In 1971 the Pink Floyd are on the verge of the turning point: Meddle has just been completed, The Dark Side of the Moon It is just an idea in gestation. The group is in the middle of an evolutionary path, still immersed in the mists of psychedelia, but increasingly attracted by a form of atmospheric, kinematic rock, capable of evoking inner worlds without the need for words. So while colleagues already outdated such as T. Rex, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin or Yes fill stadiums and arenas, the Pink Floyd decide to play without audience in one of the most popular places in the world: the Roman amphitheater of the city buried by Vesuvius. No ticket sold, no ovation, only microphones, four slopes, wind, silence and stones. The absolute antithesis of the rock performances of the time. In short, a concert that has become legend although it has never been, technically, a concert, as well as a sound paradox: music played for anyone, designed to be listened to by everyone. A philosophical experiment, in some way.
The result, filmed by the director Adrian Maben, is that Live at Pompeii That, after several attempts that went badly over the decades, in these days he has blocked in the cinemas from all over the world, but of which an official audio version had never been published. It is impossible not to see in Live at Pompeii A form of conceptual art, a sound installation that anticipates certain environmental and minimalist drifts of decades. The point was not to be seen, but to be present, create a sound form that could live even without immediate witnesses. Something that, extreme and playing a little with the time plans, in fact made the Pink Floyd Precursors even of the concerts without audience of the Covid period.
Listening today Live at Pompeii McMLXXII – Without images, without filters – You have the feeling of entering a sound temple. It is not a live disc in the canonical sense: there is no public, therefore there is no reaction or interaction. Yet every note seems to weigh as a declaration. Echoes, Set The Controls for the Heart of the Sun, In Saucerful of Secrets They are not only songs, they are lugubrious visionary symphonies suspended between beauty and nightmare, primitive sound rites, cosmic invocations that take shape among the columns fallen of a dead empire.
That this album arrives in 2025 perhaps is not even so casual. In an era in which we listen to compressed music on small speakers, but we fill the stadiums as perhaps never in history, these songs impose us an intimate, personal, meditative listening. Even better if with a system of a certain level, capable of emphasizing Steven Wilson's Remixing work, which otherwise, separated from the cinematographic vision, inevitably loses value. On the other hand, it is a job conceived more for audiophiles and the suitists than for the general public.
Live at Pompeii McMLXXII It is this: a record to listen to alone, as if you were there, in the amphitheater, between the shadows and the ghosts recently mentioned by Nick Mason. Its official exit is first of all a historical recognition, as can be released like the live of the tour of The wall. It is an act of love for history, officially recognizing that that concert is an integral part of the inheritance of Pink Floyd. Not everything has aged in the best way, it must be said. Some aesthetic choices, such as the insertion of Mademoiselle Nobsthe one sung by the dog to be clear, perhaps still makes sense if combined with the images of the film. The vocal parts of a piece like Careful with That Axe, EugeneThen, they are at times dated for a modern ear.
Live at Pompeii McMLXXII It is not just a record release: it is a historical return, an act due to one of the most influential audiovisual experiences of rock. It is also an opportunity to rediscover the Pink Floyd at the exact moment in which they were about to become immortal, suspended between two eras, armed only with their tools and their imagination. If he had come out at the time, but also after the group's world explosion, he would have been relegated to a simple style of a band for intellectuals. Now it is the sound of time, stone, solitude. It is the noise of the universe that bends to a stratocaster and an infinite delay.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
