|
How the staff of Spare Bricks discovered that all those old Floyd films add up to a nice pot of gold. By Mike McInnis
The name 'Pink Floyd' has become inseparably associated with the notion of the Concept Album. This is primarily due to the post-Dark Side Waters-era Floyd and Waters' solo projects, but even The Division Bell and Broken China had conceptual elements to them. Likewise, the driving principle behind Spare Bricks is that each issue should have a theme or concept around which every article and column revolves, from the features and opinion columns to the puzzles and trivia. It doesn't always work out quite that way, but we try. When someone on the Spare Bricks staff first proposed that we do an issue dedicated to all of the Floyd's film work, it was met with a lukewarm response at best. I guess most of us think of More and La Vallee, and perhaps Zabriskie Point, and our eyes glaze over immediately. These films are generally regarded as boring, hippy-dippy remnants of a bygone era, and of interest only to serious Floyd fanatics. But then we started looking at all of the films with which the Floyds had been associated over the years. There were art films such as San Francisco and The Committee. There were concert films, including not only Delicate Sound of Thunder and P*U*L*S*E, but also Pompeii and the lesser-known Stamping Ground. The list also grew to include documentaries such as Crystal Voyager and La Carrera Panamericana, among others. And that's just "Pink Floyd". The list grows even further when you consider that Nick Mason once formed a business dedicated to scoring films, and that Roger Waters has been involved in several films, including projects as diverse as The Body, When the Wind Blows, and The Legend of the 1900. We soon discovered that there were too many films to cover them all. The real coup came when we unearthed a series of (mostly) unpublished articles by David King that had been originally intended for publication in the presumably defunct Brain Damage magazine. David has tracked down info on several of the best-known films that the Floyds specifically worked on, and has shared stories about Syd and Roger and the rest with some of the key figures in the creation of these early Floyd soundtracks. David was kind enough to polish these up, add to them, and allow us to publish them in a special, and pleasantly exhaustive, Floyd film section. This issue also features an article by Pink Floyd Archives creator Vernon Fitch, who is one of the few people to have seen the Nick Mason documentary Life Could Be a Dream and lived to tell about it. And Johnny Valenzuela took the issue's film theme as an opportunity to take a "fact finding" trip to the real life Zabriskie Point But perhaps the most exciting pieces in this issue are the special reports on the failed attempts at releasing Floyd films. First, David King looks at the efforts made by himself and others to get The Committee finally released on video. Also, Rick Karhu tells the story of a Syd Barrett feature film, Crazy Diamond, and how attempts to put the film into production were stopped by Roger Waters and others. All in all, this issue is packed with front-page-quality stuff. Enjoy! Mike McInnis is Assistant Editor of Spare Bricks |
