Director – Adrian Maben – 1972 – UK – Cert. PG – 93m
*****
Around the time of Meddle, Pink Floyd perform in the amphitheatre at Pompeii and in a Paris sound studio; later, at EMI Abbey Road, they work on their next album The Dark Side of the Moon – Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII is out in UK cinemas on Thursday, April 24th
This review is of the Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii – The Director’s Cut version that came out on DVD in 2003. There have been various versions over the years; indeed, that DVD release also contains the 62-minute cut which excises all the Abbey Road material. The newly released version (as yet unseen by this writer) boasts a 4K restoration and a new sound mix by Steven Wilson. Even without these new enhancements, the film is pretty impressive some fifty odd years on.
It starts and ends with a version of Echoes (which originally took up the second side of Meddle and is here conveniently broken up into a part one and a part two). This is followed by Careful With That Axe Eugene and another lengthy opus A Saucerful of Secrets. Three more numbers are recorded in Studio Europa-Sonor in Paris: the shorter, punchier (to give it its long title used in the film, which also constitutes the song’s entire vocal lyrics) One of These Days I’m Going To Cut You into Little Pieces, a blues called Mademoiselle Nobs similar to Meddle’s Seamus without lyrics but with a dog (the eponymous Nobs) howling along, and Set The Controls for the Heart of the Sun.
Inserted into this are sequences of recording parts of The Dark Side of the Moon at EMI Abbey Road, specifically Richard Wright playing the piano part for Us and Them and David Gilmour performing the guitar part for Brain Damage, along with talking heads footage of the band in the canteen at Abbey Road and at Studio Europa-Sonor.
The simple-sounding conceit of having the Pink Floyd perform in an amphitheatre empty save for a small film crew (and a handful of local children who snuck in to the premises and were allowed to watch from a distance as long as they kept quiet – who you never see in the film) turns out to be a good one, allowing the film crew to effectively capture the band at their peak without any audience to get in the way. See this in a cinema, and, of course, you have an audience.
Director Maben uses some basic tricks that serve the band and their material well. There are a lot of shots circling around the band as they play, visually echoing the amphitheatre’s circular structure, and passing behind speakers labelled ‘Pink Floyd. London’. He follows a similar strategy in the Abbey Road / DSOTM performances, but those in the Studio Europa-Sonor tend to be locked off shots of the whole band or various band members.
The various talking heads pieces lend a nice feeling of the band, with a largely unexplored suggestion that there is tension between the various band members, something which would come to a head later on when the others booted bass player Roger Waters out. You can feel this hovering in the background, but it will be several years yet before it becomes a real problem. The talking heads and the DSOTM footage were added by Maben when he felt the original 62-minute version was too short, but for this writer’s money, the film works well both with it at the longer length and without it at the shorter. Sometimes, less is more – and, sometimes, less is less.
There are times when you wish there was more footage of the different members of the band. One of These Days… in particular suffers from mostly showing Nick Mason drumming, when you want to watch the other band members contributing their various parts (admittedly, one camera has Gilmour in the background, but his guitar is largely obscured from view – apparently, there was footage of some of the others which got thrown out before the director could use it for a re-edit). The opening of Echoes, Part One focuses largely on Mason on drums and Gilmour on guitar, and you long to see Wright – in this scribe’s opinion the most musically talented of the four – playing keyboards. The moments in the film when he does, including the Us and Them sequence at Abbey Road, so serve as a reminder as to what a singular talent he was.
Musically, the live renditions of the various pieces showcased are top-notch, and for anyone who likes the band, the forthcoming album version is likely to prove a worthwhile addition to their music collection. For now, though, the chance to see a newly restored version in a cinema with an audience is something to be relished.
The 4K restoration Pink Floyd at Pompeii MCMLXXII is out in cinemas in the UK on Thursday, April 24th.
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