Hear How Clare Torry’s Vocals on Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” Made the Song Go from Pretty Good to Downright Great

Smack in the mid­dle of Pink Floy­d’s clas­sic Dark Side of the Moon sits a song many lis­ten­ers may hear as an extend­ed bridge between the two true cen­ter­pieces, “Time” and “Mon­ey.” But I’ve always thought of “The Great Gig in the Sky” as the album’s true cen­ter, a swirling, swing­ing, soul­ful prog-rock mas­ter­piece, car­ried to stratos­pher­ic heights by British singer Clare Tor­ry. The song’s word­less gospel vocal makes it an ecsta­t­ic, even hope­ful, tent pole sup­port­ing Dark Side’s bril­liant­ly cyn­i­cal songs about the banal­i­ty and injus­tice of mod­ern life.

“The Great Gig in the Sky,” that is to say, pro­vides much-need­ed emo­tion­al release in an album that can sound, writes Alex­is Petridis, “like one long sigh.” Yet if you know the sto­ry of Dark Side of the Moon and of Clare Torry’s defin­ing con­tri­bu­tion, you’ll know that her incred­i­ble soar­ing vocal was sheer hap­pen­stance, an impro­vi­sa­tion by a young unknown singer brought in at the last minute by pro­duc­er Alan Parsons—and one who wasn’t a par­tic­u­lar fan of the band. (“If it had been The Kinks,” she remem­bered, “I’d have been over the moon.”)

Tor­ry reluc­tant­ly stepped into the stu­dio and asked the band, “’Well, what do you want?’” Basi­cal­ly, she says, “they had no idea.” An ear­ly instru­men­tal mix of the song from 1972 (top), fore­grounds Nick Mason’s propul­sive drums, Richard Wright’s Ham­mond organ, and sam­ples from Apol­lo 17 trans­mis­sions. (These were replaced in the final ver­sion with a snip­pet from con­ser­v­a­tive writer Mal­colm Mug­geridge.)

When Tor­ry went into the vocal booth and put on the head­phones, she would have heard an even more stripped-down mix. Giv­en no oth­er instruc­tion than “we don’t want any words,” she decid­ed, “I have to pre­tend to be an instru­ment.”

Torry’s vocal is so dis­tinc­tive that she even­tu­al­ly won a set­tle­ment in 2004 for a co-song­writ­ing cred­it with Wright—an out­come some song­writ­ing experts agree was ful­ly jus­ti­fied since she essen­tial­ly cre­at­ed a new melody for the song. In the inter­view above, hear Tor­ry describe how she “had a lit­tle go” and, after some guid­ance from David Gilmour and a can of Heineken, casu­al­ly knocked out one of the most thrilling vocal per­for­mances in rock his­to­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Doc­u­men­taries on the Mak­ing of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here

Dark Side of the Rain­bow: Pink Floyd Meets The Wiz­ard of Oz in One of the Ear­li­est Mash-Ups

Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” Pro­vides a Sound­track for the Final Scene of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagnessd