Ok, they are the Pink Floyd, so every comparison with the rest of the music is – when not directly without meaning – at least naive. Yet: how much nostalgia and how much envy, even of times never lived, and of a certain way of approaching the trade, in seeing Live again in Pompeii. Because yes, there is a new version of the legendary concert among the ruins of the British band: this is this Pink Floyd at Pompeii – McMLXXIIin the room from 24 to 30 April and then immediately after on DVD and, for the first time, in audio format; Everything has remastered, from the restored sound of Steven Wilson (who has dealt with making the instrumental traces “breathe”, in symbiosis with the panorama that surrounded them) to the film itself, now in 4K and in a less exposed version than the full one, published 2003, always signed by the director Adrian Maben. The interviews with the two Gauls in the chicken coop, Roger Waters and David Gilmour, today more than ever enemies, for example have been cleaned up, perhaps to avoid other friction.

The history of Live in Pompeii

After all, all this, at the time, could not know. The live in Pompeii, in fact, photographs them in full youth, face faces and long hair, just before the global explosion of The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), when they are still in the settlement phase after the release of Barrett, for their own admission far from the “world of drugs” and the basements that had trained them in the sixties, prosthesis towards progressive, which in any case will gradually overturn, to demonstrate that they are too also for that genre there. So much so: in October 1971, after his stay in Italy, Maben convinces them to perform among the ruins of Pompeii, in what was primarily a logistical effort – did not give up anything of their own system, and food everything was dramatic – and which will become above all a response to self -celebrating films such as that, at the time inflated, of Woodstock. Here too, it is clear, there is a concert, but it is surreal: the Pink Floyd play Echoesamong others, in an empty amphitheater, without audience, an contraintial choice that will make history. And that, with the assembly, contributes to the dreamlike atmosphere of the film: performances at sunset, the stones that echo the sounds, the four for a walk for the Solfatara of Pozzuoli, Waters who screams and firms on the gong, in one of the scenes – also at the directorial level – more intense. The protagonists? Not the band’s songs, but their relationship with the surrounding space.

Problem: the original shot is short, too short. Thus is integrated with filming in the studio in Paris, who go to compose the pulp – just an overall hour – of the first version, which comes out in 1972. It is not very good for the box office, but these are these Stop and Goas if in fact they were working on something genuinely crazyto feed the myth: the film succeeds in 1974, in the wake of The Dark Side of the Moonwith in addition some scenes a little fictitious precisely on the processing of the disc, next of over a year in Pompeii, transforming the film into a sort of photography of the Pink Floyd of that time. And of a whole world.

What effect makes it see it again today

More than fifty years later, net of the dozens of changes in the music market, of which not even the Pink Floyd themselves have not been immune, the archaeological finds on stage are no longer just the excavations of Pompeii, but also the group: something very close, which belongs to us (already only as far as they have music has influenced our shared culture, it has entered it), but also that speaks a language different from ours. Nevertheless. Yet these music ruins tell. It is seen in the tension that animates them in the most difficult moments, but also in smiles, in the moments lying.

David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters and Richard Wright were doing something great, of radical: of course, they were children of their time, but it was a time when music was still an artistic, experimentation vehicle, in which his authors were the first to be not crushed by the need to make success, rather of experimenting, to dare, fly; And it is not the art for art, it is simply that then all this had a response – and a support, even industrial – now unthinkable. They had the ambition and awareness of working on something big, which could change the world. This was (also) the mainstream. And everything was more spontaneous: we look at the questions of the journalists, who in the various interviews there they ask questions now defined as inconvenient; And the approach of their four, far from divi, thrown under the sun on the clay, with tank tops and nothing else, without filters. Today a live in Pompeii – and we saw it in the way that was told, then never happened, among the pyramids of Travis Scott, however a genius of his generation – would be only a matter of status, a way to put his flag in some illustrious place. So, it was the testimony of that daily revolution that was music.