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

7. “Us and Them” was a reject from the Zabriskie Pointsoundtrack.
The second of two singles released from Dark Side (“Money” was the first) and a minor hit in the U.S. and Canada, “Us and Them” began life in 1969 as a lovely piano-and-bass instrumental called “The Violent Sequence,” which as written by Wright and Waters and submitted for inclusion in the soundtrack of Michelangelo Antonioni’s counterculture drama Zabriskie Point. While the Italian director would eventually include three Pink Floyd recordings – “Heart Beat, Pig Meat,” “Crumbling Land” and “Come in Number 51, Your Time Is Up” – on the soundtrack, he didn’t feel that “The Violent Sequence” was appropriate for the film. In an interview for Classic Albums: The Making of Dark Side of the Moon, Waters recalled Antonioni saying, “It’s beautiful, but too sad. It makes me think of church!” More than two years after it was initially rejected by Antonioni, the band revisited the demo and recast it as a moving meditation on war and poverty.

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