Pink Floyd
London 1966-67
No mind-expanding drugs are needed to watch this Pink Floyd DVD, because the visuals alone are a trip back in time.
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Using footage from the suggestively titled flick Tonite Let's All Make Love in London, Brit Peter Whitehead captures the colorful, sexually liberated and swinging late-'60s London scene with a musty, mind-expanding pastiche of visuals. If not for the soundtrack, however, it's unlikely this 30-minute time capsule would have appeared.
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The Pink Floyd — before they lost "the" or had secured a record contract — plays two extended instrumental space rockers. One is an early version of "Interstellar Overdrive" and the other, "Nick's Boogie," is a previously unreleased precursor to "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun," featuring drummer Nick Mason's ominous mallets. Both provide eerie accompaniment for the trippy visuals. Or vice versa.
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Whitehead filmed the quartet while recording the music, making this an appropriately dated video for the two long tunes. Although the choppy collage technique and camera work is primitive even by 1967 standards, there is a charming naïvety here that makes it worth more than a cursory look from Floyd fans seeking to catch a rare glimpse of Syd Barrett, the group's founding genius who burnt out in the band's fledgling days.
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The filmmaker also includes black-and-white footage of the legendary "14-Hour Technicolor Dream Extravaganza," a massive performance-art show that John Lennon and Yoko Ono attended before meeting each other. Between the grainy, far-out photography and Floyd's otherworldly soundtrack, this is the very definition of psychedelia, recorded when the word was barely a part of the English lexicon.
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The two Floyd tunes are remixed from the original coarse mono into full-blown 5.1 surround (a stereo CD is also included), bringing the music into the present even as the accompanying footage illuminates a past remembered best from moldy copies of Life magazines.