11/11/2025
They gave her £30 and told her to "sing about death—but without words."
She improvised for 2½ minutes, broke down crying, and created one of rock's most powerful performances.
Then Pink Floyd refused to credit her for 32 years.
This is the story of Clare Torry—and the voice that made "The Great Gig in the Sky" immortal.
The year was 1972, and Pink Floyd were in Abbey Road Studios, working on an album about life, time, and death.
The Dark Side of the Moon was already shaping up to be something special. But one track—a powerful instrumental about mortality—was missing something.
Richard Wright had composed a beautiful, haunting piano piece. The band had recorded lush instrumental layers. But something was absent.
They needed a voice.
Not words. Not lyrics. Not poetry.
Just pure, raw emotion translated into sound.
The problem was: how do you capture death itself in a human voice?
The band initially considered Cathy Berberian, a renowned avant-garde experimental vocalist known for pushing boundaries. But that collaboration never materialized.
Time was running short. The album deadline was approaching.
That's when Alan Parsons, the album's engineer, had an idea.
He'd recently worked with a session singer named Clare Torry—a twenty-something vocalist who did commercial jingles and backup vocals to pay her rent in London.
She wasn't famous. She wasn't a rock star. She was a working musician hustling for session work.
Parsons called her on a Sunday. "Can you come to Abbey Road tonight? Pink Floyd needs a vocalist."
Clare almost said no. She had plans. It was last minute. And honestly, she wasn't even that familiar with Pink Floyd's music.
But Abbey Road was Abbey Road. And work was work.
She said yes.
Clare Torry arrived at Abbey Road Studios that night with no idea what she was walking into.
The band played her the instrumental track—Wright's melancholic piano, Gilmour's soaring guitar, the slow build toward something enormous and inevitable.
Then they gave her the instructions:
"Sing."
"About what?" Clare asked.
"Death," they said. "But no words. Just... feel it."
Clare stared at them. What does that even mean?
She was a trained vocalist. She sang melodies, lyrics, harmonies. She'd never been asked to just... improvise emotion without language.
But Pink Floyd weren't asking for a performance.
They were asking for something primal.
The track rolled.
Clare closed her eyes and began.
At first, she felt awkward. Self-conscious. She tried a few melodic phrases, testing the waters.
But then something shifted.
The music swelled beneath her—Wright's piano cascading, the instrumentation building like a wave—and Clare stopped thinking.
She just felt.
What came out wasn't singing in the traditional sense.
It was grief. Raw, unfiltered grief.
She wailed. She soared. She cried out. Her voice climbed higher and higher, reaching notes that felt like desperation, like pleading with something unseen.
She wasn't performing anymore. She was channeling.
Every human emotion in the face of death poured through her:
Fear. Rage. Acceptance. Sorrow. Transcendence.
She improvised for 2½ minutes straight—no lyrics, no script, just pure emotional truth.
When the track ended, Clare opened her eyes.
She was shaking. Tears were streaming down her face.
"I'm so sorry," she said, mortified. "That was too much. That was embarrassing. Let me try again—I'll tone it down."
She thought she'd failed. Thought she'd been too vulnerable, too exposed, too much.
The band stared at her in stunned silence.
Then one of them spoke: "That was perfect. We're done."
They recorded a couple more takes, but they all knew: The first take was magic.
Clare had done in one improvised performance what most singers couldn't do with a lifetime of preparation.
She'd captured death itself—the terror, the beauty, the surrender—in her voice.
Pink Floyd paid Clare Torry £30 for the session. Standard rate for a session vocalist.
She went home thinking it was just another gig. Another Sunday night, another paycheck.
She had no idea what she'd just created.
The Dark Side of the Moon was released on March 1, 1973.
It became one of the best-selling albums in history—over 45 million copies worldwide.
It stayed on the Billboard 200 chart for 950 consecutive weeks. That's over 18 years.
"The Great Gig in the Sky" became one of the album's most beloved tracks—a song that people played at funerals, at memorials, in moments of profound grief and transcendence.
Clare Torry's voice became iconic.
People around the world knew every note of her performance. They cried to it. They mourned to it. They found catharsis in it.
But when you looked at the album credits?
Clare Torry wasn't listed as a songwriter.
She was credited as a "vocalist"—like she'd just shown up and sung someone else's melody.
Meanwhile, Pink Floyd were earning millions in royalties. The songwriting credits went to Richard Wright alone.
Clare received nothing beyond that initial £30.
For decades, Clare said nothing.
She'd been paid for a session. That was the deal. She was a professional.
But as the years went on—as "The Great Gig in the Sky" became more and more legendary, as Pink Floyd's wealth grew exponentially—Clare started to feel something shift inside her.
What she'd done that night wasn't just "session work."
She hadn't sung someone else's melody. She'd created the melody.
Every note, every phrase, every emotional arc—that was her composition, improvised in the moment but no less authored.
Without her voice, "The Great Gig in the Sky" didn't exist. Not really.
Richard Wright had written a beautiful instrumental. But Clare Torry had written the soul of the song.
In 2004, after more than 30 years of silence, Clare Torry sued Pink Floyd.
She wasn't asking for back royalties or millions of pounds.
She was asking for something simpler and more profound:
Recognition.
She wanted to be credited as a co-writer of the song she'd created.
The case went to court. Music experts testified. Audio engineers analyzed the recording.
And in 2005, Pink Floyd settled.
Clare Torry was officially credited as a co-composer of "The Great Gig in the Sky" alongside Richard Wright.
She began receiving songwriting royalties—three decades after the fact.
But here's what makes this story so powerful:
Clare Torry didn't want revenge. She didn't want to destroy Pink Floyd's legacy.
She just wanted the truth to be told.
"I improvised that melody," she said. "I created those notes. That's composition, not just performance."
And she was right.
Listen to "The Great Gig in the Sky" today, and you'll hear something that almost didn't happen.
A last-minute session on a Sunday night.
A nervous vocalist who almost said no.
An impossible instruction: "Sing about death without words."
And a performance so raw, so vulnerable, so true that it became one of the most powerful moments in rock history.
Clare Torry's voice doesn't sing lyrics, but it says everything:
The fear of dying.
The rage against mortality.
The desperate grasping for life.
The final surrender.
The transcendence on the other side.
She captured the entire human experience of death in 2½ minutes of improvised wordless vocals.
And for 32 years, no one officially recognized that she'd composed that moment.
Today, when you listen to The Dark Side of the Moon, Clare Torry's name appears in the credits as co-writer.
It took three decades of legal battles to get there.
But it's there.
Because sometimes the most powerful art comes from the most vulnerable places.
Sometimes a session vocalist paid £30 creates something worth millions.
Sometimes the greatest performances happen when you stop thinking and just feel.
Pink Floyd asked Clare Torry to sing about death without words.
She gave them something nobody expected: the sound of a soul confronting eternity.
She broke down. She cried. She thought she'd failed.
Instead, she created one of rock's most transcendent moments.
And thirty-two years later, she finally got the credit she deserved.
£30. One Sunday night. No lyrics.
Just a voice, a piano, and instructions to "sing about death."
That's all it took to create immortality.
Clare Torry proved that the most powerful music doesn't come from technical skill or calculated artistry.
It comes from the moment you stop performing and start living the emotion.
Even if that emotion is death itself.
