Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Psychedelic London Uncut, 21 Dec 2000
By A Customer
Film reels shot in 1967 by film maker Peter Whitehead were stored away and only rediscovered in 1995. The reels revealed rare footage of the Pink Floyd in the studio recording "Astronomy "Overdrive" and "Nick's Boogie" while the group was still headed by Syd Barrett. Any English psychedlic fans of the Floyd's "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" and "Saucerful of Secrets" albums will love the extended versions of these songs. The footage is interspersed with shots from the Games for May hippie concert at the Festival Hall and features John Lennon and Yoko Ono (before they had met), Michael Caine and Julie Christie. Within a matter of months, Syd Barrett had left the band due to drug induced mental illness and David Gilmour was recruited to lead the group towards the dark side of the 70s. It is strongly recommended for the die hard Floyd fan but probably not for the casual observer.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
My review of this video., 5 Nov 2003
Okay. I am a Pink Floyd fan. Especially of the early, Barrett driven stuff. The first album, early singles etc. So when I found this video I had to have it. What it essentially comprises is the early Pink Floyd (pre Gilmour) in its purest form, jamming in the studio. The sound quality is not perfect, but in my opinion this only adds to the 60s authenticity of it all. The first piece performed is the legendary Interstellar Overdrive, this version often proclaimed as definitive. To be fair, it is 20 minutes long, and if you're a fan of pre no-wave, meandering, structureless, free-jazz influenced avant-garde experimentation, it's great. And I am, so I love it. But I'm sure many people would say, "that's not music, that's just noise", failing to see the subtlety and complexity of the actual sounds being made. Those people are too caught up in convention, too keen on traditions of "songs" and "melody", rather than originality, music as art rather than enterertainment, and the evocation of mood and atmosphere. Those people are idiots, ignore them. It's great. Barrett, pre-insanity, is a striking figure. Hunched on his chair, clearly not at ease with the camera, smoking instantly after each track. The second selection is an entirely improvised piece called "Nick's Boogie". This is even more unhinged than Interstellar Overdrive, beginning with no basis and not developing into much as it goes on. But the important thing to me, and I suspect, many other fans of psychedelia, is this change of emphasis from structure to experimentation. The watchword here is TOTAL freedom. At points the band pay no attention to each other's playing, drifting in and out of time and tune, making sounds with the agenda that they be as unlike what has gone before as possible. And it works. The clash of sounds when one member plays one tune and another plays another ... the spontaneous accidental creation of patterns where none previously existed, emphasising the very discordance that most try and avoid, the romantic rejection of cliche, suffocating technique and formal training, it really is very special. In attitude and intention, it's like Punk Rock, 10 years earlier. Which is why it's so strange that Johnny Rotten's t-shirt of choice should have been "I Hate Pink Floyd", when he and Vicious were closet Barrett fans.
The onscreen accompaniment is not just the band in the studio, it is a montage of footage shot largely at the UFO club in 67, and some from the epochal hippie freakout, "The 14 hour Technicolour Dream", an early rave thrown at the Alexandra Palace. Here we witness hippies, mods, miniskirts and beards as the crowd drug themselves up and party. We see the band onstage, we see Yoko Ono in the midst of one of her situationist happenings and essentially a portrait of swinging London. Allegedly Swinging London did not really exist, but this combination of footage is as close as it ever got to existence. This video is a must for every Barrett fan, and everyone interested in 60s psychedelia in general. Get it.
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