Trivia / The Dark Side of the Moon

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• Banned in China: Early South Korean copies had "Us and Them" and "Brain Damage" removed, likely due to the anti-war and anti-government lyrics in those songs. It took until 1979 for the album to even have an official release there. South Korea was effectively a military dictatorship and a very censorious place at the time. Oddly enough, the English lyrics for those songs were still printed on the lyric sheet included with the album. Copies released after that country's transition to democracy in 1987 use the full tracklisting.
• Black Sheep Hit: "Money", taken from this album, is quite different from the band's usual style, being a mix of blues and funk rather than the jazz-infused Progressive Rock that defines the rest of their catalog.
• Blooper: The end of "The Great Gig in the Sky" has an apparent engineering error, where the tape speeds up and slows back down as the piano chord dies away.
• Breakthrough Hit: This album made Pink Floyd a household name outside of their home in the UK. As individual songs go, that would be "Money".
• Completely Different Title:
  • Japanese:
    • Dark Side of the Moon -> 狂気 (Madness)
    • Any Colour You Like -> 望みの色を (The Color of Hope)
    • Brain Damage -> 狂人は心に (Madman in Mind)
• Creator's Favorite Episode: Roger Waters ranked this album and The Wall as his most essential records with Pink Floyd.
• False Credit: "Speak to Me" is officially credited to Nick Mason, who rarely ever made any songwriting contributions. While Mason claimed that he indeed wrote the track (a sound collage consisting of clips from other songs on the album) himself, Roger Waters and Richard Wright claimed that they actually wrote the song and simply gave Mason a writing credit so he could make some extra money from songwriting royalties. Following his acrimonious departure from Pink Floyd, Waters stated that he regretted attributing the piece to Mason.
• Feelies: Most vinyl copies of the album come with two posters and a set of two sticker sheets. The Immersion edition from 2011 has even more trinkets, including postcards, marbles, replica letters, tickets, and tour programs, coasters, a Roy Lichtenstein-style art print based on the album cover, and a scarf.
• Killer App:
  • An audiophile favorite from its release, the album was one for CDs, as well as high-end audio equipment in general. So many people wanted a copy of one of the best-sounding recordings ever made in a format that wouldn't wear out like vinyl or tape that EMI had a CD plant dedicated to nothing but The Dark Side of the Moon in The '80s... one of the two that existed at the time. It was also one of the first rock albums that audiophiles took seriously, where they traditionally favored classical or jazz recordings, due to its sound quality.
  • Vinyl reissues are staples of the vinyl revival movement of the 21st century.
  • It was also seen as such for Quadrophonic (4-channel surround) sound systems, which used specially-made vinyl albums and 8-track tapes, which tried to gain traction during the '70s. A 5.1-channel surround mix was released on Super Audio CD (a CD format developed by Sony & Philips that tried to gain traction before the advent of Blu-ray), for the album's 30th anniversary in 2003, and this release is so coveted among digital audiophiles that it briefly went back into print in 2013 and 2019. Both the 4.0 and 5.1 mixes would eventually be included on the...
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition:
  • A box set of the album, called Immersion, was released in 2011 as part of a massive re-release of the band's catalog. It includes four different mixes of the album, a live version performed in London in 1974, tour films, demos, a hardcover book, and other collectibles. The same was done with Wish You Were Here and The Wall.
  • Another box set was released in 2023 to celebrate the album's 50th anniversary, which, as well as featuring multiple mixes (including a new remaster correlated to this set) and many collectibles, has a vinyl and CD for each mix.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: "Dark Side of the Rainbow", the supposed "synchronisation" between this album and The Wizard of Oz. All of the band members and Alan Parsons, the engineer for the album, have stated that this is a coincidence; they do have quite a few moments that match well with each other, but it wasn't on purpose. Besides, deliberately synchronising the album in production would have added a not-inconsiderable amount of effort and expense, since the early 1970s was rather short on convenient ways to play movies in the recording studio. It might have sprung off from the fact film soundtracks were created in this era, including by Pink Floyd themselves, interrupting recording this very album.
  David Gilmour: Some guy with too much time on his hands had this idea of combining Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon.
  Nick Mason: It's absolute nonsense, it has nothing to do with The Wizard of Oz. It was all based on The Sound of Music.
• Referenced by...:
  • "Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun" from The Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique samples "Time", while "B-Boy Bouillabaisse" from the same album samples "Breathe".
  • Culture Club's "The War Song," from their 1984 album, Waking Up with the House on Fire, quotes "The Great Gig in the Sky," right down to having Clare Torry on guest vocal.
  • The industrial metal band Ministry named their 1999 studio album Dark Side of the Spoon.
  • In the The Loud House episode "One of the Boys", in the brief shot where a colorless background to the inside of Loki and Loni's room can be seen, there's what appears to be a poster of the album's cover.
  • The first trailer for Denis Villeneuve's Dune concludes with a choral cover of "Eclipse".
  • Peter Saville's cover for Joy Division's 1979 album Unknown Pleasures took some design cues from this album, with a simple, abstract design based on a scientific image against a black background.
• Throw It In!: "On the Run" was the result of David Gilmour messing around with the EMS Synthi A's sequencer. Roger Waters then put in a entirely different riff; the band then added other effects.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Paul McCartney and his wife Linda were interviewed for the voices on the album, but their responses weren't as interesting as the others and the recordings weren't used. Interviewed for John Harris' The Dark Side of the Moon: The Making of the Pink Floyd Masterpiece, Waters said that their answers were "trying too hard to be funny".
  • "On the Run" was originally a bluesy jam.
  • Early versions of "The Great Gig in the Sky" had recordings of preachers and later archival audio of NASA missions, before Alan Parsons introduced the band to Clare Torry.
• Working Title:
  • While The Dark Side of the Moon was the initial title for the album, it was renamed Eclipse after Medicine Head (which featured Keith Relf of The Yardbirds on bass) released an album called Dark Side of the Moon in 1972. Pink Floyd was aware of this, and debuted the album in concert that year under the name Eclipse. When it became clear that the Medicine Head album was a commercial failure, they decided to switch back to The Dark Side of the Moon and accordingly renamed the song "The Dark Side of the Moon" "Brain Damage".
  • "On the Run" was originally written as "The Travel Sequence".
  • "The Mortality Sequence" and "The Religion Song" were tossed around as potential titles for what ultimately became "The Great Gig in the Sky".
  • The song that morphed into "Us and Them", first penned for (but ultimately excluded from) the Zabriskie Point soundtrack, was originally titled "The Violent Sequence".

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