Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd (Click to comment/discuss)
I know, I know. I guess this was going to turn up at some point. It's a juggernaut. In fact when I told my brother I was setting up this club and asked him to guess which album I was starting with, he guessed this one without hesitation. It first came into my possession at Amsterdam train station. I was taking part in a debating conference in The Hague with my school and on the weekend before the debating started we took a trip to the country's capital. I remember it well because there was a group of kids stealing CDs from the shelves. Little did they know you had to take the box to the counter where they kept all the discs and provided them upon presentation. They were stealing empty plastic cases, serves them right! I must have liked the look of the cover and bought the album to play on my discman.
The funny thing about this album is that there isn't really a single on it, 'Money' gets played occasionally on the radio. But this is a piece of work created in a time when the listening to an album was meant to be an event and done so in its entirety. While we know the names of the artists that make up Pink Floyd, in a way they are a little like the Shins in that the music is king. David Gilmour is a guitarist who has a point to his solos, not unlike Mark Knopfler, there is no unnecessary riffing despite be quite capable of doing so.
While I doubt the conspiracy theory that the album was made to sync up with the Wizard of Oz is true, I did once watch a video where the music had been overlaid on the film. The one break in the record before the song 'Money' begins matches precisely the moment the film flicks from black and white to full technicolour.
A while back I listened to a debate in which an avid classical music fan argued that so called pop music was not a genuine artform. The person chairing the debate played him a section of Dark Side of the Moon and he could not deny that his interest had been grabbed. And therein lies the truth. This record stands up to Mozart, Bach or any other music creator you care to mention. It will last alongside the works of the greats for as long as humans stick around. Hans Zimmer has just reworked the final track 'Eclipse' for the new cinematic version of the Frank Herbert book Dune. A whole new generation will discover it.
More than a classic, it sits at the pinnacle of any human achievement.