In the footsteps of Pink Floyd

Wayne Coyne and co. are certainly no strangers to provocations and sudden changes of direction. In that sense, there's no need to turn back the clock. Just think of the Oklahoma City band's most recent effort at the time, “Embryonic”, to fully grasp the band's great form and confirm their innate ability to reinvent themselves with every single release, consistently catching critics and audiences off guard, and causing quite a stir among those who had already long since declared (and are still waiting for) their demise. Just as "Zaireeka" will remain one of the most fascinating production provocations of the last century, regardless of the individual compositions (?) contained within the work. You'll agree, then, that these days perhaps only the Flaming Lips can afford the luxury of tackling such a masterpiece, while still sparking unusual curiosity and genuine interest in the listener.

Trying to get inside a Flaming Lips album, cover versions included, is a bit like chasing the white rabbit. There are no fixed coordinates, and a persistent lunacy reigns supreme over the sound's constant metamorphoses. As a result, the mood is perpetually drunk. Consequently, the transparency and production polychromy of the original are repeatedly turned upside down by a brazen determination to virtually re-roll the dice into strictly Barrett-esque territory (!). It's a provocation that tends to disorient memory, evident both in the graceless, scraping gait of "Speak To Me/Breathe" and in the smashed vocoders of a rough-edged "The Great Gig In The Sky", stripped of its velvet cloak and lowered in pH by Peaches' electroclash accelerations, as well as in the cosmic clowning of "Time/Breathe (Reprise)".

In stark contrast, the dim lights of "Us And Them" and "Brain Damage", sung in unison by a dreamy Rollins, only momentarily calm any other form of interpretive ambition, before the luminous, shredder-blender goofing (in strictly Lips-ian attire) of "Any Colour You Like" and the closing "Eclipse" reveal the most spaced-out soul of the sabbath staged by Coyne.

"The Flaming Lips And Stardeath And White Dwarfs With Henry Rollins And Peaches Doing The Dark Side Of The Moon" isn't just a trivial divertissement, but also a small, brilliant retro-futurist analysis of one of the most significant records in rock history.

(Giuliano Delli Paoli)

Mary Fahl – From The Dark Side Of The Moon (2006)

Taking on one of the best-selling records in the history of rock music is not just a gamble but a risky operation that can define an entire career. When the album in question is Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side Of The Moon", the story takes on interesting, even unsettling, contours: a record whose sales figures and statistics are still being revised and updated, a record that, 50 years after its release, is still present in the sales charts, a record that forced EMI to dedicate an entire production line to pressing the compact disc.

History has already given us a number of reinterpretations of the Pink Floyd classic, some already well known — the aforementioned "The Flaming Lips And Stardeath And White Dwarfs With Henry Rollins And Peaches Doing The Dark Side Of The Moon", as well as Easy Star All-Stars' 2003 project "The Dub Side Of The Moon", "Return To The Dark Side Of The Moon: A Tribute To Pink Floyd" from 2006, and Phish's tribute "Dark Side Of The Moon" — others marked by particular arrangement choices, such as Mandol'in Progress's "The Dark Side Of The Mandolin" (2017) and Savoldelli Casarano Bardoscio's "The Great Jazz Gig in The Sky" (2016), to which can be added countless more or less official versions by artists in search of a modicum of visibility and fortune.

A story unto itself is the one that saw Mary Fahl deliver the boldest and most successful reinterpretation of Pink Floyd's multi-award-winning album, recorded in 2006 and officially released years later due to financial troubles at the V2 record label.

Mary Fahl's career began in the early 1990s with October Project, a band many stylistically compared to Clannad, which disbanded in 1996 after serious accusations of belonging to a satanic cult — a misunderstanding that actually arose solely from the group's stage presence. In 2003 Mary Fahl returned to the scene with the album "The Other Side Of Time", but the chance for a real turning point came when, thanks to her new manager Steven Saporta, she got in touch with Mark Doyle (some will remember him from Andy Pratt's band) and David Werner, two musicians with whom she found an instant, spontaneous rapport.

For Mary, Mark and David, Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side Of The Moon" represents more than just a youthful passion: the project's core themes — the tensions caused by social conflict and religion, the eternal dialogue between life and death, and the vision of humanity teetering on the edge of a physical and mental abyss — have lost none of their relevance. Taking on this iconic project was therefore an exciting challenge for all three artists.

"From The Dark Side Of The Moon" was dogged by no shortage of setbacks. Produced in stereo and 5.1 surround by the famed Bob Clearmountain, and distributed to press and promoters, the album was never released due to the collapse of the V2 label. In the meantime, the few physical copies the artist had, along with the promotional CDs handed out before the label's demise, began turning up on eBay, fueling a genuine cult following (original copies of the album have fetched three-figure prices).

A few years later Mary Fahl acquired the rights to the record and released a digital version, but the real turning point came when Mark Doyle, who held the original stereo masters, was encouraged by his friend Rik Pepe to revisit the project for a Hi-res release. Unfortunately, V2's original recordings had been destroyed in a fire, and Mark, after contacting Bob Clearmountain (the only person in possession of the 5.1 surround version of the album), decided to travel to New York to rework a new high-resolution stereo master.

After a meticulous surgical operation that left the original version unaltered, the Blu-Ray/Multichannel edition hit the international market on March 24, 2020, renewing the cult status of the American singer and actress's album. As the sole architect of the entire instrumental fabric, Mark Doyle took the opportunity to make a few small tweaks, calling in some outside musicians for help (Josh Dekaney on percussion and drums, Peter McMahon on harmonica) without altering the nature of the arrangements — though a careful ear won't miss the new shadings offered by tracks like "On The Run" or "Breathe". The choice to title the album "From The Dark Side Of The Moon" speaks to the enormous respect the musicians hold for the original work; likewise, the decision to replace the line "I've been mad for fucking years" in "Speak To Me" with lines from Dante — "Nel mezzo del cammino della mia vita, mi ritrovai in una selva oscura, perché la retta via era smarrita" — makes sense, aiming to renew the record's symbolic value and its prophetic warning about the ruthlessness of modern society.

The atmosphere is slightly more mournful, darker; Mary Fahl's deep, baritone voice has the allure of a modern goddess of the underworld, and is without doubt the defining element of the entire project. For his part, Mark Doyle carefully avoids overdoing references to the original, opening up more distinctly jazz-like piano passages in "On The Run" or reworking the guitar solo of "Time" — one of the album's most powerful tracks — reimagined with unexpectedly dark, heavy tones that, in turn, shine through in definition and clarity.

Tackling the album's most pop track, "Money", the musicians dare even more, earning a hearty round of applause: the backing track is reinvented with a mix of hip-hop and reggae filtered through blues, adding grit and raising the tension, thanks to an excellent vocal performance and a decidedly more rock-oriented guitar touch.

The toughest test, however, remains the legendary "The Great Gig In The Sky": synths and guitars rise toward otherworldly dimensions, leaving Mary Fahl's voice the room it needs for a performance that shifts the focus more toward overall atmosphere than toward the unattainable vocal virtuosity of the original version, sung by Clare Torry — an intelligent choice that, while seeming to dampen the pathos on one hand, on the other confirms just how clever this reinterpretation truly is.

The more acoustic delicacy and refinement of "Us And Them" is undoubtedly better suited to Mary Fahl's vocal qualities: the interweaving of instruments builds without ever imploding, and the addition of a Sanskrit chant to the original lyrics offers further food for thought on the depth of the messages contained in Pink Floyd's work, often sacrificed to excessive attention to the purely sonic side.

"From The Dark Side Of The Moon" is an almost transcendental listening experience, a heartfelt interpretation that puts back at the centre of this now-iconic album the theme of contemporary society adrift, gripped by madness and an insatiable thirst for money. It is nonetheless strange and unusual that the reinterpretation which is aesthetically most appealing and beloved, even among audiophile purists, should also be the one most coherent with and respectful of the original themes. A record that works as a whole, whatever objections some purists might raise, and for whom it will be at the very least difficult not to appreciate some of these versions ("Time", "Money") and the successful closing triptych ("Any Colour You Like", "Brain Damage", "Eclipse").

There's no doubt that with "From The Dark Side Of The Moon", Mary Fahl pulls off the far-from-easy feat of renewing the appeal of a record that, like it or not, we all know by heart, a rare case of a covers album that doesn't smell of mustiness. With all due respect to Roger Waters.

(Gianfranco Marmoro)

Dream Theater – Dark Side Of The Moon (2007)

It can't be easy to intimidate musicians of the calibre of John Petrucci, Mike Portnoy or Jordan Rudess. Boldly technical, proud of their studies at one of the most prestigious conservatories in the United States, Dream Theater have never made a secret of how central technique is to their music. Precisely because of this obsessive trait, it's certainly worth listening with interest to the live shows in which - between the late 90s and the early 2000s - they performed full versions of some of the albums that most influenced them in their formative years. These were released as four official bootlegs. Among them are Metallica's "Master Of Puppets", Iron Maiden's "The Number Of The Beast" and Deep Purple's "Made In Japan", three landmark albums for the history of, respectively, thrash metal, heavy metal and hard rock. To complete the circle and pay tribute to all the genres that have shaped the band's career, progressive rock couldn't be left out, and of all the possible albums they chose "The Dark Side Of The Moon", a genuine monument of 70s rock, so important that it can't even be pinned down to a single genre.

While on the other three live recordings Dream Theater seem to be having fun and playing with total ease, even trying out alternative versions of some tracks, things change with Pink Floyd. Faced with such a symbolic album, the fear of comparison keeps the band's usual bravado to a minimum, and they record a live set that avoids any virtuosity in favour of a version that overlaps almost perfectly with the original, positioning themselves almost as students before their masters. The bootleg of "The Dark Side Of The Moon" is therefore, first and foremost, an act of love for a band that has influenced, and continues to influence, generation after generation.

There's little need to point out how perfect Petrucci manages to be in every respect, "becoming" Gilmour for forty-five minutes, just as Labrie's voice - perhaps the one element that could have posed the greatest challenge - proves convincing too. The only moment that could be described as closer to Dream Theater's own sound, where they stray from the boundaries of the original version, is "Any Colour You Like", where Rudess returns to his usual keyboard sleight of hand (watch the video from the 33-minute mark) and Petrucci launches into a long solo that is, nonetheless, typically Gilmour-esque.

Probably the most significant covers album Dream Theater have ever made, this bootleg is a heartfelt thank-you from Petrucci's band to Pink Floyd, without whom so much of the music we know today simply wouldn't exist.

(Valerio D'Onofrio)