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The 20th of February 1974

Official U.K. Albums Chart results from Sunday the 17th to Saturday the 23rd of February 1974

Cut-off for sales figures was up to the end of Saturday the 16th of February

Results counted from Sunday the 17th,

and published on Wednesday the 20th of February 1974.

Pink Floyd

The Dark Side Of The Moon

At No.7, on the “The Top 50 U.K. Albums Chart”, the week of my 2nd Birthday, are Pink Floyd with The Dark Side Of The Moon.

Although this album…

…makes its first appearance during my 2nd birthday, for those of you who follow my posts, you’ll know that the title of the album itself has already been mentioned before in a far more obscure way.

Medicine Head – No.25 in the UK Singles Chart on My 2nd Birthday

After making their first appearance…

…with their previous studio album release along my musical road on the day of my birth, it seems that with this new album, the group had finally perfected a sonically inviolable formula that they had been quietly working towards since before I had even been born, and had now hit a raw significant cultural nerve in the music world’s untapped and deeply sensitive consciousness.

Pink Floyd – No.46 in the UK Albums Chart on My Birth Day

To a lesser degree other-worldly,..

…as their perceptive musical minds used to be, but now more deliberately down to earth. The band offer us for consideration, with an acutely observant, intelligent but altogether discerning thud of clarity, that with the very real and familiar of the every-day, interwoven into the darker and incomprehensible bigger picture, a stark reality check.

A moment in which the message this LP brings into vivid clarity, that the world is in fact run by lunatics, and with each subsequent generation, we’ve let ourselves be duped into some other reality that has been slowly evolving through human civilisation; and ever since, we’ve all evolved so far backwards that we’ve finally gone completely nuts without ever realising it consciously. In no better way is this exemplified than by the copious amounts of alarm clocks blaring out during side one, as a not so much an in-your-face moment, but more in-your-ear event, to tell everyone to wake the hell up and see the world for what it is.

It’s not so much a question…

…of how did we get here to this point, but more what can we do about it now we finally know where we actually are. And with a narrative that striking, that powerful, and that potent, it’s enough to blow anything to do with the old songs of gnomes, scarecrows and bikes completely out into space. Not that the record executives wanted you to forget about the group’s past entirely. More that they could see how this new release seemed to be inextinguishable, and so decided to ride on the back of its success, re-package the band’s psychedelic beginnings featuring Syd, and grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.

Pink Floyd – No.21 in the UK Albums Chart on My 2nd Birthday

With the group’s new insightful observation,..

…which basically turned those lava-lit backdrops from their kaleidoscopic past on its head, that we’re all in fact living in a completely hallucinogenic world without ever needing any other substances to create it, this album looks set to literally take not so much a small step for the music buying public, but more a giant leap into the consciousness of anyone who ever gets the opportunity to listen to it. And with something so profound, it has the potential at this point, to take hold and outlive those souls that are only now first taking the album freshly off the shelves in their local shops, and taking it home to immerse themselves into it with eager ears.

The album…

…slammed into the chart with a bang just over a month after my 1st birthday, on the 25th of March 1973, when it hit No.2; only being stopped by another new compilation album by K-tel entitled “20 Flash Back Greats Of The Sixties“; and so far, at the time of writing in the early spring of 2026, this album has never bettered that position, and moved that one notch higher in the UK Charts. Of course, if the ban on those type of compilations had been implemented a decade earlier, then it could have been told that this featured album would indeed be logged as hitting the top of the chart. Still, never say never.

For quite a significant chunk of the album’s initial run in the chart, it stayed hovering around the Top 10, only dropping significantly lower as the autumn of that year took hold, and ending up dropping away from the Top 50 entirely at the close of September.

It managed to clamber back in after only a week away, re-entering at No.41 on the 7th of October, and climb effortlessly back up to orbit between numbers around the Top 20 and within the Top 10; and this is where I find it this week.

From here,..

…it will follow this pattern between these two points, all the way throughout the rest of 1974, getting as high as this position of No.7, and dropping no lower than No.20.

With behaviour like that for the rest of this year, it’s absolutely no surprise that this album will be making another appearance, along my musical road, where the sun seems the same in a relative way, but I’ll be another year older, and celebrating another birthday; and so that’s when I’ll catch up with it then.