Why did Pink Floyd call their album ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’? - Far Out Magazine

Before their 1973 masterpiece The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd had struggled to find their feet following the departure of leading light Syd Barrett in 1968.

In the Classic Albums documentary about the LP, guitarist David Gilmour would later describe a lot of their music in the years after Barrett’s dismissal as “that psychedelic noodling stuff”.

Well, there was no noodling on The Dark Side of the Moon. Just 43 minutes of painfully reflective and profoundly poignant music, spread across ten tracks and myriad different genres, but singular in its vision. There are stark meditations on the brevity of life, war, capitalism and class divisions, and mental health.

See the full article from Guy Howie at Far Out Magazine here.

All of which are couched in an expansive but melodic, jazz-tinged form of psychedelia which Barrett would have been the first to appreciate. Bassist Roger Waters was coming into his own as a songwriter, providing some of the most moving lyrics ever penned for rock songs, and guiding the musical direction of the album.

The title certainly fits the mood of the record, which couldn’t get much darker. The darkness isn’t glib or self-absorbed, though. It’s an expression of deep-seated feelings that the band have a visceral need to share with us, and it can’t fail to move us and make us think.

Quite simply, The Dark Side of the Moon was the first provisional title the band could come up with for the album they were making, to describe the ideas they were putting together. The side of the moon which faces away from the sun was the best metaphor they could find for mental illness, which is the overriding theme throughout the album, as exemplified by the songs ‘Speak to Me’, ‘Brain Damage’ and ‘Eclipse’.

In particular, they were thinking of their former bandmate Barrett, whose mental health struggles had forced him out of the band and into reclusion. The etymology of the word “lunacy”, a common synonym for insanity, appealed to the band because it originated in the medieval diagnosis of an intermittent kind of madness that seemed to vary according to the position of the moon.

The album was even subtitled “A Piece for Assorted Lunatics” when the band premiered it live in London’s Rainbow Theatre a year before its release on record. The theme of lunacy would continue to be an overarching subject of Pink Floyd’s music from that point on, especially on their album Wish You Were Here, for which they wrote the song ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ in direct reference to Barrett.

The band would never manage to top The Dark Side of the Moon, though, as a singular piece of art. As Waters recently explained to AXS TV, Floyd had “finally cracked it”. They’d made the album which would define their career

While Pink Floyd fans have a propensity to indulge in the rarer moments of the band’s career, this album is undoubtedly the group’s greatest.

The album isn’t only a conceptual masterpiece but also sees the band provide some of their best singular songs too. As well as ‘Money’, ‘Time’ and ‘Breathe’, the album holds perhaps one of their most beloved tracks of all time in ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’. They are individually brilliant, but when the songs are sewn together, the tapestry created is that of legend.

There’s a lot of iconography attached to The Dark Side of the Moon, and it would seem all of the band members also agree on its validity as their greatest album. “I think that when it was finished, everyone thought it was the best thing we’d ever done to date, and everyone was very pleased with it,” remembered Nick Mason.

Wright said of the album, “It felt like the whole band were working together. It was a creative time. We were all very open.” It is this openness and reflective sound that turned Pink Floyd from prog-rock pioneers into bona fide rock icons. Untouchable.