Soundboard
Sound Quality: A
Soundtrack from Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, a 1972 Adrian Maben film featuring Pink Floyd performing six songs at the ruins of the empty ancient amphitheatre in Pompeii, Italy.
The performances of "Echoes", "A Saucerful of Secrets", and "One of These Days" were filmed from October 4, 1971 to October 7, 1971. The remaining songs were filmed in a Paris studio, along with additional bluescreen footage for insertion into the Pompeii performances. The sequences in Paris were filmed in late 1971/early 1972.
Originally filmed in early autumn 1971, Live At Pompeii was director Adrian Maben's attempt to capture Pink Floyd on film but as their later success would show, he caught them at a pivotal moment in their career for not only had Meddle been recorded and made ready for release but the material that would eventually form Dark Side Of The Moon was already being taped at EMI's Abbey Road recording studio.
Against the backdrop of the Mount Vesuvius and the deserted streets of Pompeii, Pink Floyd play the songs that had formed, and would continue to form, the cornerstone of their live concerts but performed here for the benefit of Adrian Maben's cameras alone.
When planning Live At Pompeii, Adrian Maben had the idea of removing the audience from the concert in a similar manner to Jonathan Demme's work with Talking Heads on Stop Making Sense. Unlike that later film, however, which did at least allow an audience into the venue, Maben took Pink Floyd into a Roman amphitheatre in Pompeii that was deserted but for a few local kids who sneaked in and sat out of the way. The opening shot of the film, therefore, indicates what is to come, with Maben offering a wide shot of the amphitheatre in which Pink Floyd stand amongst their equipment and play the opening part of Echoes, the epic track that closes Meddle.
What is clearly noticeable and immediately so, is the almost complete absence of both Roger Waters and Rick Wright from the concert footage. As Adrian Maben explains in the interview included on the disc, the footage that was taken of both these members of the group was lost before the film was edited and, unable to rectify the situation, Maben simply edited the film using what footage he had of the group, David Gilmour and Nick Mason. Whilst this absence of footage is noticeable, it is only in a few moments that it really jars, particularly in One Of These Days when Roger Waters has to say the song's only line off screen, being, "One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces", as Nick Mason pounds his drums.
Regarding the music, Maben agreed both with Pink Floyd and their management that the band could perform whatever songs they wanted and, having been given this freedom, they produced a set list that mixed their earliest songs from the moment when David Gilmour replaced Syd Barrett, such as Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun and A Saucerful Of Secrets, with their later, as-yet-unreleased songs, including Echoes and One Of These Days. Of course, as with the CD Times review of A Piper At The Gates Of Dawn pointing out being Pink Floyd are somewhat more playful and whimsical than they are given credit for, Pink Floyd also offer the otherwise unreleased Mademoiselle Nobs that features Roger Waters on bass, David Gilmour on blues harp and an Afghan Hound on vocals. Clearly the song has little purpose but to see Rick Wright attempting to get a clear performance from a dog has to be seen to be believed.
(Quoted from http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=5886.)
Track 7 here, 'Mademoiselle Knobs', is perhaps better known as 'Seamus' (from 'Meddle'); Film director Adrian Maben captured Pink Floyd's only live performance of "Seamus" (in a greatly altered form, excluding lyrics, changing the key from D-Major to C-Major, and retitled "Mademoiselle Nobs") in his film Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii. To re-create the song, David Gilmour played harmonica instead of singing and (unusually) Roger Waters played one of Gilmour's Stratocaster guitars. The band members were keen to include this track in the film, and gave Maben the task of finding a dog that could duplicate Seamus's performance when they re-made it in front his cameras at les Studios de Boulogne in the Spring of 1972. A female Russian Wolfhound named Nobs, which belonged to Madonna Bouglione (the daughter of circus director Joseph Bouglione), was brought to the studio and Wright gently coaxed her to provide howling accompaniment as Seamus did in the album version. There is also an audible bass guitar in this recording, likely overdubbed during mixing of the film soundtrack at another studio, but, as with many Pink Floyd songs, it is difficult to tell who is playing it.