![]() There was really something special when we all managed to confront our talents and our inspirations together”, confesses Roger Waters. “We really worked as a group, I was a lot less dominant than I was able to be afterwards. ![]() ![]() An employee paid £35 a week, Parsons would play a key role in the making of the album (Nick Mason: “I really liked the sound of my drums on the tapes produced by Alan… It is through this instrument that you recognize a good sound engineer”), but will then refuse a permanent position, preferring to devote himself to his own nascent formation, The Alan Parsons Project, with the success that we know. ![]() They didn’t need songs: they had become very square”explains Alan Parsons, sound engineer who, aged only 23, has already worked with the Beatles (Abbey Road) and pink floyd ( Ummagumma And Atom Heart Mother). “They could come in not knowing what they were going to do, and start improvising. Dark Side of the Moon will resist all these side projects, the television broadcasts of Arsenal club matches and the fridge full of Southern Comfort, despite the ban on alcohol consumption inside the studios, also occupied by Paul and Linda McCartney who can Red Rose Speedway, Wings. On the strength of these lessons, the actual recording took place between May 1972 and January 1973, at Abbey Road studios, interrupted by the completion of the soundtrack of Obscured by Clouds, in Hérouville, the release of the film Live at Pompeii and several shows with the ballets of Roland Petit. This allows you to appropriate it, to estimate what you prefer to play and the titles that the public particularly likes”. Admittedly, “Breathe” is still devoid of pedal steel, “On the Run” (then called “The Travel Sequence ”) is akin to jazz-rock without electronic effects, “Time” displays a much slower rhythm certainly the group seeks and experiments live yes, but as Nick Mason points out, “It’s a difficult but a very good way to develop a record. As often in their creative process, outtakes from previous albums reappear and make the subject of new demos: thus, two pieces composed on the piano by Rick Wright, including one for the soundtrack of Zabriskie Point, revamped two years earlier by director Michelangelo Antonioni, will become “Us and Them” and “The Great Gig in the Sky”… the pink floyd garner enough unreleased titles to decide to experience them on stage during their British tour, which began in February 1972. And Roger is not kidding! In the spirit of developing a musical suite around this somewhat depressing subject, the group invests the Decca studios until December 10, 1971. He wanted to write this album in an absolutely frank, clear and direct way, and say exactly what he wanted for the first time”, remembers David Gilmour. “I think in that time Roger’s style developed and improved. Waters uses the foundations of his childhood friend, while paying homage to him (“A Saucerful of Secrets”), to build a vessel capable of transporting his neuroses: “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun”, “Echoes ” and of course Dark Side of the Moonin which the “spatial” imagery and vocabulary remain mere artifices, dreamlike metaphors of the most earthly and human preoccupations. After the mini-fictions of Syd Barrett, who, for the anecdote, on the evening of the Brighton concert, was jamming on blues standards at King’s College Cellars, comes the science of narration from the former architecture student turned bassist. I wanted the group to come out of the confines of space where Syd had sent it, to make it the vector of my concerns”, explains Roger Waters. “ I remember sitting in the kitchen, looking at the garden and saying, ‘Hey guys, I think I’ve found it’, and quoting the pangs of everyday life, money, war, religion, madness… Dark Side of the Moon is the expression of a political, philosophical, humanitarian empathy which had to manifest itself. In November 1971, the kitchen of the apartment of the drummer, Nick Mason, in St Augustine (Camden), in which the meetings of the formation traditionally take place, constitutes the launching pad for the trip to the Moon. And that is where the most amazing thing is: how pink floyd was he able to transform a concept based on a subject as buoyant and perky as insanity into a world best-seller and essential reference record? Remarkable for his ambition and musical virtuosity, Dark Side of the Moon, the prism album, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, is also celebrated by the themes it addresses. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Dark Side of The Moon, Rolling Stone looked behind the scenes of this legendary record by Pink Floyd.
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