Pink Floyd's 1972 Château d'Hérouville Sessions vs. Abbey Road for Dark Side of the Moon

Most people think The Dark Side of the Moon was recorded entirely at Abbey Road, but the band actually decamped to a French château in the spring of 1972 for the initial basic tracks. They rented the Château d’Hérouville—a residential studio popular with Elton John and David Bowie—and hauled the Rolling Stones’ mobile recording truck out there. The place had a psychedelic history: it was originally a recording school, and the live room had a swimming-pool-sized wooden floor that gave the drums a massive, loose ring.

The big difference from the later Abbey Road sessions was the workflow. At Hérouville, the band jammed out the instrumental skeletons—“Us and Them” (then called “The Violent Sequence”) had already been kicking around, but “Money” was written in the odd 7/4 time live in the room, with the cash-register tape loop assembled on the spot. Abbey Road then became the polishing factory: they added the vocals, the tape loops, the sax solos, and Clare Torry’s “Great Gig in the Sky” scream. The French sessions were raw and experimental; the London sessions were obsessive and precise.

A handful of ideas came and went at the château. The most famous discard is “The Hard Way,” a funky blues riff that never found a home on the album—parts of it later got recycled in the Obscured by Clouds soundtrack. Another was “The Travel Sequence,” an early electronic instrumental that eventually mutated into “On the Run” once they got the synthesizers booked at Abbey Road. Also, an entire song called “The Amazing Pudding” (yes, really) was cut—its main riff reappeared later as the core of “Echoes” on Meddle, not _Dark Side