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Steve Lamacq plays the whole of Pink Floyd's legendary album The Dark Side of the Moon. Listen along and join in the conversation via #6MusicAlbumClub

"Contextually speaking this was the Floyd's saving grace. By 1972 they'd firmly claimed the avant garde (read: musically unadventurous but prone to hitting large gongs and setting fire to stuff onstage) art rock mainstream as their own playground. Yet these middle-class boys still craved, like, bread, man. After a prolonged period of fumbling soundtracks for European arthouse movies they'd finally emerged from under the shadow of founder/visionary/lost-marble icon, Syd Barrett with a coherently beautiful album, Meddle. Roger Waters had some big ideas about madness, life, death and all that deep stuff. EMI had a rather splendid studio with some top-notch engineers. Six months later...voila!

What made this concoction so popular at the time was a series of coincidences. The western world was now fully stereoed-up; the band hooked up with an immaculate engineer by the name of Alan Parsons (yes, that one with the project) and last, but not least, the band bothered to write some really fine songs. This was a long way from the half-baked nonsense that had plagued Ummagumma or Atom Heart Mother. Gilmour's guitar was now exquisitely tasteful (the heart still breaks over that little phrase about 36 seconds into ''Breathe'') and zen-like in what he could leave out (check the most underrated track ''Any Colour You Like''). The sound effects are as hackneyed as a 70s stereo demonstration record (that this album effectively replaced in most hi-fi stores at the time), yet the overall flow of the album still satisfies as it merges existential ballads (''Time'', ''Us And Them'') with cynical rockers (''Money'') and arena-impressing freak outs (''The Great Gig In The Sky'')."

Chris Jones
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