Vesuvius And Them

Floyd's 70s film goes HD and Steven Wilson gets hold of the audio to create a right old Bacchanalian beanfeast.

- Daryl Easlea

To mark the Pink Floyd catalogue’s new tenure at Sony, Pink Floyd Live At Pompeii - now retitled Pink Floyd At Pompeii MCMLXXII - is the first restoration project. The audio for film director Adrian Maben’s arty capture of the group amid the ash-encrusted ruins of Pompeii finally appeared legally in The Early Years box set in 2016, but now, Steven Wilson has mixed it, and it sounds fresher than a beech growing in volcanic soil. Released as a stand-alone album (and BluRay of the fully restored 1974 version of the film) for the first time, it commemorates the exact point where the long first act of Pink Floyd ended.

Recorded at Pompeii in October 1971 and completed later that same year in Paris, if a proper ‘best of’ had been released in 1972, it would have contained all of what is on Pink Floyd At Pompeii MCMLXXII - aside, of course, from Mademoiselle Nobs, the throwaway track to show the group's sense of humour and love of canines, une version française of Seamus from Meddle, whose lead singer couldn't make it through customs. The band’s demand to be captured live and recorded on multitrack has left these beautiful, pristine recordings, road-honed and loose as this was the time when they were the epitome of a working band. Echoes, then just recently released on