I took my partner to see one of the major films of my formative years: Pink Floyd At Pompeii. The restored 1972 French film was rereleased in late April and shown in IMAX. I hadn’t seen the thing in more than 30 years, so I grabbed two tickets and was delighted to discover she wanted to come see it with me. She’s a big Pink Floyd fan, but I suspected that fondness was reserved for the 1973-1977 period, so I was curious to see her reaction to Pompeii, which serves as a time capsule of the band just as they were about to fully transition from their middle experimental space rock / soundtrack / fragile folk ballad period into the mainstream.
She was down with the music, but couldn’t shake the giggles throughout much of the film thanks to Roger Waters’ relentless gong performances and overall awkward intensity. She also stifled laughter during all the pretentious, art film scenery shots filmed in and around the Roman amphitheatre which was already 140 years old when the Mount Vesuvius eruption of AD 79 buried the city and neighbouring Herculaneum. Excavation of the site began in 1748 and was left partially cleared until a full excavation was completed between 1813 and 1816.
I was already a huge fan of Pink Floyd as a teenager when I finally discovered this film existed. This would have been around 1987 — before the group’s reunion album A Momentary Lapse of Reason. I remember borrowing Betamax copies of this and Led Zeppelin’s 1976 concert film, The Song Remains The Same, from a stereo store in Pembroke’s West End Mall which also rented films. I only had three days to figure out how to watch them — we didn’t have a Beta player. I remembered that my neighbours two doors down had one of those big, top-loading Betamax players like my elementary school. wheeled around on a big cart. I was able to borrow it and use it to dub both movies onto a VHS tape.
I watched the shit out of both films with my friends over the next few years, culminating in the summer of 1991 when two of us moved into an abandoned rural waterfront hotel owned by a friend’s family. It had a big bar room with a stage which we played music on. Upstairs were six guest rooms, one of which was converted into a lounge. It was in that lounge that my old VHS copy of Pink Floyd At Pompeii made its indelible mark on us. It had the unparalleled effect of making us want to jam. All it would take is about five minutes of watching — it didn’t matter which song — and we’d race off downstairs and rip into a big space jam in E. My old 1973 Gibson Grabber bass was there, plugged into a makeshift cabinet. My brother’s ’73 Telecaster and Roland multi-effects amp. The old-school, two-tier family Hammond organ with Rhythm Ace beatbox didn’t have a Leslie cabinet, but it did have a line out port, which allowed us to run it through distortion, octaver and phaser pedals into the PA. Finally, there was my friend’s comically huge hair-metal drum set — created by putting together at least two black budget kits. I have clear memories of doing Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun, Careful With That Axe Eugene and Celestial Voices (the end bit of A Saucerful Of Secrets).
Unless I’m mistaken, I’m pretty sure my VHS copy of Pompeii never came home from the hotel, and apart from the odd YouTube clip, I hadn’t seen the film since then.
The restored version shown in IMAX was a real treat. Granted, it wasn’t filmed in IMAX, so the image doesn’t fill the screen, but the quality is certainly quite good and the remixed soundtrack by Porcupine Tree’s Steven Wilson is fantastic. That said, I think there was an opportunity to be a little more aggressive with the remix here and there. Mostly, though — like the original — this appears to be a genuine live performance without overdubs and even contains a few mistakes, bad notes and one famously dropped drumstick during One Of These Days. Once you see it in the film, you’ll always be able to hear it in the soundtrack. It happens during the drum fill at 4:53. The stick in Nick Mason’s left hand slips out and flies out in front of his Ludwig drums. He’s quick to grab another stick, but you can see in his expression that he’s not happy about it. This appears to weigh on him a little, causing Mason to flub the same fill when it comes up again at 5:22. You get to watch his expressions throughout because this particular track uses Mason as its sole focal point throughout. While we studied it with immense fascination as teenagers, I hadn’t noticed until seeing the IMAX version just how shiny and clean Mason’s hair was. By no means a pinup band, they all look much more presentable here than they did on the gatefold band portrait included in 1971’s Meddle, released just weeks after they filmed Pompeii.
This was a busy and major transitional period for the band. Pink Floyd travelled to Pompeii to be filmed by French director Adrian Maben during the first week of October, 1971. They were there for six days, but filing happened over four days — Oct. 4-7. The idea was Maben’s. He had initially pitched recording the band and using their live music in conjunction with sequences of images of famous paintings. The band turned him down. But after a trip to Pompeii — and the amphitheatre in particular — he approached the band with a different idea. In stark contrast to other concert films, this one would have no audience — filmed instead in the silent, ancient amphitheatre. Floyd were down with the idea and together with Maben, set about figuring out which songs to perform. They had just wrapped up a world tour for Atom Heart Mother (1970) at the end of September, and were about to begin a U.S. tour in support of Meddle on Oct. 15.
They performed three of Meddle’s six songs for the film — One Of These Days, Echoes and Seamus, which was retitled Mademoiselle Nobs for the film because it was a different dog howling along with David Gilmour’s harmonica than the one on the Meddle album. (Meddle features Steve Marriott’s border collie Seamus. Pompeii features a Russian wolfhound named Nobs, which was owned by Madonna Bouglione. Mademoiselle Nobs is one of the few times in the film when overdubbing is evident. Rick Wright is holding a microphone to capture Nobs’ howls while Gilmour plays harmonica and Waters plays guitar. But there is audible bass guitar on the track — likely added by Gilmour or Waters post-production.
The performances in the film weren’t all recorded at Pompeii, either. Several of them were filmed months later at Studio Europasonor in Paris, from Dec. 13-20, two weeks after returning from their U.S. tour.
The Pompeii setlist goes like this — Pompeii (instrumental introduction music), Echoes Part 1, Careful With That Axe Eugene, A Saucerful Of Secrets, One Of These Days, Set The Controls For The Heart of The Sun, Mademoiselle Nobs, Echoes Part 2. Only Echoes, A Saucerful Of Secrets and One Of These Days were actually recorded at Pompeii. If you look closely, Wright is clean-shaven in the Paris footage, and bearded in the Pompeii footage.
The songs in the Pompeii film are generally the same ones the band were performing at the end of their Atom Heart Mother tour and the beginning of their Meddle tour. Those sets commonly started with Careful With That Axe Eugene and transitioned to Fat Old Sun from Atom Heart Mother, the Atom Heart Mother suite itself, Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun, Echoes, One Of These Days, A Saucerful Of Secrets and Embryo, which the band recorded in 1968 but never issued on a studio album. It showed up on the 1970 Harvest Records sampler Picnic, the 1983 compilation Works and the Cre/Ation part of the Early Years box set in 2016. They never performed Seamus live apart from the Mademoiselle Nobs version at Pompeii. They did, however, perform a handful of improvised instrumental blues songs and the Blues Theme from the 1969 More soundtrack.
Anyway, as I was saying — they were a busy bunch during this time. Meddle was recorded throughout most of 1971 while they were touring Europe, the U.K., Japan, the U.S. and Canada. They put it to bed and did Pompeii and headed off to North America for a month. They came back, did the Paris footage for Pompeii, had Christmas at home and then hit the road for two months of shows in the U.K. before heading back to Japan in March 1972. March wrapped with two big shows in Manchester on the 29th and 30th.
It was in this period, prior to jetting off to North America again for shows beginning April 14, that the band managed to assemble at Château d’Hérouville studio in France and record the soundtrack for the French film La Vallee. This music was released as the studio album Obscured By Clouds on June 2, 1972. After recording Obscured By Clouds, they spent six weeks touring North America, ending on May 7 in Philly before popping up in Germany 10 days later for a trio of shows over two weeks, followed by two more big gigs in Brighton ahead of a month off before returning to America.
Then they started Dark Side Of The Moon, forever putting to bed almost all the songs from the Pompeii era. When the film was originally released in 1972, it didn’t contain the 16 mm sequences of the band in the cafeteria at Studio Europasonor or the bits showing them working at Abbey Road studio on tracks for Dark Side Of The Moon — On The Run, Us And Them and Brain Damage/Eclipse. These sequences first showed up when the movie was re-screened in 1974 and have been part of it ever since. They’re included in the IMAX film, but not the new remixed soundtrack album.
I pre-ordered a copy of said soundtrack, which arrived on my doorstep May 4. It’s gorgeous — glossy and thick gatefold sleeve, loads of photos, 180-gram vinyl and a big movie poster on thick-stock paper. The album is spread across two discs, with the second LP offering something new — an alternate version of Careful With That Axe Eugene, and an unedited version of Saucerful Of Secrets which runs 12:44 instead of 10:10. The original studio version from 1968 is just shy of 11 minutes.
The performances in the Pompeii film and soundtrack are really great — the band are somehow really tight when performing the insane “syncopated pandemonium” section of Saucerful, gradually speeding up to a furious crescendo. One Of These Days has immense power, though I wish Wright’s keyboard was mixed similarly to the way it is on Meddle. Echoes is the centrepiece, however. This was still new at the time. First performed in February 1971, the band had only just finished recording it, and probably played it around 20 times. Incidentally, this was the first song they played at their first reunion concert in September 1987 in Ottawa. I was there, and I’ll never forget the huge smile on Wright’s face throughout.
For Pink Floyd fans, this new double LP is definitely worth acquiring. But don’t forget to also get your hands on the 2016 Early Years box set — specifically the 1972: Obfusc/ation part of it, which includes 5.1 Surround mixes of everything except Mademoiselle Nobs.
Nerd alert.
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Area Resident is an Ottawa-based journalist, recording artist, music collector and re-seller. Hear (and buy) his music on Bandcamp, email him HERE, follow him on Instagram and check him out on Discogs.
