Before the music even begins on Pink Floyd’s original recording of The Dark Side of the Moon, the voices are there. “I’ve been mad for fucking years,” one of them says. “I’ve always been mad,” another concurs. These mysterious, unidentified voices recur throughout the original recording and are one of its most ingenious motifs. They center the album’s theme of madness, acting like psychotic auditory hallucinations in the listener’s head.
The idea for the voices came from Roger Waters, the band’s bassist and principal songwriter. He gathered them by interviewing various studio hands and roadies—first asking innocent questions, before gradually moving into darker territory. But, in his solo re-recording of the album, released today and titled The Dark Side of the Moon Redux, Waters has dispensed with the voices, turning a polyphonic rock symphony into a kind of sprechstimme monologue.
The voice of Waters is omnipresent on this re-recording. And it is not just restricted to the album’s lyrics. In the spaces between the singing, he has added spoken word passages. These include readings from the lyrics to Pink Floyd’s 1972 song “Free Four,” an email exchange he had following the death of a friend, a recollection of a dream he scribbled down immediately after waking up and various other scraps of text he seems to have had lying around. These spoken passages make you realize how much of the original album was wordless. There was the ticking clock on “Time,” the vocalizations on “The Great Gig in the Sky,” and the saxophone solo on “Money.” They also make you realize how, sometimes, you can say a lot more without using any words at all.
In an interview with The Telegraph this year, Waters justified this re-recording, stating of the original album that “not enough people recognised what it’s about.” But, for all of its brilliance, the original Dark Side of the Moon was rarely an album that rendered its meaning with great subtlety. It’s a struggle to imagine that many listeners failed to grasp what “Money” was about. And, for those who did, it’s even harder to see how a ponderous four-minute prose poem, replacing the instrumental middle section, will add any clarity. Sometimes a saxophone solo is worth a thousand words.
The album has been marketed as the sound of an older man looking back on an earlier work and infusing it with fresh wisdom. This re-recording sees Waters “embellish his original creations with […] the wisdom of age” the press package tells us. But, in reality, this album is less like the sound of wisdom, and more like the sound of your divorced parents arguing. On “Any Colour You Like,” Waters cannot resist throwing in a reference to the Ukraine war—a perennial topic of dispute between himself and Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour.
Waters has stooped far lower than this in his recent publicity rounds. He told The Telegraph: “I wrote The Dark Side of the Moon. Let’s get rid of all this ‘we’ crap!” (In fact, most songs on the album are co-credited and some do not feature Waters as a composer at all.) Furthermore, in a recent series of Q&A videos on YouTube, Waters reflected happily that he was able to make the last four Pink Floyd albums he was involved with “without much interference”—which shows exactly what he thinks of the input of his former bandmates.
The reality is that Waters has always relied on collaborators, and this is underlined by the fact that he only deigns to pick up an instrument on one track on this re-recording (bass guitar on “Any Colour You Like”). His backing band comport themselves adequately for the most part, bringing a new, stripped-back sound to these familiar songs. The acoustic guitar and Hammond organ combination on “Breathe” works effectively, and the theremin is an enjoyable addition to “Time.” But none of this is worthy of a standalone studio release.
The group is scheduled to play two dates at the London Palladium immediately after the album’s launch. It’s a venue with a fraction of the capacity of the stadia Waters usually sells out, and this seems like a much more suitable forum for a stripped-back reinterpretation of this kind. If Waters had approached the project in this frame of mind— as an intimate live tour—it might have worked much more effectively.
But, as it stands, Waters is scheduled to return to the arenas after these two solitary dates, so most Pink Floyd completists will have to make do with the studio release. Despite its flaws, they will still find an album that is listenable, because it is still Dark Side of the Moon—one of the greatest albums of all time. But fans may feel it’s more of a long slog than they remember, with the slower tempo stretching many of the songs beyond their natural length, and the spoken word passages lending a languorous quality that may induce drowsiness.
With this “redux” project, Waters’s aim seems to have been to place his auteur’s stamp on The Dark Side of the Moon and position himself as the album’s single guiding beam of creative light. But, if that is so, then his original band members and collaborators were surely the prism through which his creativity needed to be refracted to achieve its spectrum of full-color splendor. Without them, Waters is a monochrome beam floating in a colorless void.
