No location had been decided on for the film. Then there was a tentative agreement – the group would film later in the year. Gilmour was, as Maben says, “very nice and told me they would think about it”. He called O’Rourke again and a second meeting was arranged, this time with David Gilmour present. After this initial contact, he heard nothing. Maben phoned the group’s manager, Steve O’Rourke, in early 1971 and set up a meeting with him to discuss his vision, “a marriage of art and the Pink Floyd”. It was a different world, and that different world was absolutely fascinating.” You had all the little whispers, and the noises, and the shrieking. I found their music fantastic and different compared to other groups. “I thought it would be very interesting to show how they made their noises, their electronic sounds, and put them all together. “When you listened to their records at the time, it was very strange – you didn’t quite know how they made their sounds. More to the point, they had piqued his curiosity – he was intrigued by them. Pink Floyd seemed to marry both his love of art and music perfectly. With these films under his belt, Maben set about ensnaring the group that he really wanted to record. “Belgian TV was more open to the possibilities of making rock films, so I went to Brussels and did a couple of films there with East Of Eden and Family. It was not the case in neighbouring Belgium. “There were few rock programmes – it was just noise to the people who ran TV, even the intelligent ones.” “Art became something new and vibrant.”Ī Parisian youth at an exciting time, Maben had met Jean-Luc Godard and marched with the students in 1968, but despite all this, there was a general mistrust in the capital of rock music. “I was into art films, making portraits of Magritte and art movements,” Maben tells Prog from his residence in Paris. He was young and working for French television. Maben had not emerged from the Cambridge/London art clique that had surrounded the group. It was the vision of UK-born, Paris-residing director Adrian Maben. Like so much in the Floyd’s career, it was a happy accident. “I think Pink Floyd freaks would enjoy it.”Īlthough shot on 35mm, Live At Pompeii was originally made for television. In short, "Pink Floyd: live at Pompei" will delight any Pink Floyd fan.“It’s just us playing a load of tunes in the amphitheatre with some rather Top Of The Pops-ish shots of us walking around the top of Vesuvius and things like that,” Roger Waters said at the time of the film’s release. The movie isn't without humor (Nick Mason's preference for an apple pie without crust) and a dog is baying at the moon during "Mademoiselle nobs". If you wish to know how your favourite album was recorded, the movie will deliver it to you. You see interviews of the band and this one at work, recording their masterpiece "dark side of the moon", THE album that will reveal them to the general public and probably their last collective album before Roger Waters' seizure of power. Nevertheless, "Pink Floyd: live at Pompei" is also a well-regulated movie thanks to the sequences that take place in the Abbey Road Studios. On the other hand, it's a pity that he favours a bit too often slow travelings and the same precise shots of the band's members during their performance. However, his making appears to be paradoxical: it can be both creative and ingenious: Waters' scream in "careful with that axe Eugene is compared with a volcano erupting. I think about the static shots of different places in Pompei with "Echoes" (probable the best song Pink Floyd has ever written) in the background. Adrian Maben succeeds skilfully the marriage between the sound and the picture and it creates an entrancing climate. Moreover, you are under the impression that the members of the band surpass themselves musically and they give the best they can. There's no spectators but the music impresses, is at its full swing. However, this is what happened in october 1971 and the result is astonishing. You can barely imagine, the "dark side of the moon"'s creator to give a concert in this magic and sole scenerie. Apparently, there's none link between the two quoted names. An ancient city nowadays wiped out: Pompei, a major British band from the seventies, Pink Floyd.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |