Smack in the middle of Pink Floyd’s classic Dark Side of the Moon sits a song many listeners may hear as an extended bridge between the two true centerpieces, “Time” and “Money.” But I’ve always thought of “The Great Gig in the Sky” as the album’s true center, a swirling, swinging, soulful prog-rock masterpiece, carried to stratospheric heights by British singer Clare Torry. The song’s wordless gospel vocal makes it an ecstatic, even hopeful, tent pole supporting Dark Side’s brilliantly cynical songs about the banality and injustice of modern life.
“The Great Gig in the Sky,” that is to say, provides much-needed emotional release in an album that can sound, writes Alexis Petridis, “like one long sigh.” Yet if you know the story of Dark Side of the Moon and of Clare Torry’s defining contribution, you’ll know that her incredible soaring vocal was sheer happenstance, an improvisation by a young singer brought in at the last minute by producer Alan Parsons—and one who wasn’t a particular fan of the band. (“If it had been The Kinks,” she remembered, “I’d have been over the moon.”)
Torry reluctantly stepped into the studio and asked the band, “Well, what do you want?” Basically, she says, “they had no idea.” An isolated track from Alan Parsons’ 1973 mix (above) strips the song down to piano, drums, slide guitar, and Torry’s voice. Early live versions of the song in 1972 had featured Bible readings and recorded speeches by conservative writer Malcolm Muggeridge; in the final version, these gave way to snippets of the band’s crew and friends answering questions about death.
When Torry went into the vocal booth and put on the headphones, she would have heard an even more stripped-down mix. Given no other instruction than “we don’t want any words,” she decided, “I have to pretend to be an instrument.”
Torry’s vocal is so distinctive that she eventually won a settlement in 2005 for a co-songwriting credit with Wright—an outcome some songwriting experts agree was fully justified since she essentially created a new melody for the song. In the interview above, hear Torry describe how she “had a little go” and, after some guidance from David Gilmour and a can of Heineken, casually knocked out one of the most thrilling vocal performances in rock history.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.