Readers of my generation may recognise the following common social trope from teenage gatherings and house parties. As music plays, ring-pulls are released from cans of lager, and friendly banter fills the room, in a dim-lit corner, a long-haired layabout is skinning up a joint on the nearest album cover, which always seems to be Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. It perhaps wasn’t always The Dark Side of the Moon, but as a meme it fits pretty well into this snapshot of thematic memory. Mind you, in the era I was attending teenage gatherings, at the start of the eighties, the album was already getting quite old (it had been released in 1973) but it had turned into an enduring and perpetually high-selling album that everyone (the lads anyway) seemed to relate to.
It was the Floyd’s eighth studio album, conceived and developed over years as a concept album exploring varied themes such as conflict, greed, time, death and mental illness, and largely inspired by the band’s arduous lifestyle and the growing mental health problems suffered by former band member Syd Barrett (who left the group in 1968). Primarily developed during live performances, the band added new material during two sessions in 1972 and 1973 at Abbey Road Studios in London.
It’s highly experimental: the group incorporated multitrack recording, tape loops, analogue synthesisers, and snippets from interviews with the band’s road crew and various philosophical quotations. The engineer was Alan Parsons, and he was responsible for much of the sonic feel to the album (not least by recruiting the singer Clare Torry, who appears on The Great Gig in the Sky). It works extraordinarily well, as a whole as much as its individual parts. This actually takes me back to another teenage meme, that of bodies lying around a darkened room, in a pleasant fug, and listening to the album in its entirety.
Here’s the intro to the album put effectively to video by a fan (credit: Marc-André Ranger)…enjoy! Now, where are those Rizlas?
