The Dark Side of the Moon put Pink Floyd in a difficult position, guitarist David Gilmour says. Although the group had been a recording act since 1967 — and had even scored a hit with founder Syd Barrett on guitar and vocals — they remained essentially an underground act. Once David Gilmour took over for the ailing Barrett, the group delved into a more experimental and avant-garde style of music.
But The Dark Side of the Moon was something else. With the album, the band found the perfect mix of extended prog excursions and radio-friendly songs, like “Breathe (In the Air),” “Time” and “Money.” In an era of electric guitar heroes, Gilmour became ranked with the best of them, thanks to his fluid guitar solos, played on his famous Black Strat.
The Dark Side of the Moon became an international smash hit upon its release in 1973. Suddenly, everyone knew who Pink Floyd were.
And as Gilmour says, that made creating their followup album incredibly hard. Over eight years, Pink Floyd had released at least one album per year. Now two years would pass before the group released their next record, Wish You Were Here.
"We were in a very strange place,” the guitarist tells NPR. “You know, the ‘difficult second album’ thing springs to mind. It wasn’t a second album or anything, but it was the second album after having the knock-your-socks-off, fulfill-all-your-dreams sort of album, right? The Dark Side of the Moon.
"And there was a lot of lethargy in the studio, a lot of sitting around trying to get ourselves up into getting back to work properly. And it took quite a long time.”
That disorganization was a frustration to bass guitarist Roger Waters, who was central to the band’s musical creations. And it had a lot to with the title and theme of the next record.
Says Gilmour “That is part of what the title of the album and that song is about — Roger’s view that some of us weren’t really there a lot of the time."
The success of The Dark Side of the Moon also forced the band to think more about why they were making records.
"Are you doing this for more fame? Do you want more money when you've done rather well at that moment?” Gilmour says. “All of those things that you dream of when you were a teenager in your first full band were realized by that album.
“And you have to then think, Do I really love music or is it the fame that I really love, or is it the money that I'm after, or is it the other benefits that come with it? I think I got to the conclusion that I really was there for the music more than anything else."
Discussing the origins of Dark Side, Gilmour says that, at that time, he didn’t see a career in pop music as lasting anything more than a decade. However, he adds that, “as soon as Roger came in with the idea of its central themes of how the pressures of modern life can affect your sanity, [the album] started taking shape.”
Waters didn’t have to look far for inspiration: Barrett’s psychological struggles still hung heavy on the band. By the time of Wish You Were Here, his absence and mental decline would become one of the themes the bassist explored within an album about alienation.
As for Gilmour, he was eventually able to see the weaknesses in Dark Side and, in doing so, find a purpose in their follow-up.
“My problem with Dark Side was that I thought that Roger’s emergence on that album as a great lyric writer was such that he came to overshadow the music in places,” he says, “and there were moments when we didn’t concentrate as hard on the music side of it as we should have done.
“That was absorbed into an effort to try to make the balance between music and the words a better one on Wish You Were Here.”
Elsewhere, Gilmour has revealed how one of his "Animals" solos was lost forever, what it was like working with Jimi Hendrix, and why he never saw Pink Floyd as a prog band during their heyday.
