The 1972 concert film Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii has been remastered in 4K and is being shown in theaters in April with the new title of Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII. Recorded live at the Amphitheatre of Pompeii with no audience present, it also contains footage added in a later release of them in Abbey Road Studios during the recording of The Dark Side of the Moon.
Gina and I have our tickets already purchased for a showing at our local IMAX and I am really looking forward to seeing it again. Prior to a couple of weeks ago I wouldn’t have imagined that Gina would be all that interested in this. She likes Floyd just fine but I don’t think she has had much exposure to the early stuff they perform here and it’s different from what she knows. However, a few weeks ago we were talking about screams in music and I mentioned that Roger Waters belts out a doozy during “Careful With That Axe Eugene,” a discussion which also led to this post. I played the song for her and she mentioned that she really was enjoying it. So when I saw that tickets were available I thought she might want to go.
I haven’t seen the film in years but I used to own a copy. You see, I am “I had this on VideoDisc” years old. Not LaserDisc, VideoDisc. Introduced in 1981, the RCA VideoDisc was a phonograph like disc encased in a plastic sheath case. You would insert it in to the player and it would grab hold of the disc and you would remove the empty shell. About midway through the movie, you would have to reinsert the cover to retrieve the disc and once removed, flip the case over and repeat the process for the other side.
My parents bought one of these players soon after release and the deal at the video store was that we got to choose some discs in a package deal. I don’t remember all that we chose, but since I was there in the store I picked out Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii for myself. Over the next couple of years I added Let It Be and The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, which, in addition to the Monty Python sketches, had some amazing musical performances including Sting “Message in a Bottle” and a phenomenal version of “I Don’t Like Mondays” by Bob Geldof and Johnny Fingers (which I will post as my RSOTD)
I just checked with Gina and we are pretty sure that the VideoDisc player is still somewhere in our house, and I imagine I have the discs as well. I wonder if it still works?
Your thoughts?