Roger Waters has unveiled the first sample of music from his controversial reworking of Pink Floyd’s classic The Dark Side Of The Moon. The 52-second clip was uploaded to YouTube and features footage of Waters in the studio, soundtracked by the new version of Us And Them.
“When we recorded the stripped down songs for the Lockdown Sessions, the 50th anniversary of the release of Dark Side of The Moon was looming on the horizon,” says Waters. “It occurred to to me that Dark Side of the Moon could well be a suitable candidate for a similar re-working, partly as a tribute to the original work, but also to re-address the political and emotional message of the whole album.
“I discussed it with Gus and Sean [musician/producer Gus Seyffer and collaborator Sean Evans], and when we’d stopped giggling and shouting ‘You must be fucking mad’ at one another we decided to take it on. We are now in the process of finishing the final mix. It’s turned out really great and I’m excited for everyone to hear it.
“It’s not a replacement for the original which, obviously, is irreplaceable. But it is a way for the seventy nine year old man to look back across the intervening fifty years into the eyes of the twenty nine year old and say, to quote a poem of mine about my Father, “We did our best, we kept his trust, our Dad would have been proud of us”. And also it is a way for me to honour a recording that Nick and Rick and Dave and I have every right to be very proud of.”
News of the reworking was originally announced during an interview Waters undertook with the Daily Telegraph, during which he told writer Tristram Fane Saunders, “I wrote The Dark Side of the Moon. Let’s get rid of all this ‘we’ crap! 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 has recently become engaged in another war of words with his former Pink Floyd bandmate David Gilmour.
