2023 is of course, the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s classic album, ‘Dark Side of the Moon’. There has been a remastered anniversary release by the band, together with a live set of an early performance. I bought the latter, but not the former. The album was remastered a few years back, and I doubt technology has moved enough for my ears to hear the difference.
Anyway, that was the ‘official’ commemoration. Roger Waters, the founding, ex-member of Pink Floyd announced way back that he was intending to release a re-recorded version of the full album, and everyone thought he was mad. Why would anyone want to re-record the ‘perfect’ album? I was skeptical, it has to be said. Couldn’t see the point, really, but Roger had the lion’s share of the writing credit and no one would dispute his right to revisit old ground.
Before anyone had even heard a note of then new recording relevant corners of the internet were abuzz with fevered condemnation: “He’ll spoil Dark Side of the Moon”, or “It will destroy the legacy off the original recording” and so on and so forth.
This is, of course, drivel. The original album, the original arrangements, the original recordings, the live performances, the videos, the LPs, the tapes, the CDs, the DVDs are going nowhere. You can still get hold of them any time you like. You can stream the original, or the remaster, or any edit from (probably) and platform you wish. Roger is 80 years old. He hasn’t the time, energy, or inclination to block, delete, destroy, remove or steal every copy of the original album from every place it exists.
The legacy is safe.
As to ‘Dark Side of the Moon Redux’, if you fear that you will somehow be contaminated by it, that it will override and subsume your thoughts, feeling and attachment to the original, well don’t listen to it. And maybe see someone about your paper-thin psyche while you’re at it.
I’ve bought a copy. I listened to the three tracks that were released ahead of time. I still preordered a copy.
Dark Side of the Moon was always about death and madness and it still is. The new interpretation, recorded by a 79 year old looking back fifty years, majors rather more on the side of death now, but it’s all still there. But it’s been taken back to its framework and foundations. Don’t come expecting a rerecording: there are no flying guitar solos, no keyboard flourishes, or drum fills. It is a stripped back bare bones recording, with minimum instrumentation and additions to the lyric. Lyrics and the bare bones scaffolding of songs being, after all Waters’ strength in songwriting. The rest comes from his collaborators to flesh them out and give them form. But that’s not what this album is about.
Not all of the new -additional – lyrics work. There is something of the sixth form about them. Waters has never lost his idealism and he currently has no one to edit him, so in places you just have to let it roll past you and let him get on with it. It doesn’t last long. The musical delivery is slow and dark, with the words being half sung, half spoken. Think Tom Waites in a night club at the end of then evening where everyone is a little stoned, a little drunk and tired. If you need visuals, imagine it as an animation by Frank Miller is the style of Sin City. Above all, think of it with smoke and whisky.
I saw a review of the album that was almost neutral. The reviewer wasn’t ‘offended’ by the work, but neither was he bowled away by it. He made one very good point, which I think bears repeating: this treatment of Dark Side of the Moon would have made a good performance piece, a one or two nights’ residency in a theatre or similar, with an intimate, closed in feeling. Tell the story, perform Dark Side of the Moon Redux, trace and video it and release it as a commemorative live album and DVD. Maybe he will – I understand he’s booked a couple of dates to perform it at the Palladium in London in the near future.
I very much doubt that if you listen to the album properly, and actually give it ears and consideration, that you will find that it’s a bad release. It won’t supplant the original on your playlist and it won’t get played as often. But I think there’s a place for it, and there is a new poignancy to the words performed by an octogenarian. It’s a redux, a call back, a bringing back to mind.
Right at the outset of the recording, he says, “The memories of a man in his old age, are the deeds of the man in his prime”. Listen to it with that borne in mind, and you’ll get it: “one day closer to death” is far more poignant at age 80 than it would have been aged 29.
Hawkesmoor's Blog 