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

1. Dark Side of the Moon was the first Pink Floyd album to feature Roger Waters as its sole lyricist.
Roger Waters had been contributing lyrics to Pink Floyd albums since 1968’s A Saucerful of Secrets (he also received co-writing credit on the instrumentals “Pow R. Toc H.” and “Interstellar Overdrive” from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the band’s 1967 debut), but Dark Sidemarked the first – though definitely not the last – time that the bassist took the lyrical reins for an entire Floyd LP. Along with adhering to a cohesive concept, Waters wanted Dark Side to feature lyrics that were more lucid and direct than anything the band had written before.

“That was always my big fight in Pink Floyd,” Waters is quoted as saying in Mark Blake’s Comfortably Numb – The Inside Story of Pink Floyd. “To try and drag it kicking and screaming back from the borders of space, from the whimsy that Syd [Barrett, the band’s original leader, who had written the bulk of the material on Piper] was into, to my concerns, which were much more political and philosophical.”

Though Waters’ lyrical dominance on Dark Side essentially planted the seeds for the massive rift that would eventually occur between him and the rest of the band, it was actually welcomed at the time. “I never rated myself terribly highly in the lyrics department, and Roger wanted to do it,” Gilmour admitted to Rolling Stone in 2011. “I think it was a sense of relief that he was willing to do that. At the same time, him being the lyricist and more of the driving force didn’t ever mean that he ought to be in full charge of the direction on the musical side of things. So we’ve always had a little bit of tension in those areas.”

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