Oklahoma oddballs The Flaming Lips has spoken about their recent attempts to cover ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ in its entirety.
Released in 1973, Pink Floyd’s classic album ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ went on to become one of the decade’s defining acts. Selling in huge quantities the album spawned prog as a commercial art form, helping to push Pink Floyd into the upper echelons of rock.
However once the punk explosion happened it suddenly became uncool to state any liking for the prog behemoths. Now Flaming Lips have attempted to rescue ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ with a special cover version.
The band have re-recorded the album, and intend to play it live during a special homecoming concert over the festive period. Flaming Lips singer Wayne Coyne revealed to Pitchfork he believes Pink Floyd are close in spirit to punk rock.
“Dark Side of the Moon gets slagged a lot because it’s so popular, but I never felt that way. And even though John Lydon had that “I hate Pink Floyd” t-shirt, he would probably be the first person to say that the early days of Pink Floyd were very much punk rock” he explained.
“They were just some guys who couldn’t play that well who decided, “Fuck it, we’re going to make some weird noises and call ourselves Pink Floyd.” Punk quickly became a knee-jerk cliché, but when it started it did seem like anything was possible. If you look closely, Pink Floyd is probably a lot more punk rock than a lot of punk rock groups were.”
The singer recalled a moment in the early career of Flaming Lips when they covered Pink Floyd to the chagrin of the punk audience. “We cared so little about these strict rules of what was cool and what wasn’t. And if we’re thinking of punk rock as pissing in the face of whatever the established cool is supposed to be, playing that Pink Floyd song on that night was the most punk rock thing we could have done.”
Flaming Lips are set to release a download only version of ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ on December 22nd.
