Pink Floyd

Songwriter: Roger Waters

“People often ask me about the voices on Dark Side. I was trying to gather audio snippets to mix into segues on Dark Side. Rather than interviewing people I came up with the idea of writing a series of questions on cards. The cards would be in a stack on a conductors stand in front of a mike. We would scour Abbey Road Studios for willing guinea pigs, bring them to the studio, sit them down, roll tape and then ask them to respond to each card in order.

As I recall the first card was something irrelevant and innocuous, like “What’s your favourite colour?” and the last was the more enigmatic “What do you think of The Dark Side Of The Moon?”

I can’t remember the ones in between, except for:
Are you afraid of dying?
When were you last violent?
Were you in the right?
Do you ever think you’re going mad?
If so why?

End of Story.”

Pink Floyd was a British rock band who managed to carve a path for progressive and psychedelic music in a way that was uniquely fascinating at the time and has remained equally momentous in the modern age. The name “Pink Floyd” came from two blues musicians that founding member Syd Barrett idolized—Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.

The band was formed in 1965 London by Barrett (guitars, vocals), Nick Mason (drums), Roger Waters (bass), and Richard Wright (keyboards). Sometime after releasing their debut album, 1967’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the group saw the addition of a second singer-guitarist, David Gilmour. This acted largely as a means of replacing Barrett, who was forced to leave in 1968 for mental health reasons, resulting in Waters taking over as the main vocalist.

The band broke into the mainstream with 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon, an album that became one of the best-selling and most influential records in music history. Their follow-up efforts, 1975’s Wish You Were Here and 1977’s Animals, also sold well. However, the band started to see some in-fighting while making their next album, a rock opera about how Waters felt frustrated and detached from his audience. Waters seemingly became extremely controlling, firing Wright over disputes about touring and his contributions to the album. The result, 1979’s The Wall, became the best-selling double album of all time. It spawned iconic songs such as the #1 hit, “Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2,” and the melodic “Comfortably Numb.”

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The Dark Side of the Moon

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The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

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Pink Floyd

The Dark Side of the Moon