One of the best ever music films is back in cinemas (including IMAX!), digitally re-mastered from the original 35mm footage and retitled Pink Floyd at Pompeii: MCMLXXII. Samuel Flynn Scott embraces this mad spectacle – playing to no one in an empty colosseum, long since engulfed in the horrors of a great eruption, seems perfectly fitting.
Pink Floyd at Pompeii: MCMLXXII
There are very few moments in music history that are so particular to themselves that they become repeatable, not as a trope but as a sort of large scale meme. The Beatles’ rooftop performance, Future Islands freaky dancing on Letterman, Dylan going electric at Newport folk festival. But the one that sits closest to my heart, for mildly perverse reasons, is the ridiculous genius spectacle of Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii.
In many ways it’s their farewell to the tripped out, druggy Pink Floyd. Weirdness for weirdness’s sake. Syd Barrett’s living ghost still haunting the band’s aura. Forever spacemen stranded in the London freak scene trying to trip their way back home. Pompeii provides the backdrop for the last hurrah and the most distilled capturing of a very unusual band. The driving abstractions of Meddle brought to life in sweltering heat amidst the ruins of an ancient town. It’s kinda spooky.
It’s intriguing re-watching Live At Pompeii in a post Peter Jackson’s Get Back world. The Beatles rambling around grand concepts for their return to live performance, playing at the pyramids of Giza for one, but ultimately settling on the rather more domestic and contemporary scene of a London rooftop. Utterly fitting of the band that defined the moment they were in.
Pre-Dark Side, post-Syd Pink Floyd were not that kind of band. The Kinks or Small Faces “grab a pack of crisps and meet me at the bus stop” they were not. Enchanted by new technologies like guitar pedals and synthesisers, but free flowing and lucid like non-western spiritual music. Indian ragas come to mind, not in the instrumentation, but the intent. Playing to no one in an empty colosseum, long since engulfed in the horrors of a great eruption, seems perfectly fitting.
It had a profound effect on me as a young man for multiple reasons. For one, I didn’t like Pink Floyd at all before watching it. I can’t connect with Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here or The Wall. To me, they are just a touch boring. Not deep enough in the trip, but wound up in their own importance. The material on Pompeii is much, much weirder. It is arguably more indulgent, which makes it just indulgent enough.
The other thing that blew my mind was the strange similarities to The Beastie Boys Gratitude music video shot in Rotorua, of all places. There is some esoteric DNA connecting Money Mark’s organ solo and the keyboard work of Richard Wright which perhaps (even if subconsciously) led the hip hop group to recreate Live At Pompeii whilst on tour in New Zealand. They have even spray painted their gear with Pink Floyd logos. Or maybe they bought a whole bunch of Pink Floyd touring equipment, like Pompeii or the pink terraces, the truth is buried by ash and time.
The film tiptoes the edge of becoming a Spinal Tap Stonehenge moment. Is it too silly? Sure it is, but then the performances are so good, the silliness becomes vital to the whole. It’s a mad spectacle that gives the sense that these musicians are other worldly cosmic beings. And then it abruptly cuts to mundane footage of the band at Abbey Road, or in a cafeteria getting lunch. And they seem quite normal, a bit nerdy, a bit goofy. They don’t seem like rock Obelix acid fried freaks who fell in a cauldron of mandrake and juniper as children.
It gives me the impression that someone suggested they play at Pompeii as a bit of a lark and they all just went along with it. Whether it’s a bit tongue and cheek or an entirely sincere concert to the ancient gods, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable film with the best music Pink Floyd ever made in the moments before they became the biggest band in the world.
