Tropic Sprockets / Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii: Director’s Cut

Tropic Sprockets / Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii: Director’s Cut

By Ian Brockway

Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii is a 1972 concert film, directed by Adrian Maben, featuring the members of the spacey surrealist rock band Pink Floyd, with members Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Richard Wright, and Nick Mason. The film is an earthy, yet psychedelic exploration of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon set against Pompeii’s figures and mosaics. Though the film has a sluggish start, it works best as a free-associative poem or meditative video featuring the band’s pulsing and eerie signature sound.

One hears David Gilmour and Roger Waters talk about electronic machines: “You have to control the machines and not let the machines control you. It still comes from us — it’s in the head.”

The start of the film is cut with footage from space missions. Then one sees drummer Nick Mason banging it out in an empty Pompeii amphitheater. One single drummer alone amid ruins. Seen in this way the group Pink Floyd are existential rockers from the future reclaiming Pompeii for pagan purposes, percussive or otherwise.

In one striking scene, a statue transforms into the face of Roger Waters. The moment recalls Jim Morrison of The Doors.

One does get the band’s passions here. The musicians are experimenters using sounds as colors and always ready for the new.

Don’t look for any prefabricated narratives here, look to this film as a voyage of sound and color, of a young band with a sound board as a palette, able to change environments around them.

And if that’s not your scene it’s a trip to watch a young and handsome David Gilmour eat oysters as he says the delicacy gives him inspiration and energy to carry on. 

Write Ian at [email protected]

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