(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Wed 10 September 2025 15:30, UK
It’s well known by now that artistry and sales don’t always match up. Sometimes, a throwaway single a band didn’t care about at all can wind up being the best-seller they’re stuck with playing on repeat, while the work they poured all their time and effort into falls to the wayside. Luckily, though, Pink Floyd avoided that curse.
They avoided it to some degree. Each member of the band has, or had, their own opinion on what parts of their discography deserve to be the best-known or at least more beloved. For Nick Mason, it’s randomly ‘Set The Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, an earlier 1968 track from A Saucerful of Secrets. However, as that record was caught up in the changing of guards between Syd Barrett and David Gilmour, the musical and personal complexity and the shit that came along with it were always bound to impact its legacy.
For David Gilmour, he’s always loved ‘Echoes’ and wanted more attention for that 1971 track. But Richard Wright seems to understand that while sales and artistry don’t often match up, sales and easy listenability do.
It would be easy to see that as an insult, as if it means that every artist needs to merely put out placid, easy-to-understand slop for the masses. But since the release of Dark Side Of The Moon in 1973, Pink Floyd have been proof that that’s not the case.
Since it came out, the record has spent a total of 942 weeks on the Billboard chart. It was an album they knew would do well, but not that well, as Wright said, “We all felt it would do at least as well as the other albums, but not quite as well as it did. All our albums have done well in this country, but Dark Side was number one in the US, and we never dreamed it would do that.”
It was the record that broke the states for them thanks in part to it’s epic, cinematic and pioneering feel. But also admittedly, partly because it is just really nice to listen to.
“It was probably the easiest album to sell in that it was the easiest to listen to,” Wright admitted. It’s not that the record is one-note of boring, quite the contrary in fact. Instead, while the album floats through its highs and lows and changes of pace, it’s simply that its concept album build lends itself to a front-to-back experience as the songs move as one unit.
It’s the sort of album you hit play on and then listen from start to finish, also making it the perfect album to own on vinyl, where skipping tracks is a faff and the top-to-bottom listening experience is a priority.
And so, with the desire to hear the band’s exciting new direction, and also the desire to simply have this record in their collection for a foolproof yet great listening experience, it lends itself to being an album that was always bound to be capable of shifting a lot of stock – and it did.
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