The Groove
Roger Waters talks MOJO through The Dark Side Of The Moon, track by track…
SPEAK TO ME
I thought the album needed some kind of overture and I fiddled around with the heartbeat, the sound effects and [session vocalist] Clare Torry screaming until it sounded right.
BREATHE
This developed out of the writing sessions at Broadhurst Gardens [Decca’s studio]. The rundown in the chorus sounds very Rick-like and I wrote the lyrics and the top line. It’s so simple – only two chords. The lyrics, starting with “Breathe, breathe in the air/Don’t be afraid to care”, are an exhortation directed mainly at myself, but also at anybody else who cares to listen. It’s about trying to be true to one’s path. Dave sang Breathe much better than I could have. His voice suited the song. I don’t remember any ego problems about who sang what at that point. There was a balance. You’d just say, “How does that sound in your range?”
ON THE RUN
This just came together in the studio. What’s gratifying from my point of view in trying to claim ownership of this stuff is that some of Adrian Maben’s film Pink Floyd At Pompeii was shot while we were making The Dark Side Of The Moon, and there’s a long shot of me in the studio recording On The Run with the VCS3 [a ‘briefcase’ model with a sequencer in the lid]. Trying to find out how the sequencer works, I played something into it and speeded it up and out came the part. I thought, “That’s quite good.” It added a certain tension.
TIME
The year we made that record was the year I had a sudden revelation, which was that this was it. I had the strangest feeling growing up – and I know a lot of people share this – that childhood and adolescence and one’s early adult life are preparing for something that’s going to happen to me later. I suddenly thought, at 29, “Hang on, it’s happening, it has been right from the beginning, and there isn’t suddenly a line when the training stops and life starts”: “No one told you when to run/ You missed the starting gun.” The idea in Time is a similar exhortation to Breathe. To be here now, this is it. Make the most of it. This song was the closest to what you’d call a group collaboration. Nick had some rototoms set up in Broadhurst Gardens. We had a VCS3 doing those bass notes, and all that clicking comes off a Fender Precision bass.
BREATHE REPRISE
The decision to place Breathe Reprise after Time arose during the process of working the piece up live before we started recording.
THE GREAT GIG IN THE SKY
Are you afraid of dying? The fear of death is a major part of many lives, and as the record was at least partially about that subject, the question was asked, but not specifically to fit into this song. I don’t remember whose idea it was to get Clare [Torry], but once she sang, it was great. One of those happy accidents. The slide guitar was just something Dave was into at the time. A brilliant sound.
MONEY
I was just fiddling around on the bass at Broadhurst Gardens and came up with that riff – seven beats long. The rest of the song developed after I thought, “Let’s make a record about the pressures that impinge upon young people in pop groups, one of which is money.” It doesn’t sound to me like a song that just started to pour out of me. It doesn’t feel close enough to the nature of my being, so I’m sure it was written to become specifically part of The Dark Side Of The Moon. I then thought it would be good as an introduction, to create a rhythmic device using the sound of money.
I had a two-track studio at home with a Revox recorder. My first wife [Judy Trim] was a potter and she had a big industrial food mixer for mixing up clay. I threw handfuls of coins and wads of torn-up paper into it. We took a couple of things off sound effects records too. The backing track was everyone playing together, a Wurlitzer piano through a wah-wah, bass, drums and that tremolo guitar. One of the ways you can tell that it was done live as a band is that the tempo changes so much from the beginning to the end. It speeds up fantastically.
US AND THEM
Rick wrote the chord sequence for this and I used it as a vehicle. I can’t remember when I wrote the top line and the lyric, but it was certainly during the making of the album because it’s the political idea of humanism and whether it could or should have any effect on any of us. That’s what the record is about really – conflict, our failure to connect with one another.
The first verse is about going to war – how in the front line we don’t get much chance to communicate with one another, because someone else has decided we shouldn’t. I was always taken with those stories of the first Christmas [during World War I on the Western Front], when the British and German troops wandered out into No Man’s Land, had a cigarette, shook hands and then carried on the next day. The second verse is about civil liberties, racism and colour prejudice. The last verse is about passing a tramp in the street and not helping.
ANY COLOUR YOU LIKE
A little instrumental fill. Apart from the songs that are credited to one person, it’s all a bit of a grey area. Money, Eclipse and Brain Damage, which are credited to me, were mine. Us And Them was clearly Rick’s tune and I wrote the lyrics. The Great Gig In The Sky was Rick’s [though he later had to share the credit with Clare Torry after she brought a lawsuit against Pink Floyd in 2004]. Breathe and Any Colour You Like are grey areas and so is Time, because it was close to a real collaboration of all four members. The distributions got divided up in strange ways afterwards because we were being very egalitarian and group-like in those days. I regret it now. I gave away a lot of the publishing and I wish I hadn’t, but these things happen and that’s how it is and that’s how it will always be.
BRAIN DAMAGE
That was my song. I wrote that at home. The grass [as in “The lunatic is on the grass”] was always the square in between the River Cam and King’s College chapel [in Cambridge]. When I was young that was always the piece of grass, more than any other piece of grass, that I felt I was constrained to “keep off ”. I don’t know why, but the song still makes me think of that piece of grass. The lunatic was Syd. He was obviously in my mind. It was very Cambridge-based that whole song.
ECLIPSE
This was interesting because it was something I added after we’d gone on the road. It felt as if the piece needed an ending. It’s just a run-down with a little bit of philosophising, though there’s something about its naive quality I still find appealing. In a strange way it re-attaches me to my adolescence, the dreams of youth. The lyric are a recitative of the ideas that preceded it saying, “There you are, that’s all there is to it. What you experience is what it is.” The rather depressing ending, “And everything under the sun is in tune/But the sun is eclipsed by the moon”, is the idea that we all have the potential to be in harmony with whatever it is, to lead happy, meaningful and right lives.