Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon Revisited.
Tonight on Echoes, we’re playing Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here Reimagined, celebrating the 40th Anniversary of Floyd’s homage to founder Syd Barrett. But 2 two years ago, we did the same thing for Dark Side of the Moon.
March 1st, 2013 marked the 40th anniversary of the release of The Dark Side of The Moon. When the album came out in 1973, it became an iconic symbol of progressive rock and continued to influence everybody from electronic space musicians to singer-songwriters to classical musicians. To celebrate the 40th anniversary we put together The Dark Side of the Moon reimagined. It’s a version of the album drawn from cover tunes by everyone from Dream Theater to The Flaming Lips. And of course there was some of the original as well.
I remember Pink Floyd playing The Dark Side of The Moon. live in May of 1972 at the Boston Music Hall. At the time, they were still calling it “Eclipse.” The album resided on the Billboard charts for 15 years non-stop which was pretty amazing. On Echoes’ The Dark Side of the Moon Reimagined, we played the album from beginning to end, but it’s not all Pink Floyd. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act forbids us from playing the whole thing in one show, so I put together a reimagined rendition interpolating cover versions with some of the original songs.
Among the artists we hear are singer Mary Fahl. She was the original singer for The October Project and she covered the whole album as From the Dark Side of the Moon a couple of years ago.. We also hear an acapella rendition, a dub version and an orchestral version of their big hit song, “Money.” It was a challenge to come up with a rendition that would fit on Echoes, but I found an symphonic arrangement by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. They did an album of Pink Floyd covers and it’s something I usually wouldn’t give a second glance, but it’s arranged by Jaz Coleman of Killing Joke and collaborations with Anne Dudley. It’s produced by Youth, also of Killing Joke as well as The Orb and Paul McCartney’s Fireman project. The synthesizers were programmed by Gary Hughes who went on to the Bombay Dub Orchestra. And it was topped by Roger Dean cover art called “Dragon’s Garden.” How could we resist?
Our reimagining ended with “Brain Damage” and “Eclipse” by Pink Floyd themselves.. I love the last line on the album, “There’s no dark side of the moon. It’s all dark.” Apparently that was said by a doorman at Abbey Road studios.
Echoes On-Line subscribers can hear Dark Side of the Moon Reimagined here.