Skip to main content

Watch Pink Floyd Play Live Amidst the Ruins of Pompeii in 1971 … and David Gilmour Does It Again in 2016

Pink Floyd is one of few bands in rock history who could play the ruins of Pompeii without seeming to overreach, but it wasn’t their idea to put on a concert for Roman ghosts in 1971, the year before they recorded their magnum opus Dark Side of the Moon. According to the director Adrian Maben, who filmed the performance in the ancient necropolis, he decided upon the location after losing his passport during a holiday in Italy in 1971. He wandered Pompeii alone in search of it and had an epiphany.

It was strange. A huge deserted amphitheater filled with echoing insect sounds, flying bats and the disappearing light which meant that I could hardly see the opposite side of this huge structure built more than two thousand years ago.

I knew by instinct that this was the place for the film. It had to be here.

Making creative decisions from a chance encounter with echoes and shadows was, nonetheless, fully in keeping with the band's process. Despite their decision to write accessible lyrics fitting together under a loose concept for their current album, serendipity and chance operations had always played critical roles in the composition of their post-Syd Barrett soundscapes, and became integral to Dark Side’s creation.

As David Gilmour told Guitar World’s Alan Di Perna, early experiments like “Saucerful of Secrets” (inspired by “weird shapes” drawn by Roger Waters and Nick Mason) gave rise to “Atom Heart Mother” and Meddle’s “Echoes,” which the band played in two parts at the beginning and end of the Pompeii concert film. These songs, Gilmour says, “all lead logically to Dark Side of the Moon.”

And they led through Pompeii, where the band first was first “unleashed on film,” as one theatrical poster put it, before they were unleashed on thousands of new fans after Dark Side’s release in December. Where the filmed concert highlighted the band’s mastery of experimental space rock, the album brought this sensibility under the discipline of Roger Waters’ sharp songwriting and Gilmour’s stunning guitar playing and arranging.

Though he is modest about it, Gilmour’s contributions came increasingly to define the band’s massive sound in the early 70s. His role, as he told Di Perna, was “to help create a balance between formlessness and structure, disharmony and harmony.” He was, writes Rolling Stone, “a fiery, blues-based soloist in a band that hardly ever played the blues,” but he was just as “adept at droning avant-garde improv,” “Chic-like flourishes,” and “floating, dreamy textures,” all qualities ensuring that Pink Floyd’s music rose to the level of their creative ambitions.

So when Gilmour returned to Pompeii in 2016, without his Pink Floyd band members, to play the first live public concert the city’s amphitheater had seen in over 2000 years—and the only laser light show it had ever seen—the performance didn’t seem like overreach at all. Above, see him play “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” and “Comfortably Numb” with a full backing band (including Chuck Leavell on keyboards, singing Roger Waters’ parts on the latter song). The massive stage show and huge, smartphone-toting audience makes this footage more arena rock show than the performance art of the original concert film, but the grandeur of the music, and Gilmour’s soaring solos, still justifies the grandeur of the setting.

You can purchase online the Director's cut of Pink Floyd - Live at Pompeii.

Related Content:

How Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” Was Born From an Argument Between Roger Waters & David Gilmour

Hear Lost Recording of Pink Floyd Playing with Jazz Violinist Stéphane Grappelli on “Wish You Were Here”

When Pink Floyd Tried to Make an Album with Household Objects: Hear Two Surviving Tracks Made with Wine Glasses & Rubber Bands

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Watch Pink Floyd Play Live Amidst the Ruins of Pompeii in 1971 … and David Gilmour Does It Again in 2016 is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2Yw7qNM
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Voltaire Meant When He Said That “We Must Cultivate Our Garden”: An Animated Introduction

“Voltaire’s goal in writing [his 1759 satire Candide ] was to destroy the optimism of his times,” says Alain de Botton in the School of Life video above, “an optimism that centered around science, love, technical progress, and a faith in reason.” These beliefs were folly, Voltaire thought: the transfer of faith from a providential God to a perfect, clockwork universe. Candide satirizes this happy rationalism in Doctor Pangloss, whose belief that ours is the best of possible worlds comes directly from the philosophical optimism of Gottfried Leibniz . The preponderance of the evidence, Voltaire made abundantly clear in the novel’s series of increasingly horrific episodes, points toward a blind, indifferent universe full of needless cruelty and chaos. “Hope was, he felt, a disease,” de Botton says, and “it was Voltaire’s generous goal to try and cure us of it.” But as everyone who has read Candide (or read a summary or brief notes on Candide ) knows, the novel does not end with ...
Post a Comment
Read more

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Interactive Map of Odysseus’ 10-Year Journey in Homer’s Odyssey

The Odyssey , one of Homer's two great epics, narrates Odysseus' long, strange trip home after the Trojan war . During their ten-year journey, Odysseus and his men had to overcome divine and natural forces, from battering storms and winds to difficult encounters with the Cyclops Polyphemus, the cannibalistic Laestrygones, the witch-goddess Circe and the rest. And they took a most circuitous route, bouncing all over the Mediterranean, moving first down to Crete and Tunisia. Next over to Sicily, then off toward Spain, and back to Greece again. If you're looking for an easy way to visualize all of the twists and turns in  The Odyssey , then we'd recommend spending some time with the  interactive map created by Gisèle Mounzer .  "Odysseus' Journey"  breaks down Odysseus' voyage into 14 key scenes and locates them on a modern map designed by Esri, a company that creates GIS mapping software. Meanwhile, if you're interested in the whole concept of ...
Post a Comment
Read more