When Dark Eyes was released I wrote a piece comparing it to a prog rock album. That was in the post Dark Eyes on the Moon. Nick Briggs liked my piece so much he mentioned it on a podcast, just as a train went by which obscured the name of my blog!

Now that I have heard Dark Eyes 2 I had to return to the concept of a hidden level to the boxset…

What musical influences are there?

The second story, The White Room, is obviously a reference to the Cream song of the same name. Cream produced this psychedelic classic in the late 1960s.

Check out the lyrics of line 3:

Silver horses ran down moonbeams in your dark eyes

If that’s not proof, nothing is!

Inspired I looked at the other stories – nothing obvious for The Traitor, there’s a Genesis track called Horizons but it has no lyrics so probably didn’t influence Time’s Horizon. There is a van Morrison song called The Master’s Eyes which lyrically is rather sparse just talking about truth and light. I did find a 2011 prog rock album called Eyes of the Master by a band called Sunrunner so maybe there is something in this as well.

Structure

Now let’s look at the structure of Dark Eyes 2. There are four stories and three main characters (The Doctor, Molly and Liv). They each go through the core of the stories in a different order:

	The Doctor	Molly	Liv
The Traitor	4	n/a	1
The White Room	1	1	n/a
Time’s Horizon	2	2	2
Eyes of the Master	3	3	3

In other words the end is not really the end and there is some loopiness to the whole set – this is nothing more than classic prog rock trickery. I call attention to The Wall by Pink Floyd which starts with the phrase …we came in? This is a bit quiet and quickly drowned out by In The Flesh. Get to the end of the double album and the track Outside the Wall ends with a quite piece and someone saying Isn’t this where…

This may seem spurious but I’d just like to draw attention to the lyrics of In the Flesh and the lines:

If you wanna find out what’s behind these cold eyes
You’ll just have to claw your way through this disguise

Change cold to Dark or think of this in terms of what The Master does in his story and there are some resonances.

[pullquote]Dark Eyes 2 is an existential prog rock experiment[/pullquote]

If we postulate that the whole of Dark Eyes 2 is an existential prog rock experiment can we align it with the whole of Pink Floyd’s The Wall? Well the album is anti-war and Nick’s story The Traitor covers the whole difficult topic of collusion with an occupying force which was common in Nazi occupied France. The White Room is set around Armistice Day in 1918 which is another war theme.

My final thought is We Don’t Need No Extermination and this wonderful image from the always amusing Daily Dalek.

This is #160.

Enjoy!