviewed

who come up with the stuff.

I think they started off with "What's your favourite colour?"

And your favourite food. And none of which was...

it was just to get people there.

Then they went into "When was the last time you were violent?"

This was the good bit. "When was the last time you were violent?"

And then you'd take... You'd answer it, and then

take the next card, and it said "Were you in the right?"

Yeah, I was in the right.

Yes, absolutely in the right.

I certainly was in the right.

Definitely. That geezer was cruising for a bruising.

And this remarkable roadie called Roger The Hat.

If I participate in this fuckin' effort,

I hope I'm gonna get my gold disc at the end of it.

Imagine that, huh?

They tried to track him down to do the cards,

and by the time they got hold of him,

the cards had gone missing. I don't know where they'd gone.

So Roger Waters actually ended up doing it...

He actually did do that one as an interview.

Do you ever think you're going mad, Roger?

I once reached a stage in my life

when I was completely convinced that I'd gone over the brink.

Well, that's what I care to call it.

It was obviously a bit to do with Syd, and...

I think it's about defending the notion of being different.

The fundamental question that's facing us all

is whether or not we're capable of dealing with

the whole question of "us and them".

What he was feeling as an individual

mirrored almost exactly what a lot of other people

were feeling, at the time, in their own lives.

There's no question in my mind that Dark Side of the Moon

was one of the most important artistic statements

of the last 50 years, probably.

It's touched very many people, all over the world,

in ways that could not simply be put down to the fact that,

oh, they're nice tunes, and I like that bit at the end.

I mean, this was a complete experience.

It was actually a really grim time.

And he wrote a very grim record,

but did it with music that was extremely uplifting,

compelling and bewitching.

I think it was a very, very happy

and creative and enjoyable time when we made this album.

It was probably the most focused moment in our career,

in terms of all of us working together as a band.

I'd love to have been a person

who could sit back with his headphones on

and listen to that the whole way through,

for the first time.

You know, I never had that experience, but...

it would have been nice.

The thing that's often missed is the fact that, basically,

people are responding to it on an emotional level.

And that's what makes great records.

It's driven by emotion.

There's nothing plastic about it, you know?

There's nothing contrived about it.

And I think that's what has given it...

Well, maybe one of the things that's given it its longevity.

But that's not to say that the potential

for the sun to shine doesn't exist.

You know, walk down the path towards the light,

rather than walking into the darkness.

There is no dark side in the moon, really.

Matter of fact, it's all dark.