Go to any department store during Christmas and you’ll see an array of failsafe presents for your dad: Razor head replacement, a multi-pack of brown ales, and some sort of crude joke written around the artwork of Pink Floyd‘s The Dark Side of the Moon.
That iconic symbol is always there every Christmas, for present buyers both in and out of the know. But why? What is it about this famous artwork that seemingly appeals to the boomers? Well, quite simply, it was the album of a time that we romanticise as the heyday of modern music, a time when your parents weren’t your personal taxi driver but curious headbangers in their own right, losing themselves to the psychedelic sounds of prog-rock.
The Dark Side of the Moon made Pink Floyd a household name in that right, and who have since been heralded as the band of that generation. But like all interesting music stories, there was more beneath the surface.
They had been scratching at the walls of greatness before 1973, exploring every avenue of their experimental tendencies to varied effect. With Syd Barrett fronting the band, they platformed an acid rock revolution with The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Playfully haunting melodies were funnelled into conventional songwriting structures to usher in a novel generation of psychedelic music.
The deeper their music plunged into those experimental realms, the further Barrett descended into madness, and, soon after, he was booted from the band. In somewhat of a limbo, they recruited David Gilmour, who slowly eked out melodic greatness from the band. Like a teenager, they laboured through the growing pains of Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother, showing glimpses of the sort of innovative genius they would later showcase on The Dark Side of the Moon.
Then in 1973, the moving parts of this elaborate machine clicked into place, and they became frighteningly concise. The 1973 epic took The Beatles’ blueprint of a concept album and made it stratospheric. But it became somewhat of an albatross around the neck of the band, who would spend the remainder of their days trying to recapture that mercurial essence of greatness.
On Wish You Were Here and The Wall, they would show it in flashes, but ultimately, it was unrepeatable. The pressures of that pursuit opened up the cracks of what had always been a fractious band dynamic, and soon after, they would dissolve into the night, never again repeating the heights of their recorded greatness.
So, what is their best-selling album?
In what may be the purest example of when a band’s creative and commercial peak has converged in one record, Pink Floyd’s best-selling album is of course The Dark Side of the Moon. It sold 45million copies worldwide, cementing the band’s commercial legacy forever, but, perhaps, more importantly, is cited as one of the most groundbreaking albums of all time.
Artists from André 3000 to Paul McCartney all cite it as a work of inspiration, and it’s probably the only piece of art the four warring members can agree on. David Gilmour noted, “We knew that it was going to do better than anything we had previously done because it was obvious”, and his nemesis Roger Waters claimed, “I always thought it would be hugely successful”.
