The Dark Side of the Moon Review

The reason this outlasts every record of its type is that it is a pop album pretending to be a suite. The songs are short, the melodies are plain, and the joins between them are engineered so carefully that most listeners cannot say where one ends. Time opens with a wall of clocks and then an actual song about waking up at thirty and realising you have wasted a decade. Money is in seven four and nobody notices because the groove is so easy.

The Great Gig in the Sky is a session singer told to sing about dying with no words, doing it in two takes. Us and Them uses reverb as a subject rather than an effect. The spoken fragments came from index cards handed to anyone passing through the building, and the laughter and the line about being mad hold the whole thing together. It could easily have been pompous. It is instead direct, humane and beautifully paced, which is why it never left the shelves.