BACK TO “THE DARK SIDE”

Pink Floyd’s classic album “The Dark Side of the Moon” was one of those records that always seemed to have been around in my life but which, somehow, never really managed to ingrain itself into the fabric of it until far later than it should have done.

Certainly I remember my big sister having a copy in her record collection probably from more-or-less the time it first came out, its title no doubt forged in the fiery furnace of all those NASA moon missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but I think that I was more aware of the iconic cover image of the prism splitting the white light into its constituent bands than of its musical content.

Big Sis’s record collection seems to have been a big influence on my own later musical tastes because a lot of the tunes with which I am most familiar (like “The Monkees” or “Zeiger and Evans”) seem to come from that very same era of moon shots and the dawning of the age of Aquarius and so forth, which is a time far before I was able to scrape together any pocket money to spend it on spinning vinyl (unless it was a Frisbee, of course, but I doubt that I even had to buy that for myself…), and a few years later, when I squandered my hard-scrounged pocket money on such a thing as an actual LP, it was more likely to be a collection of theme tune covers by James Last and his Orchestra picked up from the newsagents alongside my crisps and liquorice.

Certainly, in the years after my sister lost most of her LP collection in a bizarre “house-fleeing” incident, I found that I was drawn to buying up many of the very same now “classic” records for my own LP collection when my friends were all trying to become rock stars or discovering the quite scary seeming world of nascent punk.

However, “The Dark Side of the Moon” didn’t manage to make that particular cut because of my unfamiliarity with its content, and so it would be many more years before our paths crossed again.

In the meantime, “Pink Floyd” became synonymous (to my generation at least) with its 1980 album (and later movie) “The Wall” and that smash hit single “Another Brick in the Wall (part two)” which young and ever-so-slightly rebellious people of about my age really seemed to enjoy. Nevertheless, despite having enjoyed that particular track, that was still another album it took me twenty-five years to actually buy a copy of…

“The Dark Side of the Moon” reappeared in my life during my first job when we all used to drag ourselves in at an ungodly hour to earn  a bit of overtime at weekends in the hope that having done our allotted hours, there was still enough of the weekend left in which to enjoy it. I seldom had control of the cassette player, but a wide range of music new and old got played out of it, much of which I still can’t listen to without being transported back to those quiet, dark and busy mornings from all those years ago.

At about the same time I joined the CD revolution by buying myself a “deck” (as I believe we called our “music centres” at that time - I was never “street” enough to regard it as a “Ghetto Blaster”) and, in order to supply that deck with a suitable “fix” of tunes to play on a budget limited to how much overtime money that I could earn, I signed up to one of those “music clubs” which advertised in the Sunday papers and found myself getting some relatively cheap CDs in return for agreeing to buy a CD a month from their selection.

All went well for a while until the selections started to look very similar each month, but then I started to find myself turning page after page in the monthly catalogue and finding nothing much that I fancied listening to, and began to run the serious risk of having to suffer the “Editor’s Pick” for a couple of months, which didn’t bear thinking about.

I could, of course, have used that as an excuse to explain some of the dafter corners of my music collection, but I’m far too honest for that, and yet it was during this time that one or two well-known classic albums like “The Velvet Underground and Nico” started to slip through my letterbox at the flat, and so it came to pass that The Pink Floyd and I became reunited via “The Dark Side of the Moon” and “Wish You Were Here” and which eventually ultimately led to that quarter-century late purchase of “The Wall”.

Both of those albums served a dual purpose in my life, not least because they made me re-explore some of the dustier and more neglected areas of my music collection and to rediscover that so-called “Prog Rock” wasn’t quite so pompous as I’d persuaded myself it was. Meanwhile, those two Pink Floyd classics from the 1970s were soothing enough to help me to endure a hangover and ambient enough for me to put on whenever I had one of my rare moments with company around to talk to, and I grew to admire their subtlety and brilliance long after the generation which they had been written by and for had discovered it.

Ah well, I suppose that I always was a late developer…

Later still, Pink Floyd played a sublime set at “Live 8” which introduced some of the “Scissor Sisters” generation to an example of their more mellow source material, and which led to me being bought a “Pink Floyd Greatest Hits” collection which got played a heck of a lot for a time. Certain tracks off it still get selected from the playlist on bad days at work, which tends to prove to me that “The Pink Floyd” have finally made it into the bedrock of my own musical story despite that very wobbly start.