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Fri 16 October 2026 16:00, UK
There comes a time in a music fan’s life when they need to sit down and listen to a collection of classic albums. These are albums you can only hear for the first time once, and so they demand undivided attention. Without a doubt, one of those albums is Pink Floyd‘s The Dark Side of the Moon.
It might be the ultimate psychedelic record, not just because of its ambition in musical ideas but because of its seamless conceptual flow and truly groundbreaking production. On that very first listen to The Dark Side of the Moon, it’s hard not to be mesmerised by the textural scale of a record that does away with conventional song structure.
From time-signature changes to jarring interludes where ticking clocks override the mix, there’s plenty for the first-time listener to sink their teeth into. But naturally, because of the overwhelming ambition of the sonic ideas, lyrics tend to fall by the wayside. In fact, they’re rather wrongly disregarded as an afterthought on a record that doesn’t need to say anything to be so inspiring.
That school of thought does the lyrical work of Dark Side Of The Moon a rank injustice, for amid the chaos sit calm words that cut to the heart of a listener willing to let them in.
Take ‘Time’ for example: a song that, for all its wild arrangement, is actually a rather tragic musing on the process of ageing: “Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time / Plans that either come to nought, or half a page of scribbled lines / Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.”
But maybe the lyrical oversight that takes place on ‘Time’ is the result of Pink Floyd’s own negligence at the start of the record? Maybe psych-rock fans assumed that they weren’t worth paying attention to, for the words on the album opener ‘Breathe’ were so simplistic that it was chalked off as another album of psychedelic nothingness, musing on nonsense while the musicality did all the heavy lifting.
As beautiful a song as it is, it does adopt a somewhat trite lyrical view, particularly for a band who were known for being psychedelic. “Breathe in the air / Don’t be afraid to care’ is a relatively banal take that may have got some fans off on the wrong lyrical foot and thus undermined what came after.
Further reading: From The Vault
At least, that’s what Roger Waters thinks. “It’s a little adolescent and naïve in its preoccupations,” he said. “It’s like a rather wonderful, naïve painting… Well, yeah, I can cop that, but it’s kind of simplistic stuff.”
If anything, it suited the song’s relaxed palette, which made it the ideal way into the album. It was almost like a soft vortex you had to walk through before diving headfirst into the chaotic madness of the rest of the record, and thus served as a crucial part of its record-breaking chart run and the subsequent critical acclaim it has enjoyed.
