A Radio Play Based on Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Coming Monday. Watch the Trailer.

This year, Pink Floy­d’s mas­ter­ful prog rock album The Dark Side of the Moon turns 40. Yes, 40. Explor­ing themes rang­ing from con­flict and greed, to men­tal ill­ness and the pass­ing of time, The Dark Side of the Moon has “every­thing you’d ever want … : Grand, trans­port­ing melodies, synapse-rip­ping synth exper­i­ments and sound col­lages, intri­cate musi­cian­ship, state-of-the-art stu­dio sound and John Lennon-meets-Thom Yorke lyrics like ‘The lunatic is on the grass/Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs/Got to keep the loonies on the path.’ ” Or, so that’s how Rolling Stone mag­a­zine sums up the album that it now ranks 43rd on its list of “The 500 Great­est Albums of All Time.”

Next Mon­day, BBC Radio 2 will hon­or Pink Floy­d’s mag­num opus with a new radio dra­ma from leg­endary play­wright Sir Tom Stop­pard. Appar­ent­ly Stop­pard (who co-wrote the screen­plays for Brazil and Shake­speare in Love) first con­sid­ered writ­ing a play based on the album back in 1973. Now, some 40 years lat­er, he has “trans­formed the Pink Floyd clas­sic into a psy­che­del­ic mash-up of Kant­ian phi­los­o­phy, epic rock and John Prescott sound­bites,” writes The Inde­pen­dent. To get you ready for Dark­side, as the play will be called, Aard­man Ani­ma­tions has cre­at­ed a three-minute trail­er that evokes themes from the album and play. Says the direc­tor Dar­ren Dubic­ki:

I spent time absorb­ing the rich detail from the Pink Floyd album, their art and the dra­ma script. What was fun­da­men­tal­ly impor­tant to us was that we retained a con­sis­tent visu­al tone that echoed the imagery cre­at­ed over the years for the band. The insane­ly sur­re­al and pow­er­ful art­work cre­at­ed by Storm Thorg­er­son and Hipg­no­sis has always had a strong dis­tor­tion on real­i­ty. Their sense of space and twist­ed con­text make for some uncom­fort­ably beau­ti­ful art. This tone has been con­sis­tent for decades and we want­ed to hon­our this with our con­tem­po­rary dig­i­tal, and ana­logue, slant on the style.

You can watch the trail­er above, and find some won­der­ful Pink Floyd mate­r­i­al in the sec­tion below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Son­net 18

Watch Pink Floyd Plays Live in the Ruins of Pom­peii (1972)

Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters Per­forms The Wall at the Berlin Wall (1990)