The Dark Side of the Moon
Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon is one of the bestselling and most iconic records of all time. Having sold tens of millions of copies worldwide since its release in 1973, it is one of the rare recordings to be instantly embraced by critics and fans alike and to endure for successive generations with no signs of losing its relevancy or impact. In the United States alone The Dark Side of the Moon has sold over 9 million copies since the early 90s!
“... I think that when it was finished, everyone thought it was the best thing we'd ever done to date… but there's no way that anyone felt it was five times as good as Meddle, or eight times as good as Atom Heart Mother, or the sort of figures that it has in fact sold…” -- Nick Mason, drummer, Pink Floyd
The figures are staggering:
- over 45 million copies sold worldwide with a record-setting 741 consecutive weeks on the Billboard 200 chart (that’s over 14 years!).
- In any given year, “Money” is played over 13,000 times on American radio stations. Close to 9,000 copies are still sold around the world each week.
- The statisticians here are at Wines That Rock calculate that, according to the latest census figures, The Dark Side of the Moon is in the music collection of 7% of Americans under the age of 50 – about 15 million people in the United States right now own a copy of the recording in some format.
All of this is a long way to say that The Dark Side of the Moon continues to have an incredible impact on millions of people’s lives almost forty years after its first release – and the images associated with the album, a simple prism on a black background, would be instantly recognizable and transporting to those same millions.
“The idea itself was cunningly cobbled from a standard physics textbook, which illustrated light passing through a prism. Of significance was the simple, elegant layout against black - standard textbook illustrations did not do this. Also important to the art direction, was the fortuitous decision to listen to Rick Wright (Pink
Floyd’s keyboard player), who suggested we do something clean, elegant and graphic, not photographic - not a figurative picture. And then to connect this idea to their live show, which was famous for its lighting, and subsequently to connect this to ambition and madness, themes Roger was exploring in the lyrics... The refracting glass prism referred to Floyd light shows - consummate use of light in the concert setting. Its outline is triangular and triangles are symbols of ambition, and are redolent of pyramids, both cosmic and mad in equal measure, all these ideas touching on themes in the lyrics. The joining of the spectrum extending round the back cover and across the gatefold inside was seamless like the segueing tracks on the album, whilst the opening heartbeat was represented by a repeating blip in one of the colours...”
—Storm Thorgerson, designer
In the same way the band knew they had made their best recording, they apparently “knew” exactly how it should be packaged. The artwork was created, as all Floyd artwork at that point had been, by Storm Thorgerson and his design firm, Hipgnosis, in conjunction with designer George Hardie. It is Hardie’s actual prism design which graces the cover. Again, from Storm:
“There were seven roughs submitted to the Floyd for Dark Side…A meeting was held…and the seven ideas were placed against the wall, a bit like a formal showing. The whole meeting actually took about three seconds, in so much as, the band cast their eyes over everything, looked at each other and in unison, “That one”, and left the room. It was the shortest design meeting on record.”
The Dark Side of the Moon has been a special piece of work since its first notes were played almost forty years ago. Music and imagery have seldom since been so perfectly combined in rock and roll.
