Why Pink Floyd’s 'The Dark Side of the Moon' is still a mood 50 years on

A deluxe edition of Pink Floyd's 1973 album 'The Dark Side of the Moon' is set to release on March 24, 2023.

Fifty years after it first arrived, The Dark Side of the Moon stays resolutely in orbit. In March 1973, rock titans Pink Floyd gained second wind when they released this 10-song, 43-minute record. Back then, the album reformed the British prog-rock band’s fate, expanded rock music’s scope, and reinvented the album itself. That it still sits comfortably on Billboard Top 200 Albums charts, decades and generations later, is testament to its musical accomplishment. Dark Side’s core message endures — even if its architects, perhaps, do not.

“New car, caviar, four star, daydream/ Think I'll buy me a football team,” wrote bassist Roger Waters in Money, the first song off the B-side of The Dark Side of the Moon. That tone of sarcasm and irreverence, along with the uncharacteristically groovy production, set the cash registers ringing for Pink Floyd with this radio-friendly track. But The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd’s first truly worthy output since band founder Syd Barrett exited in 1968, was a thing of lofty ambition, a unique concept album that defined the genre. It also signalled the dawn of Pink Floyd’s anti-authority era, which would find further expression in 1979’s The Wall.

As seamless as The Dark Side of the Moon  is — a novel in 10 chapters rather than 10 short stories — its many anthemic tracks do stand out as individual works of art. Time transports you into a room full of grandfather clocks chiming in unison, an eerie mood before David Gilmour voiced Waters’ gloomy lyrics about aimlessness, about the passage of youth, about the realisation that one is suddenly in the middle of the life that one has been preparing for all this time.

“For long, you live and high you fly/ But only if you ride the tide,” went Waters’ lyrics on Breathe (In The Air), a song that could be read as a darker, 20th-century twist on William Henry Davies’ poem Leisure which asked its reader to “stand and stare”. Here, Waters asks that you care, but to not forget the inevitability and futility of it all.

“And all that is now/ And all that is gone/ And all that's to come/ And everything under the sun is in tune/ But the sun is eclipsed by the moon”, the band chants on album closer Eclipse, a song that Waters said was a “very simple statement saying that all the good things life can offer are there for us to grasp, but that the influence of some dark force in our natures prevents us from seizing them.”

For decades, people have lost themselves in the operatic, grand sonic universe of this no-breaks album; and pondered on the meaning of it all. Is it just a rumination on the many phases of life, a dour reckoning with the passage of time, or is there something darker, such as the band coming to terms with Barrett’s mental illness, lurking here? Maybe, it was all of those things, and maybe that’s what makes The Dark Side of the Moon so enduring: That it was so deeply personal and universal at once.

Those paying attention can find a small answer at the near-end of the album. After the chorus of Eclipse is completed, the doorman of the Abbey Road Studios, where Pink Floyd were recording, is heard saying: “There is no dark side in the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark. The only thing that makes it look light is the sun.”

Several turns of the moon later, so much has changed, and yet so much remains the same. The 1970s were a time when the utopian promise of the counterculture, the idyll that the hippies of the world sought, was beginning to vanish. Amazingly (or not), war, money, aspiration, fear of death — all big themes in The Dark Side of the Moon and in much of Pink Floyd’s work — are just as relevant in 2023 as they were in 1973. We exist tangled up in that warp and weft of idealism and commerce, and there’s nothing like a pandemic to highlight the ephemeral nature of life. Pink Floyd’s greatest success may lie in capturing the essence of humanity, in all its insignificance and profoundness.

And yet, The Dark Side of the Moon’s worldly wisdom is in sharp contrast with where Pink Floyd are now, more disconnected than refracted through the prism of time. While David Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason, bassist Guy Pratt re-grouped last year (along with British composer of Indian origin Nitin Sawhney) to release their first new song in 28 years in support of Ukraine as war broke out early in 2022; Roger Waters began to make radical statements.

In February, The Guardian reported that David Gilmour’s wife, Polly Samson described Waters as “antisemitic to your rotten core. Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-syncing, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac.” While a deluxe edition of The Dark Side of the Moon is set to release on March 24 (including remixes and surround sound updates to the tracks, and some live sessions), Waters has announced his own solo “re-working” of the entire album — a move that is causing more anxiety than anticipation.

The original, though, will always be iconic, down to its cover art, which was designed by Storm Thorgerson of the British graphic art group Hipgnosis. The Dark Side of the Moon has been certified 14 times platinum in the UK. It is also the fourth biggest selling album in history — and that’s before the streaming era, when LPs and CDs needed to be bought. Evidently, The Dark Side of the Moon continues to pulse and reverberate, much like the heartbeat that bookends the album.