(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover / Apple Music)
Sun 23 November 2025 0:00, UK
The beauty of Pink Floyd‘s Dark Side Of The Moon is that there really aren’t any singles.
Not in the traditional way, anyway. This was a pioneering concept album because of how each idea bleeds from one track to the next, with no obvious delineation. So for the most part, the discourse around the album mostly includes sounds, moments and textures that live long in the memory, as opposed to one specific song.
Nevertheless, if you were that way inclined when it came to music listening, there is one song that steps forward as perhaps a more obvious lead single. Combining all of the psychedelic elements of the beginning tracks, with a more bluesy beating heart, ‘Money’ became one of the band’s most recognisable songs.
It had all the ingredients to become the record’s most beloved song, be it the sonic composition that felt as rocky as anything else on the record, or the lyrics, which were the most easily understood on Dark Side Of The Moon. It’s plain to see that Roger Waters is lamenting on societal’s state of hyper-capitalist intrigue, and does so with the sort of universality to incite a singalong.
He explained, “Money interested me enormously. I remember thinking, ‘Well, this is it, and I have to decide whether I’m really a socialist or not.’ I’m still keen on a general welfare society, but I became a capitalist. You have to accept it. I remember coveting a Bentley like crazy. The only way to get something like that was through rock or the football pools. I very much wanted all that material stuff.”
Roger Waters on stage with Pink Floyd. (Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
But then, once fans dug a little deeper and dove into the music of the track, it revealed even more of the album’s compositional treasures.
While the cash register introduction may have seemed like a neat trick, it was nothing compared to what came after. The blues riff hung throughout the opening verse and chorus, before a saxophone solo ushered in a quite mesmerising time signature change that highlighted the symbiotic brilliance of this record.
But it was that saxophone solo that triggered it all, becoming somewhat of an unsung hero of the album. While Clare Torry’s vocal solo on ‘Great Gig In The Sky’ enjoyed rightful praise after the album’s release, fewer people highlighted the saxophone player in ‘Money’, who quite simply conducted one of the greatest musical switches in history.
So, who played saxophone on ‘Money’?
The man in question was a musician named Dick Parry, who also provided some sax parts on the follow-up track ‘Us And Them’, as well as Wish You Were Here’s ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’. It was Gilmour who brought Parry into the fold after the pair had met at Cambridge University together, where they were both a part of the city’s mid-1960s music scene in Cambridge, with Parry in a band called The Soul Committee and Gilmour in Jokers Wild.
Ultimately, ‘Money’ was the sound of Pink Floyd finding their own voice. But the jazz and soul inflexions provided by Parry were loosely inspired by an artist his mate Gilmour earmarked as someone from whom the band should have somewhat of a lead.
“Getting specific about how and what influenced what is always difficult, but I was a big Booker T fan. I had the Green Onions album when I was a teenager,” he concluded. “It was something I thought we could incorporate into our sound without anyone spotting where the influence had come from. And to me, it worked. Nice white English architecture students getting funky is a bit of an odd thought… and isn’t as funky as all that.”
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