So I went and looked on the old family Windows Vista computer to see when I downloaded The Dark Side of the Moon onto it. Results showed that I did so on Christmas Eve 2009. I’ve always thought I’d heard it much earlier in that year. I’m still a bit sceptical, to be honest. But if I did hear it properly for the first time then, I think it was to listen to another album that was considered to be the greatest of all time among all the Beatles stuff I would have been getting into during that period. I apparently went on to download Abbey Road a few days later, so that shows where I was at in those days. A year later, I listened to Wish You Were Here. By then, I think I was into ‘Time’ quite a bit. I somehow figured out that parts of ‘Have a Cigar’ mixed quite well with ‘Time’, and I made a mashup of the two with ‘Helter Skelter’ by The Beatles. Why did I do that? Mash-ups were quite the thing in 2010. If I’m making things up and I wasn’t feeling ‘Time’ then, I certainly was at that point.

‘Time’ is the fourth song on The Dark Side of the Moon, the first one in the long-duration, meaty section that makes up the middle of the album’s sandwich-like structure. Bass guitarist Roger Waters wrote the lyrics. From what I can recall from an interview I watched, he was inspired to write it when he was about 28 or 29 and realised he need to stop waiting for something big to happen to say ‘Life is starting now’, because life was happening with each second that passed him by. If anything, ‘Time’ acts as a warning. It touches on the dangers of wasting time, procrastination, how time goes quickly, how death approaches with each tick of the clock. A read through of the song’s words isn’t likely to brighten anyone’s day. And then there’s the music. ‘Haunting’ is the word that gets thrown around on web comments to get upvotes and make things scarier than they are, but you can definitely see ‘Time’ being the soundtrack to a very bad trip, or at the very least a nightmare of some kind.

No one starts singing until two minutes and 30 seconds into the song, but even those chiming clocks, ringing alarms and that long, long introduction is essential to the proceedings. You’re waiting in anticipation as those long notes ring out and those muted bass guitar notes keep clicking on, and the emphatic drum fill by Nick Mason fulfills your wish. The notable feature for me is the contrast between David Gilmour’s raspier vocal, which you hear in the groovier verses, and keyboardist Richard Wright’s softer delivery in the spaced out choruses – accompanied by the ooh-aahs of the lady vocalists in the background. The two guys sing their melodies perfectly. And then there’s the damn ripping guitar solo in the middle. Man, this is a song of vast proportions. It comes to an end with a reprise of ‘Breathe’, and I’ve always thought of the “softly spoken magic spell” mentioned in the last line as referring to the vocals in ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’. Thinking about it, there’s nothing softly spoken about them. But there’s a kind of spell-like quality about them, if spells were something that existed in reality.