{"id":750260,"date":"2026-07-08T10:00:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T10:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/750260\/"},"modified":"2026-07-08T10:00:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T10:00:11","slug":"money-by-pink-floyd-the-story-behind-the-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/750260\/","title":{"rendered":"Money by Pink Floyd – The Story Behind The Song"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s the clank of a cash register. A jangle of coins. A tearing of till receipts. A loping bassline, built on just eight notes. And finally, David Gilmour\u2019s opening gambit (\u2018Money! Get away\u2026\u2019). So begins Pink Floyd<\/a>\u2019s first true international signature tune and their ticket to the stadium league.<\/p>\n

Nobody could have predicted those impending plaudits when Roger Waters<\/a> arrived at Abbey Road in June 1972 with the bones of the song: an awkward 7\/4 composition that tested both Nick Mason and guesting tenor saxophonist Dick Parry.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s Roger\u2019s riff,\u201d noted Gilmour. \u201cRoger came in with the verses and lyrics for Money more or less completed. We made up middle sections, guitar solos and all that stuff. We also invented some new riffs \u2013 we created a 4\/4 progression for the guitar solo and made the poor saxophone player play in 7\/4.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cOccasionally,\u201d Waters reflected, \u201cI would do things and Dave would say, \u2018No, that\u2019s wrong. There should be another beat. That\u2019s only seven\u2019. I\u2019d say, \u2018Well, that\u2019s how it is\u2019. A number of my songs have bars of odd length. When you play Money on an acoustic guitar, it\u2019s very much a blues thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the studio take, Waters would re-record the sound effects that he had originally created in his garden shed by throwing coins into a bowl used by his wife for mixing clay, while Mason drilled holes into old British pennies and threaded them onto strings to create a distinctive metallic chink.<\/p>\n

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Yet the song\u2019s most dazzling moment came from Gilmour. Though the guitarist would self-deprecatingly refer to Money as \u201cnice white English architecture students getting funky\u201d, there was searing soul in his solo, which adrenalises the song at the three-minute mark then drops its effects for the \u2018dry\u2019 section at 3:48.<\/p>\n

While Floyd\u2019s management quickly identified Money as a potential \u201cmonster hit\u201d, the band members themselves were ambivalent, feeling that the tricky time signature would hold it back, and also envious of Led Zeppelin<\/a>\u2019s refusal to issue singles or pander to radio.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe didn\u2019t think anything would happen with Money,\u201d noted Rick Wright. \u201cAnd suddenly, it just did.\u201d<\/p>\n

And how. Released on May 7, 1973 \u2013 two months after parent album The Dark Side Of The Moon<\/a> had topped the Billboard chart \u2013 Money climbed to No.13 in the US, announcing Floyd as rock heavyweights and making Waters\u2019s wealth-baiting lyric ring a little hollow. With Money in their locker, the band found themselves harangued at shows across the planet.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was quite a shock,\u201d Gilmour said, \u201cto be confronted with people down the front all screaming for us to play Money \u2013 when previously our slightly more reverential audiences were sitting in absolute silence waiting to hear the next pin being dropped.<\/p>\n

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Money (1981 re-recording) – YouTube
\n\"Money<\/p>\n

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Unusually, Money was re-recorded by Gilmour in 1981 for the Pink Floyd compilation album, A Collection of Great Dance Songs. The band had recently signed to Columbia Records, but Capitol still held the US rights to the original 1973 studio version of The Dark Side of the Moon and flatly refused to license Money to their rival.<\/p>\n

To bypass this roadblock, Columbia asked the band to re-record the track from scratch, but Gilmour and Waters weren’t talking, and Mason and Wright weren’t available, so the guitarist re-recorded the song from scratch, playing every part himself apart from the saxophone, which was reprised by Dick Parry.<\/p>\n

Gilmour’s new version was as faithful a reproduction as he could manage, although his drums lacked Mason’s swing and the bass felt rather perfunctory compared to Waters’ more swaggering original.<\/p>\n

Roger Waters – Money (Official Lyric Video, DSOTM REDUX) – YouTube
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Fifty years on from Money’s emergence, Waters got his own back, releasing an unexpected new version as part of his Redux re-recording of The Dark Side Of The Moon.<\/p>\n

Gone was the original’s lively rhythm, replaced by a slow, brooding acoustic arrangement. Gone was the original’s most iconic instrumentation \u2013 Gilmour’s guitar and Parry’s saxophone \u2013 replaced by spooky strings and a foreboding piano. Gone was Gilmour’s voice, replaced by a gravelly new vocal from Waters. And the midsection now contained an apocalyptic spoken-word poem.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe original Dark Side of the Moon feels in some ways like the lament of an elder being on the human condition,\u201d said Waters. \u201cBut Dave, Rick, Nick and I were so young when we made it, and when you look at the world around us, clearly the message hasn\u2019t stuck. That\u2019s why I started to consider what the wisdom of an 80-year-old could bring to a reimagined version.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s the clank of a cash register. A jangle of coins. A tearing of till receipts. A loping…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":750261,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[88,216],"class_list":["post-750260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=750260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750260\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/750261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=750260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=750260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=750260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}