The Dark Side of the Moon by John Harris

Author:John Harris
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780007383412
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2012-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

Three days after the last of the London shows, Pink Floyd were across the English Channel, beginning a week’s stay at Château d’Hérouville, the French residential studio to which Elton John paid tribute in the title of Honky Château, the album put to tape there mere weeks before the Floyd’s arrival. They were there at the behest of Barbet Schroeder, the director who had employed them to record soundtrack to 1969’s More; this time, they were charged with the responsibility of coming up with a score for La Vallée, another rather stereotypical counterculture movie involving the attempts of a gaggle of French hippies to find a higher truth on an adventure in Papua New Guinea. ‘We sat in a room, and wrote and recorded like a production line,’ said Dave Gilmour. ‘Very good to work like that sometimes – under extreme constraints of time and trying to meet someone else’s needs.’

The resultant album, though hardly among the band’s most important records, amounts to much more than a mere footnote. Taken on its own, it’s a subtly accomplished collection of music, in which the Floyd occasionally reveal sides of themselves that do not quite fit with their art-rock stereotype – as in the Wright/Waters collaboration ‘Stay’, an airbrushed bit of mainstream balladry that forgoes anything experimental in favour of a strait-laced love song; and ‘The Gold It’s in the …’, for which the band dispenses a strain of gonzo blues-rock (a close relative, it has to be said, of the Small Faces’ 1969 single ‘Wham Bam Thank You Mam’3) that sounds so out of character as to be almost hilarious – not least when Dave Gilmour attempts to bend his polite English vocal into American-flavoured raunch.

In the context of The Dark Side of the Moon, some of the music forms a neat set of companion pieces. There are hints of the songs they had been playing in concert for the previous month: Gilmour’s delicate slide guitar on ‘Burning Bridges’; the serene feel – à la ‘Breathe’ and ‘Us and Them’ – of ‘Mudmen’; the sharpened, steely aspects of Gilmour’s ‘Childhood’s End’ that presage the eventual treatment given to the verses of ‘Time’. Perhaps most insightful, however, is Waters’s solo composition ‘Free Four’: on the face of it way too whimsical to be considered of a piece with any of Dark Side, and yet built from the kind of themes that he had tapped into for what was still known as Eclipse. Its first and second verses, for all the camped-up joviality of the music, tap into the same ideas as ‘Time’: ‘Life is a short warm moment … you get your chance to try, in the twinkling of an eye.’ The next stanza finds the narrator bemoaning the advent of yet another American tour, before the song approaches its end via an elliptical reference to Eric Fletcher Waters. Had its author thought to develop the song further – a chorus, for example, might have been an idea – it could have

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