Pink Floyd

At the start of the Seventies, Pink Floyd were still a band searching for the definitive shape of their own music. The psychedelic era of Syd Barrett was by then behind them, but the group had yet to find that balance of experimentation, songcraft, technology and conceptual ambition that would soon turn them into one of the most important phenomena in the history of rock. These were years of transition and trial and error: the sprawling suites of “Ummagumma“, the orchestral experiment of “Atom Heart Mother“, the moods of “Meddle”, the film scores, the concerts where the songs changed from night to night. It's precisely within this string of attempts that the ideas destined to converge in “The Dark Side Of The Moon“ began to surface.
The album that would change the course of Pink Floyd's history forever in 1973 didn't spring from a sudden flash of inspiration in the studio. It was the result of a long process, in which old and new material was recovered, reworked and put to the service of a project that had finally found its unity. Roger Waters wanted to build a work around the pressures that shape human existence: the passage of time, money, death, madness, power, fear and conflict. The music had to follow the same logic, avoiding as much as possible the traditional succession of separate tracks and turning the album into a single continuous sonic flow.

The soundtrack that never was

Something was already taking shape as early as late 1971. In the final stretch of that year's live activity, ideas emerged that would be developed over the following months; at the end of November the band regrouped to bring order to the new material, thinking from the outset about how it would work on stage too. In the early months of 1972, “The Dark Side Of The Moon”, initially presented as “The Dark Side Of The Moon: A Piece For Assorted Lunatics”, was thus performed live even before being completed in the studio. The concerts became a giant testing ground: structures, transitions, dynamics and lyrics could be tried out in front of an audience and continually refined.
Among the material recovered for the new project was one piece that dated all the way back to 1969, when Michelangelo Antonioni had brought Pink Floyd on board for the soundtrack of “Zabriskie Point“. Richard Wright had composed a piano sequence, known as “The Violent Sequence”, meant to accompany a scene of clashes and repression. Antonioni hadn't been convinced: he considered the music beautiful, but too sad and almost churchlike. The piece had been shelved, but Wright hadn't forgotten it.

A few years later, that slow, melancholy progression finally found the context it had been missing. Roger Waters built a lyric on top of it, and “The Violent Sequence” became “Us And Them”, perfectly woven into the conceptual architecture of “The Dark Side Of The Moon”. Wright's music, suspended between jazz, gospel and impressionism, provided the ideal space for one of the most stripped-down and, at the same time, most political lyrics Waters ever wrote.

A hymn to peace

The title already contains the core of the song: us and them. War is thus examined through the basic mechanism by which men are split into opposing factions. The soldier on the other side could be identical to the one shooting at him; what sets them apart is a line, an order, a uniform, a decision made elsewhere. Waters gradually widens the lens from the trench to society at large, showing how the same binary logic reproduces itself between those who command and those who obey, those who have and those who are left out.
“Us And Them” is therefore not merely an anti-war song. It's a reflection on the very principle that makes war possible: the construction of the other as an enemy. The oppositions scattered through the lyric – us/them, here/there, up/down – become the grammar of a world in which essentially similar individuals end up on opposing sides. Meanwhile, responsibility for the decisions remains at a distance: it's the generals and the authorities who set the strategies, while ordinary men are left to bear the consequences.

A liquid ballad

Musically too, the song stages this same tension. The verses unfold calmly, carried by Wright's piano and organ and Gilmour's quiet David Gilmour vocal; then the dynamic suddenly explodes in the chorus, with the band and backing vocals coming in at full force. Dick Parry's tenor sax coda makes it all the more poignant. Through the contrast between the initial calm and the orchestral explosion, the song's structure seems to want to stage a physical enactment of the conflict evoked by the words. If in the first verse the protagonist addresses the enemy directly, in the second the perspective widens to the consequences of conflict and the randomness that can turn two individuals into adversaries, placing them on opposing sides. The closing passage finally lays bare the absurdity of war: behind the clash lie flimsy reasons, incapable of justifying a confrontation that drives men to fight and kill one another.
The recording also features voices Waters gathered during the “The Dark Side Of The Moon” sessions. Musicians, technicians and people present at Abbey Road were asked questions prepared by the bassist, and some of their answers ended up scattered throughout the album. In “Us And Them” there's also Roger Manifold, roadie for the band The Hat, telling his story of a brawl and the phrase “quick, short, sharp shock”. These are fragments of ordinary life that help blur the line between the grand theme of collective violence and the far more everyday kind that runs through human relationships.

Waters' tour

Decades later, Waters would return explicitly to the song's meaning. In 2017 he chose “Us + Them” as the title of his tour, noting how the problems that had driven him to write those words in 1972 were still present: “The name of the tour comes from a song I wrote in 1972,” he explained, “and unfortunately the reasons and problems that drove me to write it back then are still with us. Which isn't surprising. We're only a nanosecond on cosmic timelines. Years have gone by, and evolution is a fascinating process, but it takes a bit more time.”
After all, “Us And Them” already contains, in embryonic form, a decisive part of Waters' political and autobiographical universe. It's no surprise, then, that the theme became central to his later work: from the ghosts of “The Wall” to the memory of his father, killed in the Second World War, that looms over “The Final Cut”.

Gilmour's Regrets

There's another, more technical aspect that David Gilmour would recall with regret many years later. "Us And Them" had been conceived as an inseparable part of the flow of "The Dark Side Of The Moon", where the tracks aren't simply placed one after another but interlock through fades and segues. When the compilation "Echoes: The Best Of Pink Floyd" was being put together in 2001, the problem became apparent. "Some things just don't have an ending", Gilmour explained to Rolling Stone, speaking precisely about "Us And Them": the band went back to listen to fragments of the original mixes in search of a self-contained conclusion, only to discover that, in fact, none existed.

But rather than a flaw, this was the very consequence of the nature of "The Dark Side Of The Moon" itself. "Us And Them", in fact, hadn't been conceived by Pink Floyd as a standalone piece, but was fully woven into the album's sonic flow, eventually dissolving into the instrumental "Any Colour You Like". A single, uninterrupted sonic journey, impossible to break apart.

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17/09/2026