How 'Cymbaline' from 'More' was Roger Waters' first paranoid music-industry lament

Before The Dark Side of the Moon turned anxiety into a concept album, Roger Waters already sketched out a music-industry nightmare on the More soundtrack. “Cymbaline” is the first Pink Floyd song where Waters explicitly frames the business side of music as a threat—“the businessman” drinks your wine, “the policeman’s looking in your window,” and there’s always someone trying to make you feel small. It’s not about space or psychedelia; it’s about feeling trapped by the machinery around the band.

Fans point to “Cymbaline” as a warm-up for Dark Side because it shares that album’s core tension: the pressure of success, the loss of privacy, and the slow creep of madness. The line “doctor, doctor, I’m in bad shape” sounds like a dry run for “Speak to Me” and “The Lunatic is on the Grass.” Waters hadn’t yet built a whole album around these fears, but here he’s already pointing at the same dark corner—just without the stadium concept and the cash-register sound effects.