Danny Baker likes this album. Jeremy Clarkson does too. And that should be enough to dismiss it as utter toss shouldn't it? That two of the biggest egotistical buffoons on British television should share a common appreciation of this megalith of progressive rock. Circumstantial evidence sure but damning, nonetheless.
Here's some more.
A few years back, two
public school boys found themselves in hot water when they decided to help
themselves to some gratis souvenirs from Auschwitz. Maybe there isn't a
gift shop there. Maybe it's one of the few places on earth except from the
sound of ringing tills ( more of those later ) and wanton commercial last
because this was a factory of human destruction, perhaps even the worst place
that has ever been on earth. And these lads thought, well we'll just have to
take a memento then. These two boys went to the same school as Pink Floyd.
So, this is it then. The album that finally links Clarkson with
the Holocaust. It sold 8 billion copies. It's not about the moon. It's got a cover
by a man called Storm. It's still absolute fucking rubbish.
It starts, as any fule kno, with the sound of a beating
heart. Instantly, the discerning ear should have their bullshit detector at
full blast. Eventually, after what feels like an eternity, some singing occurs.
This song is called “Breathe” - Prodigy covered it later and had the idea of
removing all the 6th form lyrics and adding on much needed attitude, drugs and a tune.
Then Pink Floyd decide to invent electronica and somehow it's boring. A song about
mental illness called “On The Run” by a band who kicked a founding member out because of their mental illness and it's still dull.
Because that's what Dark Side of the Moon is, an album so
geared to capturing the futility of reconciling our humanity with the
psychological demands of modern life, that it actually feels like going to
work.
Then a song called “Time”. Time starts with the sound of clocks. All that expensive education and the world's most state-of-the-art recording equipment at your disposal and you write a song called Time and stick the sounds of clocks on it. No doubt if they turned out the Britney Spears classic “Baby hit me one more time” it would have started with the sound of someone being slapped and whimpering “Again”.
Dark Side of the Moon doesn't
have anything as thrilling or vital as those three piano notes at the start at Britney’s
classic. It's just hour upon hour of competently played tedium with lyrics that
even Pete Doherty would blanch at. Continuing their use of subtle sound
effects, Money has the sound of tills on it. Sadly, “Brain Damage” proves not
to be as tasteless as well might have hoped.
If you play this album at the same time as watching the
Wizard of Oz, apparently what happens is you get old and get a golf dinner
celebrating your 20 years in charge of business loans at the Chingford branch of
The Bank of Suddenly Reactionary Middle-Aged Bastards. This is an album awash
with such mythology, a legendary status which it simply doesn't deserve. People
tell me that it's an album you need to wash over you, presumably with some
suitably bohemian soft furnishings and a “doobie”.
Such is the enduring nature of that particular lie that Pink
Floyd, not content with selling 45,000 trillion copies of this record, re-released
it as in immersion edition. The Venn diagram of people who bought the immersion
edition of dark side of the moon and idiots has no overlap it is just a fucking
plain white circle, a dull and empty moon.
