1. The original prism cover--The band members spent three minutes deciding on the front cover. Designer Storm Thorgerson brought seven designs. The band looked at the designs, looked at each other, nodded, and said, "that one", as they pointed at the prism.
The prism was partly inspired by Floyd's live light shows.
2. "Money" was influenced by Booker T and the MGs. The basis of the song is a blues progression written by Roger Waters, but David Gilmour said he brought an R&B influence to the song's instrumental breaks. He said: "I was a big Booker T fan. I had the Green Onions album when I was a teenager. And in my previous band, we played ‘Green Onions' onstage. 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."
3. "Breathe" came from a song of the same name that Roger Waters wrote for the soundtrack of a documentary called "The Body". But Waters' two "Breathe" songs don't share much besides a title and an opening line.
4. At the very end of "Eclipse," in the right channel, there is a faint sound of a Muzak version of the Beatles' "Ticket to Ride." It was apparently playing in the background when they recorded the closing snippet of chatter. The Fab Four never demanded any royalties.
5. Session vocalist Clare Torry demanded—and got—royalties and co-writing credit for "The Great Gig in the Sky," more than 30 years after it was recorded. Originally she'd only been paid a few dollars for her brief studio session. But over the years she felt her contributions were worth a lot more. Torry's main direction for the song: sing for several minutes, and don't sing any words.
6. "Dark Side" still holds the record for the most number of weeks spent on the Billboard top 200. The album spent a record 591 consecutive weeks on the Billboard Top 200 chart between 1976 and 1988. Counting the time it spent there before and since, it totaled out at 741 weeks, beating former record-holder "Johnny's Greatest Hits" by Johnny Mathis. Eventually Billboard changed the rules so that albums automatically reverted to the catalog chart and not the current chart if they dropped off for a period of time.
7. Roger Waters said he was under pressure to let David Gilmour do most or all of the singing on Dark Side. He said: "My memory is David and Rick were at great pains to point out how I couldn't sing and how I was tone-deaf. And there's this bollocks that Rick had to tune my bass. And you only have to look at the body of work to realize that this is not the case. Maybe their way of keeping me from being totally overwhelming was to point out that I might have vocal and instrumental inadequacies."
8. Neither of the band's two frontmen consider Dark Side their best album. Roger Waters said "The Wall" is "a much more important work." For Gilmour, it's "Wish You Were Here".
9. The album has had a few full-length cover versions. Phish and Dream Theater are among the bands who've covered the album in its entirety in concert, and the Flaming Lips released a studio version of their take on the album. There have been bluegrass, a cappella, and string-quartet album versions, not to mention the famous reggae-version, "Dub Side of the Moon."
10. The album won one whole Grammy award, for best-engineered recording.
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