Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’: 10 Things You Didn’t Know

6. Paul McCartney’s contributions to the album were deleted – but the Beatles made a surprise appearance on the record.
In an attempt to further tie Dark Side‘s songs together, Roger Waters came up with the idea of recording interviews with Abbey Road staffers, road crew members, and anyone else working at the studio – asking them a series of questions about subjects ranging from the banal (favorite colors and foods) to the deeply serious (madness and death) – and then threading some of the interview snippets into the final mix. Paul McCartney, who was finishing Wings’ Red Rose Speedway album at Abbey Road, was actually among the interviewees, but Waters deemed his answers unusable. “He was the only person who found it necessary to perform, which was useless, of course,” Waters told Pink Floyd biographer John Harris. “I thought it was really interesting that he would do that. He was trying to be funny, which wasn’t what we wanted at all.”

Even so, McCartney – or at least his music – still managed to make a brief appearance on the album. If you listen close to the end of “Eclipse,” the album’s closing track, a passage from an orchestral version of the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride” can be heard; the song was apparently playing in the background at the studio while Abbey Road doorman Gerry O’Driscoll (who delivered the immortal lines, “There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark. The only thing that makes it look light is the sun.”) was being recorded.

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