Features 3
Isn't this where we came in?
The Wall recycled
Pink Floyd spent the three years between 1968 and 1971 desperately in search of a direction to take with their music; they were looking for a sound. 1971 brought Meddle and Obscured By Clouds in which this direction--this sound--was beginning to gel.
It reached its fruition with their eighth album, 1973's The Dark Side Of The Moon. Swirling Hammond organs combined with ethereal guitars, soaring vocal harmonies, plodding bass lines and jazzadelic drum beats to form a crystal cathedral of sound which was unquestionably PINK FLOYD.
This sound continued (in a more evolved fashion) on 1975's Wish You Were Here, but was becoming a little darker. The paranoia, no longer content to lurk in the background, was moving closer and closer to center stage.
Darkness reigned on 1977's Animals, and the sound had completely transformed. Gone were the dreamy organs and ethereal guitars and in their place were creepy synthesizers and more muscular guitar riffs. Pink Floyd might as well have been metamorphosing into an altogether different band.
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1979's The Wall had some of the band's harshest critics (some of whom had been its biggest supporters during the first half of the decade) pointedly noting that it sounded nothing like anything that had come before it.
Obviously, they weren't listening as closely as they would have one believe, since The Wall stands as not only a testament of Pink Floyd's never ending commitment to top everything they've done up to that point, but also as an encyclopedic summation of everything they'd done up to that point.
Tell me... is something eluding you sunshine?
We'll begin with some very broad strokes. For starters, The Wall fully realizes "Have A Cigar"'s wry suggestion that Pink Floyd could be the name of someone in the band, most likely the lead singer.
The case could be made that that's more an observation of an actual phenomenon in the world of Pink Floyd's fans than a repetition of something the band had already done. But the case could also be made that since "Have A Cigar" never answers the question at all, the suggestion is made that there is now a developed character called Pink Floyd who is the protagonist of three of Roger Waters' most famous conceptual constructions. It could even be said that The Dark Side Of The Moon examines the broad abstract causes of Pink's breakdown and that Wish You Were Here focuses on his career as a musician as he's breaking down.
The Wallbrings it all home by giving us the details of his life that lead up to the breakdown, then takes us within the breakdown itself and right up to the moment where... well, we don't actually know what happens to him after the wall comes down, do we?
Nevertheless, the three albums would seem to serve as companion pieces to each other, and while this would seem to be more a case of extraordinarily prolonged thought than a case of repetition, it cannot be ignored that one of the band's mildest-tempered members once remarked, "Oh no, not his father and the war again."
To be sure, one of The Wall's themes is that war causes strain even on people who aren't actually participating in said war... it was also one of the themes of "Us And Them", as well as a theme in "Free Four".
When I put The Wall in my portable CD player to nitpick every song for this article, I already had in mind about six or seven specific things that I had heard in the body of work that preceded The Wall. But what surprised me wasn't the number of "repetitions" that I found, but rather the form some of those repetitions took.
Perhaps I was being overzealous, but almost the instant that I hit the play button, I noticed a connection to a previous work. Call it a tool of music composition if you like, but "In The Flesh?" begins in a manner similar to The Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here in that the first sound on all three albums comes in at a lower volume than that at which the song itself will actually be listened to. Granted, "In The Flesh?" doesn't fade in like "Speak To Me" or "Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part One)"; in fact, the very beginning of "In The Flesh?" is an interrupted reprise of the last song on the album, which is another difference. However, the technique used on The Wall serves the same purpose as the fade in technique of the other two albums: to make the work a continuing cycle.
[Warning to the Technically Challenged: the next few paragraphs contain some information which one might have to be a musician to understand. Having been a musician for longer than I was not, I wouldn't know if non-musicians can understand this information or not. I suggest reading it anyway and seeing if you catch on.]
Once "In The Flesh?" proper kicks off, it is with a riff based around the minor third scale which forms the basic palette from which Roger constructs the music of the entire album. (I never noticed this for myself until 1989 when my best friend, who also happened to be a bit of a snob when it came to music [read: Yes-head], pointed out, "Dude, I'm just amazed that Roger Waters got a double album out of the minor third.") Indeed, this minor third scale forms the very base structure of all three "Brick"" songs... but more on that in a bit.
Upon returning to the dominant tone-note of the song, David Gilmour rips out a classic bluesy metal type of guitar fill which has firm roots in the Chuck Berry style of guitar solo. It not only pops up in almost every guitar solo in The Wall, but could even be said to be the quintessential David Gilmour Guitar Lick.
In what is more of a suggestion of things to come than a repetition of a previous work, the main riff of "In The Flesh" presents a musical theme that will be repeated later in Roger Waters' first real solo album, The Pros And Cons Of Hitch Hiking. (I don't really count "The Body". Even without Ron Geesin's bits, it would only amount to a solo EP for Roger.)
[We now return you to less-musician oriented information. Thank you for your patience.]
Roger's voice enters the song accompanied by background singers who are not actual members of Pink Floyd, and a heartbeat (both courtesy of The Dark Side Of The Moon).
The song finishes out with the sound of a dive bombing airplane, thus suggesting the recurring theme of war being the cause of death for one Eric Fletcher Waters which was perhaps the most traumatic experience of Roger Waters' life. This particular sound effect also recalls live versions of "Atom Heart Mother", particularly the KQED performance, which begins with the sound of what appears to be a crop duster plane taking off.
"The Thin Ice" also features a touch of Floydian foreshadowing by using the same verse chord progression that Roger would use later on "The Tide Is Turning" from Radio KAOS. However, since this is not an article about Floydian foreshadowing, we'll let that one go.
The moment of repetition occurs at the end of the song. While merging with the next song in the line-up, the song we've been listening to ends on a completely different chord than the song which comes next. The two chords blending with each other create a moment of pure musical tension that is resolved only by the dissipation of the previous song. The transition between "Any Colour You Like" and "Brain Damage" creates the same kind of tension in the same manner... two different chords sounding at the same time.
"Another Brick In The Wall (Part 1)" recycles a lyrical form that is strewn throughout the work of Roger Waters... that of the List/Question song. List songs abound throughout the Floyd canon: "Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk" being the first known Roger Waters 'List Song'. "Another Brick In The Wall (Part 1)" also revisits the 'deceased father due to war' theme that first showed up in "Free Four". This is not the place, so I won't go into how much this theme informs the work of Roger Waters (not really as much as you might think. ahem).
Echo devices (chiefly the Binson Echorec) were being used within Pink Floyd before they were called Pink Floyd. "One Of These Days (I'm Going To Cut You Into Little Pieces)" was the first time an entire song was crafted via the process of using the echo generated by the unit to create the pulse of the song; "Brick One" is another.
Eugene and his axe briefly surface in Roger Waters' ghostly whispers and whooshes... some of which bear a resemblance to bits of "Pow R Toc H".
Continuing the aircraft motif, "The Happiest Days Of Our Lives" begins with the sound of a helicopter fading in from the ending of "Brick One", the song then begins proper with another delay-drenched riff setting up the pulse of the song. Midway through the song, there is a pause in the vocal which is punctuated by one of the creepiest laughs committed to tape since the ones in "Brain Damage" and "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" (Part V or VI--I forget which--just after the first vocal line.) The climax of the song features cadences played on rototoms much like the intro to "Time", and the whole thing screeches into a segue featuring a scream which sounds much like the one torn from the victim of Eugene's axe.
The segue ends in "Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)", another List/Question song which reminds one (just in case you've never heard the latter part of "Shine On" or even "Funky Dung" from "Atom Heart Mother") that Pink Floyd were some pretty decent funkmeisters for upper-middleclass white guys from England. The pre-chorus features a really nice descending chord sequence that briefly recalls the ending of "Sheep". Following a guitar solo whose tone sounds as though Gilmour might have dialed in an old Animals setting, Roger Waters as The Schoolmaster begins shouting crazed phrases which repeat in loops that follow each other much as the dialogue loops at the end of "Money".
The fact that, on the surface, "Mother" sounds like "Pigs On The Wing" is more due to the sound of Roger Waters' singing along with just an acoustic guitar than it is due to any sort of recycling.
A more succinct example of recycling within "Mother", however, is the line "...am I really dying", which, while not actually in the original release of the song, is included on the lyric sheet accompanying the album, and appears in various live versions as well as the film version of the song. The line originally appeared in "Julia Dream", another List/Question song, although one could go all the way back to "Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk" to find lyrical references to a fear of dying.
A subtle theme running throughout this song is one which ties "Mother" to "Welcome To The Machine": that of a predatory authority figure keeping the weaker figure under more-or-less constant surveillance. The protagonist of "Welcome To The Machine" first asks "Where have you been," and then immediately answers himself, "It's alright, we know where you've been", while "Mother" states that she will always find out where Pink has been.
Paranoia has been a theme in the work of Roger Waters since (at least) "Free Four", but the above instance begs the question, "Is it really paranoia if you're actually under surveillance?"
Chirping birds and acoustic guitars reminiscent of "Grantchester Meadows" ease the listener into "Goodbye Blue Sky," another List/Question song. "Goodbye Blue Sky" also ends with the kind of fretless bass guitar riff found in the intro to "Pigs (Three Different Ones)", and which will pop up again later on in this album.
"Empty Spaces/What Shall We Do Now" slinks creepily into the listeners' ears, coming up out of the fade-out of "Goodbye Blue Sky" by way of a mechanical pulse not entirely dissimilar to the one in "Welcome To The Machine", and a guitar figure which restates the minor third ascension and descent that first popped up on this album in "In The Flesh?"
Perhaps the most obvious List/Question song on "The Wall", "Empty Spaces/What Shall We Do Now" also references "Pigs On The Wing, Part Two" with the line about burying bones.
Perhaps more of a stylistic re-occurrence than an actual recycling, "Young Lust" is the kind of swaggering, cock-rock pastiche Pink Floyd first offered up in the guise of "The Nile Song" and "The Gold, It's In The...". Another List/Question song, "Young Lust"also looks forward in time by offering up a vignette of a telephone call that never reaches the intended recipient, a la the hidden coda of 1994's The Division Bell.
"One Of My Turns" begins with a vignette of a vacant groupie being brought back to Pink's hotel room only to be treated rather shabbily. As difficult as it may be to believe, this is not the first reference in the Floyd library to meaningless encounters with groupies. One need only look as far back as "Summer '68" from Atom Heart Mother to see that, despite all appearances to the contrary, the Floyd were certainly no strangers to the "wham bam, thank you ma'am" school of post-gig entertainment.
Eugene's axe even makes an appearance, this time in the guise of Pink's favorite axe. Perhaps Eugene plays in Pink's backup band... who knows?
"One of My Turns" is yet another List/Question song, and one of the questions Pink asks of the groupie is if she'd like to learn to fly. Contrasting the "death from above" theme running through the work of Roger Waters, the image of flight as a means of achieving transcendence can be found at least as far back as "Point Me At The Sky", and even pops up in "Have A Cigar".
One of the more "Un-Floyd-like" songs on The Wall would have to be "Don't Leave Me Now". There certainly isn't much in the greater Pink Floyd catalogue that sounds like this. Perhaps some of the more experimental moments on Ummagumma get within the same neighborhood, but still not close enough to bother listing here. However, the heavy breathing is certainly reminiscent of "On the Run".
There is an undercurrent of barely-controlled rage floating about the Floyd's body of work. From suggestive titles such as "The Violence Sequence" to more specific titles such as "One Of These Days (I'm Going To Cut You Into Little Pieces)", to lyrical descriptions of falling on a neck with a scream, violence would seem to be as prevalent in Pink's world as in our own. So it's no real surprise that Pink occasionally feels the need to beat his wife to a pulp on the weekends.
Pink Floyd has always used effects creatively. One of their favorites is the aforementioned delay effect. Not just for guitars, the effect also has interesting applications for the human voice as demonstrated by "Us And Them" and "Dogs". Used to loop the phrase "need you" here, it works to lend a creepy feeling to the song (as if it needed any help) and is filtered in much the same way as the word "stone" was in "Dogs". The filter effect sterilizes the phrase, if you will, removing any hint of human warmth and leaving only cold repetitions.
The delay effect returns to the guitar for "Another Brick In The Wall (Part Three)", setting the pulse for the song, while a second guitar performs chordal stabs reminiscent of those found in "Sheep".
"Goodbye Cruel World" fades into listening range with Roger Waters' trademark bass octave riff, first heard in "See Emily Play" and used to a similar effect in "Careful With That Axe, Eugene".
There will now be a twenty-minute intermission when the band will return for the second half of the show.
The second half of The Wall begins with Pink's plaintive cry for connection, "Hey You". As an ethereal, altered-tuning acoustic guitar begins playing an arpeggiated figure, a fretless bass provides the melody, much as in "Pigs (Three Different Ones)".
Another List/Question song, it's interesting to note how each verse ends with a question of "can you _____ me?" When you elevate this to a conceptual level, each one of these individual questions can be covered by the single question "can you do something for me?" Throughout Roger Waters' itemized list of all the ways in which man can be inhuman to man has always been the suggestion that if we all could work together, we could achieve so much more. "Hey You" is another illustration of Roger Waters' belief that co-operation breeds success while competition breeds decay.
Another hold over from Animals is the idea that the things which oppress us and keep us from reaching that which is best within ourselves amount to a "stone" that we must carry. This in itself is something of a reference to the mythological figure of Sysyphus, who was doomed to spend eternity rolling a stone up a hill during the day only to awaken in the morning with the stone returned to the bottom of a hill, thus his labor begins all over again. Of course, "Sysyphus" was the title of Rick Wright's contribution to "Ummagumma". While there is no evidence of any connection between this piece and Roger Waters' adoption of "the stone" as a lyrical metaphor, the co-incidence is just too sweet to ignore.
The Wall is perhaps Pink Floyd's creepiest album. The atmospheric sounds suggesting sanity spiraling away are as immaculately presented as the guitar solos and orchestral lines. "Is There Anybody Out There?" abounds with such sonic suggestion. From the ominous synth drone vaguely suggestive of "Welcome To The Machine" to what sounds like water dripping off of stalactites, the sonic landscape of the song is the aural equivalent of the 'alien landscape' mentioned several times in Roger Waters' original screenplay for the movie.
Within this soundscape, however, is a familiar seagull-like sound. It is, of course, Gilmour's own soundwash addition to "Echoes", reportedly first achieved when he accidentally plugged his guitar into his wah-wah pedal backwards.
Given that much of "Is There Anybody Out There" consists of a single droning tone, it's tempting to suggest that it's Roger's way of parodying the drawn out drone of the first four or five minutes of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" (which Roger said in one interview he regretted, as he found it boring,) but there is nothing to corroborate this suggestion.
"Nobody Home" is another List Song which ticks off a parade of material possessions which should provide comfort to our beloved protagonist, Pink, but do not, in much the same way that the materialistic mantra of "Money" catalogues all of the things that fail to provide anything but proof that one has more money than one knows what to do with.
Lyrical references to a dog and his bone recall "Pigs On The Wing, Part Two", while the self-diagnosed Swollen Hand Blues foreshadows "Comfortably Numb".
The phrase "fly to" is fed through the same combination of delay and filter effects (first heard in "Dogs" and "Don't Leave Me Now",) which remove the human element from the repetitions in order to underscore the theme that material issues rarely provide the spiritual (or mental) comfort that we think they will or should. In effect, Pink's attempts to transcend his situation fail to provide said transcendence. He has no place to fly to, and even if he did, it's not flying away that he needs.
"Vera" showcases some fine fretless bass work, including a phrase which is taken almost note for note from "Pigs (Three Different Ones)".
Although another List/Question song, "Vera" also showcases the perennial Floydian theme of absence in a slightly different light. By using absence to reflect the dark side of fame, the song combines two essential Floydian (or Watersian) themes that have informed two of the three albums that preceded The Wall.
Roger Waters has called "Bring The Boys Back Home" the pivotal song of the album. Intended, one would then assume, to sum up the entire message of the most "un-Floydian" album to date, it is rather fitting that the closest pre-existing piece in Pink Floyd's catalogue that I could think of to compare it to is Atom Heart Mother (with its choirs and orchestra), where the band were still struggling to find that "Floydian" sound. But I still have to admit that this particular comparison holds no water.
Thus, it would seem that there is at least one song on The Wall that has no real precedent in Pink Floyd's catalogue. There is, however, an interesting coda to the song which recalls the denouement of "Another Brick In The Wall (Part Two)", in which several phrases are looped and continue to stack on top of each other, as they do at the end of "Money".
"Comfortably Numb" begins with the sonic euphoria that can only be brought about by treating a slide guitar part with a generous helping of delay. Syd Barrett used to play slide guitar solos treated with gobs of delay to create swirling blips and whooshes as early on as "Astronomy Domine", and most likely even before then.
Putting a slightly different spin on the List/Question Song format, "Comfortably Numb"'s list of questions are asked by one character in the song, while another character attempts to answer with a list of things he is feeling at that moment.
While not a Pink Floyd recycling, it must be noted that the pre-chorus of "Comfortably Numb" features a string-arrangement virtually identical to one employed by producer Bob Ezrin on Lou Reed's "Sad Song" from his masterpiece Berlin (which was widely considered the most depressing concept album in the history of the medium until The Wall.)
Pink's internal pre-show soliloquy, "The Show Must Go On", continues the theme of music business stress on the fragile psyche of an artist first begun in earnest on Wish You Were Here. Pink's fear of losing his soul to the industry recalls the list of things traded/given up that makes up the second verse of "Wish You Were Here".
And, since we're on the subject, "The Show Must Go On" is another of Roger Waters' List/Question songs.
This brings us to the reprise of "In The Flesh". Since this song's relations to other Pink Floyd songs has mostly been covered in it's first appearance, all that needs be pointed out here is that this expanded version becomes a List song, as Pink rattles off the "riff-raff" in the audience.
The delay effect forming the pulse of a song (ala "One of These Days") returns in "Run Like Hell", but this time the connection is made stronger via Gilmour's false starts. Once the galloping delay drenched pulse is established and the entire band falls into the groove, Gilmour begins playing a descending series of chords reminiscent of the ending of "Sheep", all the more supported by the pulsing bass line and almost "disco" groove.
As made obvious by its title, the word "Run" is being used to imply paranoia and is again borrowed from "Free Four" and "On the Run". It should be noted that the use of the word "run" in "Time" is not the same type of usage as in these examples. Within the context of "Time," the word "run" (particularly when followed by the phrase "starting gun") implies the movement of running, as in sprinting; whereas within these contexts, the implication is clear that "run" is associated "guilt" and "paranoia."
The keyboard solo is followed by the sort of "breakdown" found within "Dogs", in which instrumental activity takes a backseat to sound effect-created atmosphere. This atmosphere features two particular elements which hearken back to earlier works: a maniacal laugh a la "Brain Damage" and "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", and a scream which almost sounds directly lifted from "Careful With That Axe, Eugene."
There are several tools that proliferate throughout the works of Roger Waters. One, as has been repeatedly noted above, is the List/Question song, which "Waiting for the Worms" becomes in its middle section and second verse. Another, which better characterizes the tone of "Waiting for the Worms", is the Internal Dialogue, where the single character of the song converses with another, darker side of himself. "Wish You Were Here" and "Not Now John" have both been described by Roger Waters as being "schizophrenic" songs in which one side of a person's personality is attempting to communicate with another side of their personality in an attempt to unify into a cohesive whole.
In the middle section of the song, the lead vocal is sung through a megaphone, distorting it in a fashion similar to the vocal in "One of These Days". The comparison of these two pieces illustrates the way in which Pink Floyd's use of sound effects changed from providing "surreal atmospherics" (as in The Dark Side of the Moon) to conveying "...a harsh and claustrophobic realism." (Saucerful Of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey by Nicholas Schaffner, copyright 1991, published in the US by Delta books, quote used without permission, thank you in advance for the absence of litigation.)
A reference so clever that it must be intentional is how two specific words in the final verse of "Waiting for the Worms" are treated. Listening closely to the background vocals, one can discern that the backing vocalists do not sing the word "Britannia" with the lead vocal; they sing the word "Us". In the second half of the verse, the backing vocals replace the phrase "coloured cousins" with the word "Them".
"Us and Them" also features an interesting use of delay on vocals which serves to suggest that the phrase "round and round... and round" continues to circle into perpetuity. A similar effect is used on Roger Water's last two lines in "Stop". First, the phrase "...have to know" is looped and continues to repeat while the last word of the last line, "...time," is added to the loop and creates the repeated phrase "time to know."
The melodic, cascading piano recalls (to me, at least) the song "Beth" by Kiss; a song not by Pink Floyd, but still a song produced by Bob Ezrin.
Largely due to the collapse of Syd Barrett, insanity (or the causes of it) is a more than just a theme in the Pink Floyd canon; it's virtually a raison d'etre. "The Trial" takes us within Pink's mind as it conjures up the specters from the past that Pink has been holding up to blame for driving him mad.
By the time we reach the conclusion that Pink himself is responsible for his situation and must assume the responsibility (another favorite theme of Roger Waters), we have passed through a lyrical reference to "If" (when the wife tells Pink he should have talked to her more often than he did; quite interesting when one considers that the line from "If" was probably intended for Roger's first wife, Judy Trim, while the second line was uttered by a fictional creation based, in part, on her), and another creepy laugh in the vein of "Brain Damage" and "Shine On You Crazy Diamond".
The Wall concludes with "Outside the Wall". A soothing song which releases the listener from the darker notions of the body of the album, "Outside the Wall" also wraps back around to the beginning of the album. In these ways, it recalls "Pigs On The Wing, Part Two", and in a more esoteric fashion, the heartbeat from The Dark Side of the Moon and the sustained organ chords of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond".
Once the album was released, there was the stage show to consider. It seems unlikely that Pink Floyd ever considered playing anything other than The Wall for the tour, seeing as it was a double album and would require two hours to pull off.
This doesn't mean that nothing from the past catalogue would be played, however.
Live performances of "Goodbye Cruel World" found the famous 'ping' from "Echoes" making an appearance. In fact, on some bootlegs and one of the bootleg videos, you can plainly hear some idiot in the crowd yelling "Echoes!!" This guy obviously didn't grasp the idea that Pink Floyd were playing The Wall, the whole Wall and nothing but The Wall.
Well... except for the 'ping' from "Echoes".
Bootlegs from the first run of shows in Los Angeles (particularly Azimuth Co-ordinator Volume 3, the first live performance of The Wall) reveal that phrases and bits from "Any Colour You Like" turned up in what is now called "The Last Few Bricks".
Perhaps more out of necessity than anything else, there are clips of Gerald Scarfe's animation which were recycled for the Wall live shows. In particular, "The Trial" features an appearance by "Sky Break Leaf Man" (as Roger Waters refers to him in The Wall DVD commentary track), which was recycled from "Shine On You Crazy Diamond"'s animation footage. Then there is the dog-like creature who tears a piece of meat off of a hook only to be devoured itself by a larger dog-like creature who then begins to take on human features, also used in "The Trial" but taken from the footage Scarfe originally created for "Welcome To The Machine".
The point of this article is not to suggest that Pink Floyd were too lazy to come up with entirely new material. At one point in time, every song on this album was a new, fresh creation. Most likely, the "repetitions" were performed for the purpose of linking this new, different sound to what had come before. It was a way of acknowledging everything that had been done, perhaps as a means of saying goodbye to it. We now know that things were never going to be the same for Pink Floyd following The Wall.
Maybe that's what they were trying to tell us... or maybe it's all just as co-incidental as "The Dark Side of Oz".
We drove our racing cars
La Carrera Panamericana is a rich man's folly
I'm not a killjoy, honestly I'm not. But I am a glutton for punishment. Not only do I own a copy of Pink Floyd's frankly, erm, not very good Ummagumma, but hell, I even sat and watched their movie La Carrera Panamericana.
The first time I saw it I fell asleep, and I honestly can't think of a worse thing to say about a film than that.
 Even unconsciousness seems more exciting than watching La Carrera Panamericana. |
On a list of mistakes in the Floyd career, I would call La Carrera Panamericana certainly the most tasteless. Gasp(!) as a series of multimillionaire rock stars lord up like royalty around Mexico. Yawn(!) as endless shots of them driving heroically across vast desert vistas in anonymous helmets as repeated over a dull soundtrack of unreleaseable instrumentals. Cringe(!) as Rock Stars are fawned over like Gods by starving, hungry children.
To call it a Pink Floyd movie is a bit of an overstatement, as only two of the band's members appear, in curious cameo roles, and manage to say nothing of importance, talking, as they do, only of tyres and engines. After all, La Carrera Panamericana is kind of like Cannonball Run, but without the humour, the style, or even a scratch of drama. But it does have a bunch of rich, humourless old men in stupid leathers driving antiques over desert vistas.
It gets worse. The sequence where the race crew pulls into a small Mexican town to the accompaniment of a huge town parade is, at best, insulting. Instead of pointing out the various inequalities of a world where people can spend millions of pounds restoring antique 1952 C-Type Jaguars just to drive the shit out of them in the desert, we get an endless succession of car porn and subtitles like "When these racers come to our crummy Mexican backwater we treat them like Lords".
Frankly, were it not for the inclusion of several instrumental jams taken from the Floyd archives (or pointless re-recordings of much better old songs), La Carerra Panamericana would not even warrant being made, let alone released.
The main selling point, six previously unreleased Pink Floyd songs and a handful of remixes/re-recordings of old songs, isn't bad, but neither is it good. Want to hear the Floyd doing an instrumental version of "Run Like Hell" with a drum machine and additions from a cavalcade of roaring engines for 'atmosphere'? Step right up. Want to hear Gilmour riffing endlessly on a mundane chord progression whilst people talk about gear ratios? Well, fast forward to "Mexico '78".
The big draw is, of course, the music, and some of it is fantastic. Of the six new instrumentals--all of which are, frustratingly, chopped to pieces by superfluous interviews and race footage that renders the songs mostly inaudible--the previously mentioned "Mexico '78" and the barely noticed "Slow Carrera Blues" are as mundane as their titles suggest. "Big Theme" and "Pan Am Shuffle" are fabulous (if somewhat meandering) instrumentals that would not be out of place on a recent Floyd album in its own right, and "Small Theme" and "Country Theme" are worthy of inclusion as b-sides. Some of these songs, rightly so, are destined never to be released, but I can't help but wonder when EMI are going to schedule them as bonus tracks on the inevitable Floyd reissue package due out sometimes in 2017 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of their debut album.
Frankly, the film is boring. It's a rich man's folly, a vanity ego-project. In fact it's so dull that the first time I watched it, and having spent ages tracking down a copy to hear those elusive missing songs, I fell asleep. That's how exciting it is--that unconsciousness seems even more exciting than watching it. It's a dull film, stripped of any of the excitement and glamour one might associate with motor racing, Mexico, or Pink Floyd, and doesn't bear repeated examination. It exposes the Floyd to be cosseted, very rich men, living in a world far removed from anything even approaching reality, and even further from common sense. A momentary lapse of reason indeed.