Pink Floyd has, for as long as many people can remember, been one of the most famous musical groups in history. The band’s albums, as trippy and generally laid back as they are, are filled to their brims with symbolic imagery, emotional landscaping, and self-referential messages. The peaks of Pink Floyd’s success, in fact, came in the form of their two most complex albums: Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall.
The Wall is generally known as the more famous of the two, for a few reasons. For one thing, it was a two-disc album, a story so long that it could not adequately be told in the amount of time that one record would have allowed. It was because of this overarching story, which covers a life’s worth of social confusion, disillusion, and personal mental collapse, that the album was just a few years later made into a full-fledged feature film. The movie, titled simply, The Wall, gives the album’s tale a face, and is even more full of analyzable details and symbolism than the music that makes up the entirety of its soundtrack.
But what of Dark Side of the Moon? It is shorter, and its story about the confusion and stress of life causing one to go mad may not be quite as emotionally relatable, but it still ranks as far more accomplished than The Wall ever was. At 22.7 million confirmed copies sold, and almost twice as many claimed, Dark Side ranks as one of the most-bought albums of all time. The Wall, for reference, has sold 17.1 million copies, with 30 million claimed.
Despite this, Dark Side never quite got as much recognition as its two-disc cousin. The famous cover image of a prism refracting a rainbow has become a legendary symbol of rock and roll and has been remade and rehashed plenty of times for new marketing methods, but when it comes to philosophical discussion and reviews, The Wall has long been a far more common topic.
Recently, however, that changed a little. In order to celebrate Dark Side’s 40th anniversary, playwright Tom Stoppard put together a radio drama – essentially, a play that relies entirely on audial presence, without any visible stage to watch – which helps to highlight the meaning of the iconic record. The drama, aptly named Darkside, was aired on BBC Radio on the day of the album’s 40th anniversary celebration, briefly streamed on the BBC website, and then later released to other online outlets.
Similar to The Wall’s movie form, Darkside uses a soundtrack consisting solely of the songs of its original album, interspersed with relevant dialogue that solidifies the intended story. The play is every bit as surrealistic as the music that spawned it and in fact gives the songs’ meanings an even broader scale. While it can be confusing to listen to at first, the message becomes apparent by the end.
Originally, Dark Side of the Moon told the story of personal madness. It details the myriad stressors of life, all of which are surprisingly relevant even decades after it was released, and insinuates that these things are only made worse by the people of the world all being too focused on their own goals to help make things better for everyone else. The frantic rush to meet the demands of a work schedule, the lack of time in the day to do all you want to do, even the rudeness of a random passerby on the sidewalk, all lead to the implied character of the album descending into delirious madness. The overarching message of the album is simple: life is short, and no one ever knows where it’s going to lead, so everyone should strive to do something meaningful and make the world a better place while on it.
In Darkside, the madness within the lead character is broadened to a global scale. Emily McCoy, a college student studying philosophy, is presented with a series of baffling ethical dilemmas and moral differences in the form of “thought experiments,” and as a result of this whirlwind of ideologies, it is revealed to her that the world is quickly being destroyed by those who look out only for their own success in life. Yet, at the same time, it is those people who are in charge of society as we know it.
In the end, the moral of the story is a slight reworking of that from the album. The world is doomed to fall eventually, but people who assume the worst of things and try to make the best of it for themselves will only end up speeding things along. It takes a selfless person, one who is willing to make sacrifice for the good others, to carve a path of good out of the madness that’s taken over the world.
Though complex in its nature and heavily referential to scholars in the field of philosophy, Darkside is still a fairly accessible play that adds a fitting layer of action to the songs of the famed album. While no longer available on the BBC website, it can be found either via a YouTube search, or (officially) on the Pink Floyd page on Spotify.