If there had to be a background score for this month’s events it had to be Pink Floyd’s Dark side of the moon. The series of songs in the album match the unfolding of the month’s events. The album starts with the track Speak to me followed by Breathe and ends in Eclipse. The month started with the death of the moonwalker Michael Jackson, who was found unconscious on the floor.

‘Speak to me’ would have surely been the first words by whoever first saw him. He was taken to the hospital, where doctors tried to pump his heart and make him Breathe. Everyone kept an eye on The great gig the sky for it was 40 years since the Eagle had landed on the moon. The album ends with Eclipse, just like the one we witnessed a week ago.

You may call this moonshine, but like this month, which saw the moon in different lights, Floyd’s album is a musical that show the many ways in which people can go mad. Like acts of a play, one song leads to the other taking the story to the next level.

Roger Waters’ idea was to focus on things that made people mad when the band decided to put together the album. The band’s former member Syd Barrett had suffered mental disorders and it was a trigger for the album. But Waters, who wrote most of the band’s songs, went one step ahead. The theme included not just the moon, an ancient belief that it made us ‘lunatic’, but also greed, conflict, competition and of course mental illness.

My favourite tracks are Time and Money. Time starts with a rather quick tick-tock of a clock, like the sound of a high-heeled executive late for work. Within seconds several other clocks join the chorus, as if entering an office, it’s a cacophony only to end in the clanging of a pendulum — a sound shouting from the boss? The clicking cash register is the sound of Money. But I like it more for its lyrics. “Money, so they say. Is the root of all evil today. But if you ask for a raise, its no surprise that they’re giving none away.”

The moon doesn’t have light of its own; everybody knows that. However, a moonlit night is a universal picture of it. To see the dark side of the moon, the real moon actually, one has to see a solar eclipse. Dark side of the moon reaches its crescendo in Eclipse where the song goes into a tizzy by a soulful wailing of opera-like female vocals; reminiscent of ancient Chinese culture that made noises to chase away the dragon from swallowing the moon. It ends in a converse, “there is no dark side of the moon really ... as a matter of fact it’s all dark.” The album was a giant leap for the band. It is considered Floyd’s magnum opus and is among the top five, best-selling albums of all time.