4. Pink FloydDark Side Of The Moon
What do you say about this album that hasn’t already been said? For me, it goes back to those days in Crieff at the Hydro. I wasn’t the kind of guy who was always hanging out with the girls. I suppose I was a typical clichéd progressive rock fan and I remember listening to it for the very first time on a mono Philips cassette somebody had recorded for me. I remember walking through this wood and listening to it for the first time and being blown away.
It’s an album I could play anytime – it’s just ageless. What you’re always trying to make as a musician is an album that’s not anchored by fashion – you want something that can move through the years and you can still listen to it and it mean something and sound brilliant. Dark Side… does that.
Dark Side… is seen as prog, but if you listen to the blues that are in Floyd, it’s fantastic. The album was also a big influence as a soundscape – in employing sound effects and layers within the music to add to that soundscape. In that respect, it was the ultimate album. I got my first stereo and it was the album, just hearing the clocks and hearing the right-left bounces and things.
I think probably it’s one of the perfect albums – there’s nothing at all that irritates me about it. There are no tracks you want to skip. When I go to make an album that’s what I use as a plan. I mean, when Dark Side… was put together, in those days when you were writing for vinyl, you had to basically start an album and then at the end of twenty minutes you had to realise that someone was going to have to get up and turn the album over. On Dark Side… you reach a beautiful piece at the end of side one and then you turn it over and it’s ‘Money’ which sets you up. In the architecture of sonics, it’s the ultimate.
