Dark Side Of The Moon by Pink Floyd
Dark Side Of The Moon by The Flaming Lips
I’m just listening to The Flaming Lips doing Dark Side of the Moon. It’s really quite beautiful. Their strongest set of songs for years. Sorry. Somebody on Gearslutz asked Alan Parsons what he thought of it. He said he’d have to have a listen. I now suspect that he just didn’t want to say anything nasty. Production values have changed over the years. Not better or worse. I really like the amount of distortion on the Lips version. It sounds cheap and lovely. But I’ve been listening to a lot of early seventies stuff (e.g. Hatfield and The North) and it is very well recorded.
I was wondering what I’d do if I was going to cover an album. Tonight’s The Night was the first thing that I thought of. But you can’t really make it any dirtier (well, you could, you could do it like a Gun Club record or something, but Tonight’s The Night is so dirty because it’s so true, not being brutal in an unbalanced way). Actually, I’d like to hear a Gun Club version of Tonight’s The Night. Maybe the original version that they cut that didn’t have any of the pretty songs on it. I believe David Briggs thought Neil Young was a pussy for not putting out the ‘real’ version.
I wouldn’t have the balls to try Electric Ladyland though if you did it with no guitars that would be interesting. Exile On Mainstreet you couldn’t really change much. Maybe take the country thing all the way and do it in the style of Gram Parsons. I wouldn’t mind trying Seance (by The Church) with all natural, slightly garage sounds. The drum sound on that record used to really give me the shits, but now I kind of like it. It is so annoying and ugly that it lends an alienating FU vibe to the whole record that suits the lyrics.
On the whole it’s a stupid idea. I’ve just been studying so hard today that I’ve gone all mental. And because I haven’t had a drink I’m all wired up. I have Swimmers Ear and it is really quite painful.
I have to get up at half past five in the morning because Sean has an excursion to Melbourne. So perhaps I should try to unwind and get to bed early.