The Classic 1972 Concert Film Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii Gets Restored & Will Soon Hit IMAX Theaters

Today, when we watch genre-defin­ing con­cert films like Mon­terey Pop, Wood­stock, Gimme Shel­ter, or Zig­gy Star­dust and the Spi­ders from Mars, we look upon the audi­ence with near­ly as much inter­est as we do the per­form­ers. But Pink Floyd nev­er did things in quite the same way as oth­er rock bands of that era. In 1972, they put out a con­cert film with no audi­ence at all, sub­sti­tut­ing for visu­al inter­est the majes­tic ruins of the ancient Roman amphithe­ater in Pom­peii. Pink Floyd at Pom­peii – MCMLXXII has late­ly been restored, and you can see the trail­er for its upcom­ing world­wide cin­e­mas-and-IMAX re-release above.

Even with­out the unpre­dictable ele­ment of atten­dees (apart from a few local chil­dren who snuck in to watch), the pro­duc­tion had its dif­fi­cul­ties. Ever musi­cal­ly rig­or­ous, the Floyd insist­ed on play­ing live with their actu­al tour­ing gear, which took three days to truck over from Lon­don.

Only then was it dis­cov­ered that the amphithe­ater did­n’t have enough elec­tric­i­ty avail­able to pow­er it all, which ulti­mate­ly required run­ning a half-mile-long exten­sion cord to the town hall. Though hard­ly unim­pres­sive, the result­ing footage fell short of fea­ture length, which required sup­ple­men­tary shoot­ing at the con­sid­er­ably less his­toric Stu­dio Europa­sonor in Paris.

Pink Floyd at Pom­peii – MCMLXXII was orig­i­nal­ly meant, in part, to pro­mote their then-lat­est-release Med­dle. That album is best remem­bered for “Echoes,” which occu­pies the entire­ty of side two, and which fore­shad­owed the kinds of ambi­tious com­po­si­tions of which the post-Syd Bar­rett ver­sion of the Floyd would be capa­ble. The film splits it up into two parts, one to open it and the oth­er to close it; you can get a taste of this live ren­di­tion from the clip just above. In between the two halves of “Echoes” come songs like “Care­ful with That Axe, Eugene,” “A Saucer­ful of Secrets,” and “Made­moi­selle Nobs,” as well as footage of the band in the stu­dio, at work on their next project: an album called The Dark Side of the Moon.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Hour-Long Col­lec­tion of Live Footage Doc­u­ments the Ear­ly Days of Pink Floyd (1967–1972)

Pink Floyd Films a Con­cert in an Emp­ty Audi­to­ri­um, Still Try­ing to Break Into the U.S. Charts (1970)

Pink Floyd Plays in Venice on a Mas­sive Float­ing Stage in 1989; Forces the May­or & City Coun­cil to Resign

Watch the Rare Reunions of Pink Floyd: Con­certs from 2005, 2010 & 2011

David Gilmour Makes His Live at Pom­peii Con­cert Film Free to Watch Online

Take a High Def, Guid­ed Tour of Pom­peii

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.