The last words on The Dark Side of the Moon do not belong to Pink Floyd. They belong to Gerry O'Driscoll, the Irish doorman at Abbey Road, who sat in front of a microphone in a darkened studio, read a question off a flashcard and said: "There is no dark side in the moon really. Matter of fact, it's all dark." Roger Waters had spent months writing lyrics about time, money, war and madness, and then handed the closing line of the album to a man who worked the front door.
That was the trick of the whole record. A roadie opens it, a £30 session singer delivers its most celebrated vocal, and clocks Alan Parsons had taped in an antique shop for a sound-effects record open "Time". Pink Floyd built it on the road, finished it at Abbey Road over roughly 60 studio days, and released a record that has since sold around 45 million copies and logged 996 weeks on the Billboard 200. This is how they made it.
Album Facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Pink Floyd |
| Album | The Dark Side of the Moon |
| Release Date | 1 March 1973 (US); 16 March 1973 (UK) |
| Label | Capitol (US); Harvest (UK) |
| Producer(s) | Pink Floyd; Chris Thomas, mix supervisor |
| Studio(s) | EMI Studios (now Abbey Road Studios), London, 31 May 1972 to 9 February 1973 |
| Genre / Subgenre | Progressive rock, psychedelic rock |
| Track Count | 10 |
| Total Runtime | 42:54 |
| Billboard 200 Peak | 1 (one week, from 28 April 1973); 996 chart weeks by January 2026 |
| UK Albums Chart Peak | 2 (578 weeks in the Top 100) |
| Other Notable Chart Peaks | 1 in Canada, Austria, France and Italy; 2 in Australia, the Netherlands and Norway |
| Certifications | 15x Platinum (RIAA, 1998); 16x Platinum (BPI, 2025) |
| Estimated Sales | About 45 million worldwide (2013 industry estimate) |
| Key Singles | Money; Us and Them / Time |
Pink Floyd Before The Dark Side of the Moon
Meddle had come out in 1971, and David Gilmour and Roger Waters both pointed to it later as the turning point towards what came next. Gilmour later dismissed the long instrumentals of the post-Syd Barrett years as "that psychedelic noodling stuff". In the UK, the band had not released a single since "Point Me at the Sky" in 1968.
At a band meeting at Nick Mason's house in North London, Waters proposed that a new album could be built into the coming tour. His idea was a record about the things that "make people mad": the grind of the band's own lifestyle, and the mental health problems of former member Syd Barrett. Gilmour told Rolling Stone in 2003 that the feeling was that their old lyrics had been "a little too indirect", and that this time "the words were going to be very clear and specific."
Their business was in flux too. Unhappy with Capitol, the band and manager Steve O'Rourke were quietly talking to Clive Davis at Columbia, and The Dark Side of the Moon was the last album they owed their American label. Capitol's new chairman, Bhaskar Menon, threw a huge advertising campaign behind the record, but it was not enough to keep them: Pink Floyd moved to Columbia in the US for a reported $1 million advance.
A Piece for Assorted Lunatics
Waters made demos in a small studio in the garden shed of his home in Islington. His original "Money" was, by his own description, "prissy and very English", and sat in G-sharp minor rather than the B minor of the record. Some ideas came from the shelf: the opening line of "Breathe" came from a piece Waters wrote with Ron Geesin for the soundtrack of The Body, and "Us and Them" began life as Richard Wright's "The Violent Sequence", rejected by Michelangelo Antonioni for Zabriskie Point. Waters later recalled the director's verdict in a mock accent: "It's beautiful but is a too sad, you know? It makes me think of church."
The band booked Decca Studios in Hampstead from 29 November to 10 December 1971 to write, rehearsed in a Bermondsey warehouse owned by the Rolling Stones, and held a dress rehearsal at the Rainbow Theatre to test a new quadraphonic PA. New speakers, a 28-track desk with quadraphonic output and a custom lighting rig added up to nine tonnes of kit in three lorries. It was the first time they had taken an entire album on tour.
The premiere at the Brighton Dome on 20 January 1972 fell apart during "Money", when a power problem slowed the backing tape and pushed it out of time. The band stopped, took a break and played "Atom Heart Mother" instead. The first complete performance came the next night at Portsmouth Guildhall. Almost every song had a different name on the road:
- "On the Run" was "The Travel Sequence", a guitar and Wurlitzer jam
- "The Great Gig in the Sky" was "The Mortality Sequence" or "The Religion Song"
- "Any Colour You Like" was a jam called "Scat"
- "Brain Damage" was "Lunatic"
- "Eclipse" was first played at Leicester's De Montfort Hall on 10 February
The suite itself was billed as Dark Side of the Moon: A Piece for Assorted Lunatics, a nod to lunacy rather than astronomy. When the band found that Medicine Head had already released an album called Dark Side of the Moon, they switched to Eclipse, then switched back once that record flopped. The press saw it at the Rainbow on 17 February 1972. The Sunday Times decided "The ambition of the Floyd's artistic intention is now vast", while Melody Maker's reviewer wondered whether he was "in a bird-cage at London Zoo". A bootleg of the Rainbow shows sold 100,000 copies, which annoyed a band still treating the music as a work in progress.
Making The Dark Side of the Moon at Abbey Road
EMI assigned the band staff engineer Alan Parsons, who had been assistant tape operator on Atom Heart Mother and had worked on the Beatles' Abbey Road and Let It Be. Sessions ran in roughly 60 days between 31 May 1972 and 9 February 1973, fitted around tours of Japan, North America and Europe and a trip to France to score Barbet Schroeder's La Vallée. As Parsons put it: "I think if Dark Side of the Moon had been recorded today, it would have taken a month, not a year."
"Us and Them" was the first song recorded, on 31 May, with "Money" following a week later and "Time" and "The Great Gig in the Sky" after that. The Studer A80 16-track machines were a big step up from the eight and four-track tape the band had used before, but they filled the tracks so quickly that second-generation copies were still needed. Parsons told Guitar World in 1993: "Believe it or not, almost all the tracks are second generation."
"There were only two or three tracks of drums when we came to mixing it... One track for keyboard, one track for bass, and one or two sound effects tracks. They had been very, very efficient in the way they'd worked."
Chris Thomas, Making Music, 1995
Waters, an Arsenal supporter, would break off to watch his team, and the band would stop to catch Monty Python's Flying Circus on the television while Parsons worked on the tracks. "But when we were on a roll," Gilmour remembered, "we would get on." After a two-month break and a US tour, they came back in January 1973 to cut "Brain Damage", "Eclipse", "Any Colour You Like" and "On the Run", bring in four backing singers, and film studio footage for Adrian Maben's Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii.
Some of the sound came from Abbey Road's own kit and some from things the band dreamed up:
- An EMS VCS 3 on "Brain Damage" and "Any Colour You Like", and a Synthi A on "Time" and "On the Run"
- A specially treated bass drum standing in for a human heartbeat
- Assistant engineer Peter James running round the studio's echo chamber for "On the Run"
- Double-tracked vocals and guitars, so Gilmour could harmonise with himself
In the final week Waters printed questions on flashcards and invited anyone in the building to answer them in a darkened Studio 3, starting with "What's your favourite colour?" and working up to "When was the last time you were violent?" and "Were you in the right?"
Then came Chris Thomas, hired as "a fresh pair of ears". Gilmour later told Guitar World that Thomas's job was "essentially to stop the arguments between me and Roger", because Gilmour wanted the record "big and swampy and wet" and Waters wanted it dry, in the spirit of John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band. Thomas brokered a compromise that left both men satisfied. The album was signed off at Abbey Road on 9 February 1973. Waters took a reel-to-reel copy home and played it to his wife.
"I remember her bursting into tears when it was finished. And I thought, 'This has obviously struck a chord somewhere', and I was kinda pleased by that."
Roger Waters, Billboard, 2006
Personnel and Credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Core band | ||
| Vocals, guitars, VCS3 | David Gilmour | Lead on Breathe, Time, Money, Us and Them |
| Bass, vocals, VCS3, tape effects | Roger Waters | All lyrics; sings Brain Damage and Eclipse |
| Keyboards, vocals, VCS3 | Richard Wright | Co-lead vocal on Time |
| Drums, percussion, tape effects | Nick Mason | Sole writing credit on Speak to Me |
| Guest musicians | ||
| Saxophone | Dick Parry | Money, Us and Them |
| Vocals | Clare Torry | The Great Gig in the Sky |
| Backing vocals | Doris Troy, Lesley Duncan, Liza Strike, Barry St. John | Time, Us and Them, Brain Damage, Eclipse |
| Spoken voices | ||
| Doorman, Abbey Road | Gerry O'Driscoll | Closing line; "any time will do" |
| Road manager | Peter Watts | The laughter on Speak to Me and Brain Damage |
| Voice | Patricia "Puddie" Watts | "Cruisin' for a bruisin'" |
| Roadie | Chris Adamson | Opening words of the album |
| Roadie | Roger "The Hat" Manifold | "Short, sharp shock"; "Live for today" |
| Wings guitarist | Henry McCullough | "I was really drunk at the time" |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Producers | Pink Floyd | |
| Engineer | Alan Parsons | Abbey Road staff engineer |
| Assistant engineer | Peter James | Credited as "Peter Jones" on first US pressings |
| Mix supervisor | Chris Thomas | Brought in for the final mix |
| Artwork | ||
| Sleeve design, photography | Hipgnosis | Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell |
| Sleeve and sticker art | George Hardie | |
The guest list was short because the band's address book was. Parry got the call because he was an old friend of Gilmour from Cambridge, and he stayed on to play every Pink Floyd show from 1973 to 1977. Paul and Linda McCartney, recording Red Rose Speedway elsewhere in the building, sat for the flashcard interview. Their answers were judged to be "trying too hard to be funny" and binned, while their guitarist's single line made the record.
Parsons, paid a weekly wage of £35, earned a Grammy nomination for Best Engineered Recording, Non-Classical, and went on to the Alan Parsons Project.
The Songs on The Dark Side of the Moon
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Speak to Me | Mason | 1:05 | Overture of heartbeats, laughter and tape loops | |
| 2 | Breathe (In the Air) | Gilmour, Wright, Waters | 2:49 | France B-side | Wright borrowed a chord from Miles Davis |
| 3 | On the Run | Gilmour, Waters | 3:45 | Logged at Abbey Road as "Weird Noises" | |
| 4 | Time | Mason, Waters, Wright, Gilmour | 6:53 | Double A-side (US); A-side (France) | Only track crediting all four members |
| 5 | The Great Gig in the Sky | Wright, Torry | 4:47 | Torry's credit added after 2005 settlement | |
| 6 | Money | Waters | 6:22 | Yes | Mostly in 7/4; first US hit |
| 7 | Us and Them | Wright, Waters | 7:49 | Yes | Longest track; first song recorded |
| 8 | Any Colour You Like | Gilmour, Mason, Wright | 3:26 | B-side | Mason spelled "Marson" in original credits |
| 9 | Brain Damage | Waters | 3:46 | Played live as "Lunatic" | |
| 10 | Eclipse | Waters | 2:12 | Written on the road as a finale |
Each side runs as one continuous piece, and the album opens and closes on a heartbeat. "Speak to Me" earned Mason a rare solo writing credit, though accounts differ: Mason says he made it, while Wright and Waters called the credit a "gift". It opens with roadie Chris Adamson: "I've been mad for fucking years, absolutely years." A backwards piano chord tips it into "Breathe", where Gilmour plays lap steel and Wright lifts a chord straight out of bar nine of Miles Davis's "All Blues".
"On the Run" was once a guitar-and-keyboard jam. In the studio Gilmour found a sequencer in the lid of the Synthi and, as he put it, "came up with the basic sound of it". Waters then reworked the note sequence, which is why both men are credited. Parsons said "all the basic sounds- including the bass and percussion sounds- came as a mono feed from that one synth", and the backing track was recorded twice, first on 31 May and again on 13 June.
"Time" opens with clocks Parsons had already recorded in an antique shop near Abbey Road, originally "for a sound-effects record". He taped each one separately, ticking and chiming, and on multitrack they were made to tick together and then strike at the same time. Mason added his Rototom passage over Waters picking muted bass strings for the tick-tock. The lyric grew out of Waters's realisation, in his late twenties, that life was not preparation for something else. It is the only song on the album credited to all four members, and the last Pink Floyd song to share that credit.
"The Great Gig in the Sky" was Wright's chord sequence, played on the 1972 tour over Bible readings and clips of Malcolm Muggeridge. In January 1973 the band decided they wanted a female singer to "wail" over it, and Parsons suggested Clare Torry, whom he knew from an album of chart cover versions. She had tickets to see Chuck Berry that night, so a three-hour session was booked for Sunday 21 January. Nobody could tell her what to sing. Gilmour, by her account, suggested something "emotional", so she dropped the soul phrasing and sang as if she were an instrument. She stopped a third take halfway through, convinced she was repeating herself, and the master was cut together from all three.
She left with a £30 Sunday fee, sure the vocal would be dropped, and found out otherwise when she saw her name on the sleeve in a record shop. In 2004 she sued Pink Floyd and EMI for half the songwriting royalties. The case settled out of court in 2005 for an undisclosed sum, and every pressing since credits the song to Wright and Torry. "If I'd known then what I know now," she told Mojo in 1998, "I would have done something about organising copyright or publishing."
"Money" started with Waters's loop of coins thrown into a mixing bowl in his wife's pottery studio, tearing paper, a till and an adding machine, spliced into a seven-beat cycle. "It was effectively the click track that they actually played the song to," Parsons said. Wright played a Wurlitzer through a wah-wah pedal, and Gilmour cut three solos, one dry and two through a Fuzz Face and Binson Echorec, the last on a custom 24-fret Lewis guitar. Parry's sax went on in October. Gilmour summed up the arrangement to Guitar World: "We created a 4/4 progression for the guitar solo and made the poor saxophone player play in 7/4."
"Us and Them", at 7:49 the longest track, has Manifold's "short, sharp shock" speech in its middle. Waters said its first verse was about war, its second about "civil liberties, racism and colour prejudice", and its last about "passing a tramp in the street and not helping". "Brain Damage" goes back to the Meddle sessions, when Waters was already singing it under the title "The Dark Side of the Moon". Its line about the band "playing different tunes" points straight at Barrett, and the grass in "The lunatic is on the grass" was, Waters said, the lawn behind King's College, Cambridge.
Outtakes and Lost Pieces
The album shed one whole song. "The Travel Sequence", the jam that preceded "On the Run", was recorded in the studio and judged not good enough once the band started playing with the Synthi. The 2011 Immersion box set gave fans the original instrumental "Violent Sequence" demo from the Zabriskie Point sessions, the seed of "Us and Them". Lyrics changed along the way too: on the 1972 tour, "Time" was slower and the line was "Lying supine in the sunshine" where the record has "Tired of lying in the sunshine".
The Prism: The Dark Side of the Moon Cover
The cover is a black field, a thin white beam coming in from the left, a pale outlined triangle and a band of colour leaving on the right. There are six colours, red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet, because indigo is missing. Wright had asked Hipgnosis for something simple and bold, "like the artwork of a Black Magic chocolate box". Storm Thorgerson found his answer in a photograph of a prism in a 1963 physics textbook, and the design also owes something to Alex Steinweiss's artwork for a 1942 New York Philharmonic performance of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto. George Hardie drew it.
Hipgnosis offered seven designs. "There were no arguments," Waters said. "We all pointed to the prism and said 'That's the one'." At his suggestion the spectrum continues into the gatefold, which also carries a visual representation of the album's heartbeat. On the back, a second prism recombines the colours, Thorgerson's idea for allowing interesting layouts of the sleeves in record shops. Inside were two posters, one of the band live and one an infrared photo of the Great Pyramids of Giza, plus two pyramid stickers. It was also the first time Pink Floyd printed their lyrics on a sleeve. VH1 later ranked it the fourth-greatest album cover.
Release and Reception
The launch was a shambles. The quadraphonic mix was not ready, so every band member except Wright boycotted the press reception at the London Planetarium on 27 February 1973. Guests got four life-size cardboard cut-outs of the band and the stereo mix through a poor PA. The reviews were mostly kind anyway. Steve Peacock of Sounds told readers he would "unreservedly recommend everyone" to it, and Loyd Grossman in Rolling Stone called it "a fine album with a textural and conceptual richness that not only invites, but demands involvement". Robert Christgau was less sold, finding the lyrics clichéd and the music pretentious, but still called it a "kitsch masterpiece".
Capitol put it out in America on 1 March, two weeks before Harvest in Britain. It went gold in the US by the following month and hit number one on the Billboard chart on 28 April 1973, for one week. In Britain it peaked at number two. What made it famous was what happened after that:
- 736 Billboard 200 weeks in its first run, from 17 March 1973 to 16 July 1988
- A 593-week unbroken stretch from December 1976 to April 1988
- 996 total Billboard 200 weeks by January 2026
- 15x Platinum in the US from June 1998
- By 2017, the UK's seventh-bestselling album and its biggest seller never to reach number one
Gilmour put part of the success down to the lyrics: "All the music before had not had any great lyrical point to it. And this one was clear and concise."
Singles
| Single | Released | B-side | Peaks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Money | 7 May 1973 | Any Colour You Like | 13 Billboard Hot 100; 10 Cash Box; 1 France |
| Us and Them | 4 February 1974 | Time (double A-side) | 72 Cash Box; 85 Canada |
"Money" was cut down for the single, with most of the sax and guitar solos edited out, and became Pink Floyd's first major American hit. The white-label promo for radio had a mono side with "bullshit" trimmed to "bull" and a stereo side where the word survived. That copy was withdrawn, and the replacement came with a note asking DJs to throw away the uncensored one. Capitol also sent radio truncated versions of "Us and Them" and "Time". In France, "Time" went out as a single with "Breathe" on the flip.
The Dark Side of the Moon on Tour
The two legs of the Dark Side of the Moon Tour, before and after release, added up to 128 shows across the UK, US, Europe and Japan. The 1972 run of 89 shows was the band's busiest year until 1994. On the September 1972 US leg, Parsons ran front-of-house sound.
For 1973 they took extra players on the road for the first time: Parry, and three backing singers who had been touring with Leon Russell. On 17 March they played a late-night show at Radio City Music Hall, rising onto the stage on a lift surrounded by dry ice. At Earls Court on 18 and 19 May, a seven-foot model plane crashed into the stage at the end of "On the Run". By June they were playing stadiums, and the crowds wanted "Money" more than they wanted to sit and listen. On 4 November 1973 two shows at the Rainbow raised a reported £10,000 for Robert Wyatt after his fall, and Torry sang "The Great Gig in the Sky" live with the band.
The Dark Side of the Moon in TV, Film and Media
- "Eclipse" woke NASA's Mars rover Opportunity on 10 March 2004, marking a transit of the moon Phobos
- "Eclipse" played after the torch was lit at the London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony
- The clocks from "Time" ran under the Big Ben fly-by in the same ceremony
- "Time" opens Marvel's Eternals and scored the final trailer for The Flash
- "On the Run" introduced visiting teams at Chicago Bulls home games in the Michael Jordan era
The strangest afterlife is the Dark Side of the Rainbow, the theory that the album syncs with The Wizard of Oz. Charles Savage popularised it in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette in August 1995, and Turner Classic Movies aired the film with the album on its SAP audio channel in July 2000. Parsons called it "a complete load of eyewash".
Covers, Samples and Tributes
Whole-album remakes have become their own genre. The New York dub collective Easy Star All-Stars made Dub Side of the Moon in 2003, and the Flaming Lips remade it track by track in 2009 with Stardeath and White Dwarfs, Henry Rollins and Peaches. The 2006 tribute Return to the Dark Side of the Moon pulled in Adrian Belew, Tommy Shaw, Dweezil Zappa and Rick Wakeman. Phish played it live in Utah on 2 November 1998, and Dream Theater have covered it twice on stage. Milli Vanilli used the "Money" tape loop to open their own "Money".
Reissues, Remasters and Anniversaries
| Year | Edition | What was new |
|---|---|---|
| 1979 | Mobile Fidelity LP | Remastered LP |
| 1983 / 1984 | First CD | Japan June 1983; US and Europe August 1984 |
| 1992 | Shine On box remaster | Doug Sax and James Guthrie at the Mastering Lab |
| 2003 | 30th anniversary SACD | New 5.1 surround mix by James Guthrie; stained-glass cover |
| 2011 | Immersion and Experience editions | Remaster plus the Wembley 1974 live set; Immersion added the original "Violent Sequence" demo |
| 2023 | 50th Anniversary box | New remaster, Dolby Atmos mix, Wembley 1974 on vinyl |
Parsons made a quadraphonic mix at the time, but the band never endorsed it and he was disappointed with it himself. For the 30th anniversary they went to Guthrie instead. Parsons judged that mix "possibly a little too true to the original mix", and it won four Surround Music Awards and sold 800,000 copies in the US. On some pressings, an orchestral "Ticket to Ride" can be heard faintly under the final heartbeats. It was playing in the background at Abbey Road when O'Driscoll was recorded.
The Legacy of The Dark Side of the Moon
The money changed everything. Wright and Waters bought big country houses, Mason started collecting fine cars, and some of the profits went into Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The band that followed it with Wish You Were Here in 1975 was a wealthy one. Not everyone who made the record shared in that.
"I still wake up occasionally, frustrated about the fact that they made untold millions and a lot of the people involved in the record didn't."
Alan Parsons, Rolling Stone, 2003
The honours piled up. The album entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Library of Congress National Recording Registry, which judged it "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Rolling Stone placed it at 43 in its 500 Greatest Albums lists of 2003 and 2012, and both Rolling Stone and Q have named it the best progressive rock album. Waters went back to it for its 50th birthday, releasing The Dark Side of the Moon Redux in October 2023 without the rest of the band and without guitar solos.
Things You Might Not Know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| A famous laugh | Road manager Peter Watts, whose laughter runs through Speak to Me and Brain Damage, was the father of actress Naomi Watts. |
| The line they cut | O'Driscoll went on: "The only thing that makes it look alight is the sun." Parsons said continuing would have been "an anticlimax". |
| The airport voice | On the Run carries a PA announcement for "BEA 215 to Rome, Cairo and Lagos", which Parsons later reused on an Alan Parsons Project bonus track. |
| One in fourteen | In 2007 an estimated one in every fourteen Americans under 50 owned a copy. |
| Parry's encore | Dick Parry was back on stage for the Pink Floyd reunion at Live 8, playing his saxophone part on Money. |
Hear More on the Riffology Podcast
The Dark Side of the Moon is a record about madness that was made by four men who, as Alan Parsons remembers it, were still good friends. For the full story, from the shed demos to the doorman's last word, the Riffology podcast is available on all the major podcast platforms.
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