Roger Waters recently revealed new details about the re-recording of “The Dark Side of the Moon” in a new interview with the Telegraph.
The album’s original March release date has been pushed back to May because Waters hasn’t finished tinkering with the recordings. A big concert that was meant to launch it in March has also been postponed to May and moved to a different venue.
Waters is adamant that the Dark Side is his to muck about with however he sees fit. “I wrote The Dark Side of the Moon. Let’s get rid of all this ‘we’ c–p! Of course we were a band; there were four of us, we all contributed, but it’s my project, and I wrote it. So… blah!” (Waters, who wrote the album’s lyrics, is credited with composing three of its 10 tracks, and co-writing music for two others.
Waters seems to have decided that what was wrong with the original album’s beautiful instrumental tracks was that they didn’t have Waters talking all over them. Now they do.
After a bad dream one night, he splurged down a description of it on his laptop, and recites the whole dreadful prose poem over On The Run unedited: “It was a revelation, almost Patmosian whatever that means… a fight with evil, in this case an apparently all-powerful hooded and cloaked figure… it brooked no rebuttal.”
This somehow ties in to his grand idea about following “the voice of reason” – in this dream, a bonfire with the voice of Atticus Finch – a phrase he uses constantly in the Telegraph interview, and which he says is the theme of the album. It was the message of the 1973 Dark Side, too, he says. So why has he remade it? “Because not enough people recognised what it’s about, what it was I was saying then.” This new version, he hopes, will hammer the point home.
Always following The Voice of Reason is good advice, or would be, if so many of history’s most unreasonable voices hadn’t presented themselves as precisely that.
Others on the album include Waters’s multi-instrumentalist collaborator Gus Seyffert, and Seyffert’s girlfriend, Azniv Korkejian (a brilliant Syria-born singer who performs as Bedouine), plus a Baptist minister on Hammond organ. Waters sings throughout, but only actually plays an instrument on one track, a terrific bass solo on Us and Them, which made me wish he’d played across the whole thing; it seems such a missed opportunity.
In another interview prior to this, Roger was quoted as saying, “the new concept is meant to reflect on the meaning of the work, to bring out the heart and soul of the album,” he says, “both musically and spiritually.” “I’m the only one singing my songs on these new recordings, and there are no rock and roll guitar solos.” The spoken words, superimposed on instrumental pieces like “On the Run” or “The Great Gig in the Sky,” and over “Speak to Me,” “Brain Damage,” “Any Color You Like,” and “Money,” are meant to clarify his “mantra,” the message he considers central to all his work.
A release date is currently being planned for May, and a launch concert date is also being finalised at present, but we will bring you further details as they become available.
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Roger Waters recently revealed new details about the re-recording of “