Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon - II-V-I: A Softly Spoken Magic Spell
By Dave Sanderson

I, Us and Them

David Gilmour sings the last line of “Money” and the energy of the song dissolves to a shuffling swing… “Away…away…”

As the track fades, the question and answer calls between Gilmour’s guitar and vocal are joined by fragments from another conversation… “ I don’t know if I was really drunk at the time…”

Meanwhile, on the crossfade, a new dawn of colour slowly materialises. Eventually, as a mass of suspensions and densely clustered notes clear, Rick Wright’s Hammond organ settles on the chord of D. The gentle swirl of the Leslie effect wraps around this new glow of consonance then, having waited patiently for long enough, the rest of the band enter to begin the blissfully slow and relaxed instrumental opening to “Us and Them”.

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This is a landmark moment on Dark Side Of The Moon. Not only does the beginning of “Us and Them” provide the listener with some relief and respite after the rip-roaring guitar-and-drums feast of “Money” but it also gracefully announces the arrival of a long-awaited object… Chord I of D major.

This is a significant structural moment as, from here on, throughout the rest of “Us and Them”, “Any Colour You Like”, “Brain Damage” and “Eclipse”, the music is all harmonically centred around the keynote of D. It marks the beginning of the end. Like seeing a ‘welcome home’ banner displayed somewhere before you’ve reached your destination.

But how do we know that chord I of D major is ‘home’ when we first hear it? Perhaps, to see how this happens, we need to take a look at the whole journey…

II and V

There are many wonderful and startling harmonic twists and turns on Dark Side Of The Moon but a great deal of the album’s convincing cohesive quality could perhaps be put down to the predominance of one chord progression in particular.