Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Never mind ten years that have passed in our struggle to fill Time, it is the half century of existence between points that can drive us to the edge of human madness.
That starting gun that Pink Floyd warned us of being missed as the Dark Side Of The Moon played out on our first listen, did we ever truly appreciate the echoes of the ricochet that would come our way every time we heard it, the cautionary advice that we are but slaves to the momentum of the clock, and if we do not care for Time then how can we understand the care we wish to receive as people urge us on to leave a footprint on the beach, to leave our kindness in the form of a mark on the world; or at least pay attention to the sound of a crown enraptured in silent homage as a pulse of humanity becomes still.
There are two ways as a Pink Floyd fan to look back on the 50th anniversary of the seminal recording of Dark Side Of The Moon, one would be to go all out and spend hours in the company of the phenomenally large boxset, or arguably the finer way of being lost in reverie in the silent appreciation of the release of Dark Side Of The Moon – Live At Wembley 1974 as a single entity.
It is the latter that the sheer scope of the album is to be found, without the bells and whistles, the rare and complicated, what is necessary is the feeling of listening to the extraordinary captured in its sense of absolute, the toil of expression in a live setting that is caught on every word of an album that is known universally, that explores some of the darker, more brutal aspects of fear and consciousness, and be found loving every minute of the experience.
There is no need to talk about the individual tracks, they are so well known that they are almost to be seen as bystanders in their own backyard; what matters in the case of this large recording is how they affect you, the listener, how they shape and pull your emotions in directions that arguably were not covered when that first introduction to the studio version took place. This is a live album, even with the missing content from the gig, that is simply, outrageously stunning.
Dark Side Of The Moon – Live At Wembley 1974 is not just any live recording long after the fact, it is in many ways even superior to the studio album that gave birth to it, unquenchable, reliable, insistent, beautiful. Ten years or fifty, the sound of a specific moment in time has never sounded so memorable.
Ian D. Hall