Obviously it’s a bit of a cliché to say that the 60s were all peace, love, LSD, economic stability and trendy Social Democratic government, while the 70s marked a descent into decadent, gender-bending glamour and social, political, and economic turmoil. After all, “Gimme Shelter” and the Doors’ menacing debut album came out in the 60s, while David Bowie, the detached and anorexic aristocrat of space age 70s aberrance, called on us to fill our hearts with love on Ziggy Stardust. Nonetheless, it’s hard to imagine a weirdly futuristic concept album about mortality and mental illness being released in the 1960s, much less such an album going straight to number one in the US, despite it being unheralded by any singles.
And yet this is precisely what happened with Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd’s eighth album and, for my money, one of the best albums in the history of rock music. This blog started as part of a project to explore music that I never got into organically, in many cases because its creation predated my birth. In the process of revisiting some of this stuff, I’ve frequently been underwhelmed by it, even by the Beatles and Bowie, acts I like a lot, but which I would probably not choose over the stuff that I grew up with and loved, like Radiohead, Depeche Mode or U2. Dark Side of the Moon, however, is an exception. The sound, the production values, the lyrics, the strange interludes, the broken-patched-back-together song structures; this could easily stand up to anything released in the mid-90s, including ground-breaking records like OK Computer or Achtung Baby. It’s commonly regarded as a stoner record, but I find that hard to understand, given how heavy and even distressing the subject matter is. Listening to this while high could result in a very bad trip indeed.
The conventional critical approach to analysing this record is to designate side 1 as a deflating journey through the myriad disappointments and traumas of the typical Western lifecycle, while side 2 deals with the various pressures that can drive a person mad in modern society. But I’m not sure if this neat division quite does the trick; to my mind, the twin themes of mortality and madness run throughout the entire record, and they are complemented by other contributions that border on protest music. In the end, Dark Side of the Moon is an album about going mad, which is precisely what the title alludes to; the black pit of insanity, alienated from the light of reason and a shared concept of reality – a grim fate which, perhaps not coincidentally, had but a few years before befallen Syd Barrett, the band’s principal songwriter.
And this is precisely how Dark Side of the Moon introduces itself; with the first of a succession of excerpts from interviews conducted with members of the sound crew which are dotted throughout the album. In fact, several of the album’s tracks consist of these voices against a background of space-age sound effects or synthesisers which, I guess, are designed to conjure the experience of a schizophrenic break with reality. The first voice on “Speak to Me”, the opening track, declares that “I know I’ve always been mad”, triggering an escalating, cataclysmic musical frenzy, while “On the Run” is yet more intense, and ends with what sounds like a German dive-bomber unleashing hell over Coventry during the Blitz. Perhaps this is a haunting allusion to the post-traumatic stress disorder that remains endemic among war veterans, or even to Roger Waters’ own father, who was killed in the Second World War.
These weird interludes, which are suggestive of the chaotic subconscious of the traumatised psychotic patient, are interspliced with (comparatively) more conventional songs with very carefully thought-out lyrics. The songs and interludes fade into and out of each other, like moments of sanity and clarity punctuating the jagged, confusing perplexity of psychosis. When the rational ego of the album’s ‘proper songs’ emerges from the madness of the spoken voice interludes, the lyrics frequently focus on the stultifying and unhinging banality of everyday life, and particularly on the fact that this boredom is experienced against the vague, distant, but ineluctable and steadily encroaching backdrop of inevitable death. The haunting, spacey “Breathe” focuses on a highflying workaholic who realises that he is on the road to oblivion, thereby triggering the deranged miasma of “On the Run.”
Perhaps the centrepiece of Dark Side of the Moon is “Time”, which starts with a discombobulating cacophony of clocks chiming and ringing, before collapsing again into the strange, almost jazzy and funky, but profoundly unsettling and understated psychedelic rock that gives the album its inimitable musical tone. The lyrics of “Time” describe a typical Western lifecycle – the first verse touching on the seemingly unlimited time available to us as youths, while subsequent verses hint ominously at gathering middle-age, and finally the road to everlasting darkness. The optimistic dreams and ambitions of youth either come to nothing, or they remain mere scribbles on a page, soon to be usurped by the mundane pleasures of bland domesticity. The last verse reveals the basic futility of this exhausting, disillusioning process by invoking the tolling of a funeral bell, whereupon the song segues into the hysterical shrieking of the instrumental “The Great Gig in the Sky.”
This all makes for a pretty appalling listen, actually. It’s remarkable that this album sold 45 million copies, even more so that the members of the band were still in their 20s when they were visited by these burdensome themes of life, death and madness. I guess a lot of that owes not only to the tribulations of Syd Barrett, but also to the formative experiences of Roger Waters, whose father was a communist and a conscientious objector against the Second World War, until he changed his mind, joined up, and was killed at the Battle of Anzio in February 1944. Given this background, the listener might expect the inclusion of some songs here with anti-capitalist and anti-militaristic overtones, and they would be correct to do so, as “Money” and “Us and Them” comprise what could be considered psychedelic 1970s protest music.
“Money” once again somehow manages to make jazzy, funky rock sound sinister and unsettling. The lyrics offer an acerbic foreshadowing of Thatcherism, framing the perspective of an obscenely rich yuppie who extensively narrates his materialistic value system. “Us and Them”, meanwhile, is the album’s highlight, a furious indictment of the Manichean madness that underpins armed conflict. The music in the choruses is overpowering, even as the lyrics advance a critique of the crazed detachment of the military top brass reminiscent of Stephen Fry’s portrayal of the deranged General Melchett in Blackadder Goes Forth. These are but “ordinary men”, observes Gilmour drily and almost apologetically, in a line later referenced by historian Christopher Browning in his disturbing study of the “ordinary men” who were recruited into Nazi killing squads during the Second World War.
But as observed above, the real conceptual core of Dark Side of the Moon consists in a musical narration of the experience of going mad, with the insanity of capitalism and military conflict invoked as the necessary socio-political background to the individual experience of losing one’s marbles. Indeed, “Brain Damage” deals explicitly with this link between the personal and political, by implying that the politicians, generals, and celebrities on the front pages of newspapers are, in fact, the biggest nutcases of all. “Brain Damage” and “Eclipse”, the album’s twin closing songs, return to the overall theme of mental illness but, to my mind, they feel somehow upbeat after the unrelenting darkness that has characterised our listening experience thus far. Ostensibly, they offer little comfort. “Brain Damage” apparently describes the experience of a full-frontal lobotomy, while “Eclipse”, despite its rousing, climatic tone and apparent celebration of life, concludes that everything on earth is ultimately eclipsed by the moon – which, I guess, means that the darkness of insanity can rear up at any time and blot out the shining light of rationality.
Not exactly reasons to be cheerful. And yet, “Brain Damage” does offer a declaration of solidarity with the insane. Perhaps this is the best we can hope for – a normalisation of madness, a recognition of the universality of the harrowing experiences described on this album, especially given the nature of the societies we live in. Either way, we are a long way here from “I wanna hold your hand”, or even from the later Beatles’ millenarian celebration of spiritualist egolessness, or even, indeed, from the Rolling Stones’ Dionysian, nudge-nudge-wink-wink response to the trials and tribulations of life. In the face of the insanity-inducing realities of wage slavery and inevitable death, Pink Floyd offer nothing more than radical acceptance, resignation, and a sliver of fatalistic solidarity.
10/10
Highlights: “Time”, “Us and Them”, “Brain Damage”