Pink Floyd - Allen Theater, Cleveland, OH, 4-24-1972

Wow! I try not to hype things up on this blog, since there's way too much of that on the Internet these days already. But if you're a Pink Floyd fan, you definitely need to give this a listen.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Pink Floyd made no attempts to record themselves in concert. So the relatively small number of excellent sounding recordings we have are due to lucky chance, like the times they were recorded by the BBC. One unfortunate gap due to this is there's no great live recording of the "Dark Side of the Moon" album from 1972 or 1973. (There is one from a 1974 BBC broadcast.) For a long time now, I've especially wanted to hear what that sounded like in 1972, because the band performed that album in concert for over a year before recording it, and there were a lot of changes along the way. So it's pretty damn shocking to me that, 54 years later, a recording of this quality showed up on the Internet in the last couple of weeks. (I write this in mid-May 2026.)

This is an audience recording. Normally, that's a step below a soundboard or radio broadcast, sometimes several steps below. But not in this case. In my opinion, this sounds as good or better than most soundboards from the era. Previously, most people felt that a concert recording from the Rainbow Theatre in London on February 20, 1972 was the best live recording that included an early version of Dark Side. However, there were some big flaws with that, including some big chunks of the quality recording that were missing and had to be filled in with a much inferior recording from another source. I think this sounds better all the way through, and there are no missing chunks or other flaws like that.

I've included a PDF file that explains the story of how this recording was made public so many decades after the show. So read that if you're interested. That story makes me wonder what other audio treasures are still sitting in people's houses, forgotten or hoarded.

I made one big change to this already fine recording. I ran all the songs through an MVSEP audio filter to get rid of ambient crowd noise. At the time of this concert, in early 1972, Pink Floyd was more of a cult band, with a decent sized devoted fan base. As a result, the crowd listened very attentively and respectfully. So there wasn't much crowd noise to begin with. But I got rid of all I could during the songs, while keeping the cheering at the ends of songs. There wasn't a lot of even that because the Dark Side portion of the concert was played like one big song medley, with few occasions for the audience to really cheer until the whole album was over. Plus, the music of that album was brand new to everyone, so one didn't have the usual phenomenon of big cheers when recognizable songs started.

Additionally, there was very little in the way of random "woo-hoo" noises and talking during this recording. I found a little bit of that on two tracks, and ran those two through an extra MVSEP filter to get rid of that. Oh, and I also got rid of some dead air between songs. In particular, there were a few minutes of the sound of the crowd while the band took a short intermission at the end of the Dark Side portion of the concert. I got rid of that entirely.

Note that two songs that were a part of Dark Side at this point were later totally changed, with only a vague concept staying the same. "The Travel Sequence" was replaced by "On the Run." And "The Mortality Sequence," also sometimes known as "Religion," was replaced by "The Great Gig in the Sky." 

This album is an hour and 58 minutes long.

01 Speak to Me [Instrumental] (Pink Floyd)
02 Breathe (Pink Floyd)
03 The Travel Sequence [Instrumental] (Pink Floyd)
04 Time - Breathe [Reprise] (Pink Floyd)
05 The Mortality Sequence [Instrumental] (Pink Floyd)
06 Money (Pink Floyd)
07 Us and Them (Pink Floyd)
08 Any Colour You Like [Instrumental] (Pink Floyd)
09 Brain Damage - Eclipse (Pink Floyd)
10 One of These Days [Instrumental] (Pink Floyd)
11 talk (Pink Floyd)
12 Careful with That Axe, Eugene [Instrumental] (Pink Floyd)
13 Echoes (Pink Floyd)
14 talk (Pink Floyd)
15 Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun (Pink Floyd)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/VvXP9ZkE

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/S9NNWY3jyprpp93/file

The cover image is the only photo that I was able to confirm actually was taken at this exact concert. It shows lead guitarist David Gilmour.