‘I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.” These could easily have been the words of the Chinese team behind Chang’e 4, shortly before it set off on its successful journey to the moon’s far side. But as any rock fan will tell you, they were immortalised 45 years ago at the end of Pink Floyd’s track Brain Damage. It was the line that gave their most famous album, The Dark Side of the Moon, its title. And it remains one of the most enduring phrases in popular culture – copied, spoofed and riffed on by generations to come (even Krusty the Clown has a “lost” album entitled Dark Side of the Moonpie).
It’s not hard to see why artists have a fascination with the moon’s far side. It speaks of the unknowable, the distant and the elusive – and is especially ripe for metaphor. For Pink Floyd, the moon’s dark side was used to symbolise the darker forces of human nature on an album that delved into unusual territories for pop: mental illness, mortality and the scars of the second world war. As songwriter Roger Waters explained in the 1994 book Bricks in the Wall: “The line ‘I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon’ is me speaking to the listener, saying, ‘I know you have these bad feelings and impulses because I do too, and one of the ways I can make direct contact with you is to share with you the fact that I feel bad sometimes.’”
Other songwriters have seen the moon’s most distant territory differently. For English folk singer Vin Garbutt, it helped describe the conditions of the 1982 Falklands war, where soldiers died in such cold and bloodied conditions it “may as well have been the dark side of the moon”. Rapper Lil Wayne’s 2018 duet with Nicki Minaj envisaged it more romantically, as a place of escape from a postapocalyptic Earth: he arranged to meet up with Minaj on the dark side of the moon, asking her to “leave a message in the dust just for me” when she reached the safe haven. Given that he also offered to take her for a walk once she got there “as she wears slippers”, you suspect their lovestruck escape mission might ultimately have been doomed by insufficient technical preparation.
Outside music, the sheer remoteness of the moon’s furthest side has been seized on as a plot device. In the film Iron Sky, the defeated Nazis fled to the moon after the second world war to rebuild their forces – with the plan to ultimately conquer Earth using a space fleet. A crowdfunded sequel is due to be released this month. In Jed Mercurio’s 2007 novel Ascent, a Soviet astronaut successfully lands on the far side of the moon during a secret mission, only to be abandoned there alone when his craft breaks down and the USSR denies any such attempt took place.
But for many people, the moon’s dark side will only ever be associated with Pink Floyd. On 4 January, the UK’s National Space Centre in Leicester is putting on the first of two sold-out light and laser shows in its Sir Patrick Moore Planetarium, combining the band’s music with the story of the 1968 Apollo 8 mission, which orbited the moon and made the crew the first humans to see the moon’s other side.
“While Pink Floyd titled The Dark Side of the Moon, as an allusion to lunacy, rather than astronomy, the links between the band and the Apollo space programme can be seen in their work,” says Josh Barker, the space centre’s planetarium coordinator and education presenter. “Pink Floyd played a major part in the heady days of the 1960s and 70s, creating innovative sounds that captured the feelings of optimism and freedom that set out the era as something really very special.”
The timing of the shows with the Chang’e 4 landing may be coincidental, but nevertheless they neatly summarise the way the moon’s furthest reaches have fascinated scientists and artists alike.
Bringing things back down to Earth for a moment, it’s safe to say that the Chang’e 4 team probably didn’t mention Pink Floyd’s song at the start of their mission – not because they’re all secretly bigger fans of King Crimson, but because the statement would be scientifically incorrect. It is not the moon’s “dark” side that Chang’e 4 landed on, but its far side – and that’s an important distinction. Each side of the moon is blessed with a roughly equal amount of the sun’s light; it’s just that humans only get to see one side of it. Of course, Pink Floyd acknowledged that too. Listen carefully as the album’s climax fades to leave a thudding heartbeat and you’ll hear Gerry O’Driscoll, the doorman to Abbey Road studios where it was recorded, saying: “There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark.”
