Pink Floyd in London ’66-’67 (See for Miles Films, 1967)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles came home from work half an hour early last night and I used the extra time we had together by running the DVD I had just got as part of an elaborate package containing the earliest recordings by Pink Floyd (or The Pink Floyd – with the article – as they were known in the very earliest days of the band), made for film director Peter Whitehead for a movie from 1967 called Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London. (Note the spelling of the first word: I typed it into imdb.com’s search engine as “Tonight” and got an error message that there were no matches.) Whitehead’s original film was a seven-movement, 70-minute semi-documentary about the so-called “Swinging London” scene of the mid-1960’s. He had heard Pink Floyd’s music and decided it would make the right sort of underscoring for his film, and he also filmed the band while he was recording them in a studio and also while they were playing at the UFO nightclub and a big indoor festival called the “14 Hour Technicolor Dream” concert at the Alexandra Palace. (Ironically, the “14 Hour Technicolor Dream” sequences were shot in black-and-white, probably because Whitehead couldn’t bring in extra lights and color film demands more light – or at least it did then.) Later Whitehead extracted the Pink Floyd performance footage from his movie and made a separate half-hour film from it called Pink Floyd in London ’66-’67, which was the main item on this disc.

It also featured bonus interviews with Mick Jagger, Julie Christie, Michael Caine and artist David Hockney, who became more famous later as a middle-aged Gay man who would pick up nice-looking young men and use them as both sex partners and models. Charles joked that it was nice to know that this early Hockney himself had looked like the young men he later picked up and painted. The Jagger and Caine sequences were more like formal interviews (and Caine was surprisingly conservative morally, saying he was uncomfortable with the outfits people were wearing – especially the mini-skirts on women – that he felt were flaunting their sexuality). The sequences with Christie and Hockney were more conversational (though Christie had just come back from filming Doctor Zhivago and thus had transitioned from “Swinging London” sensation to mainstream movie star), and the most interesting part of Hockney’s interview was that he felt more comfortable out at night in New York than in London because the New York bars stayed open until 2 a.m. while the London bars were forced to close at 11 p.m., a holdover from the days of World War Ii when they wanted to make sure the workers didn’t stay out too late and get too drunk to be effective on the job the next morning. You could get a drink in London after 11 p.m., Hockney explained, but only at dingy, unpleasant “private clubs” that charged up to one pound per drink – a price Hockney thought was way out of line. (One wonders what cocktails cost in London today.)

The main feature included extended versions of the instrumental “Interstellar Overdrive” (the first of many Pink Floyd songs that had science-fictional titles), credited to all four band members (Syd Barrett on guitar, Roger Waters on bass, Rick Wright on keyboards and Nick Mason on drums – Barrett would blow his brains out on LSD after only about a year in the spotlight, though he lived until 2006 and died from a long-standing kidney disease at 60, but the other three would stay in the band through the 1970’s until Waters and the others had a falling-out in the early 1980’s and David Gilmour, Barrett’s replacement, took over), as well as a piece they improvised in the studio called “Nick’s Boogie” and credited to Mason as composer because it was based on a drum lick. Interestingly, Mason played with felt-headed tympani sticks – an unusual tool for a rock or jazz drummer. One of the comments by Whitehead mentioned Pink Floyd as a jazz-influenced band, which once again made me regret that the fusion of jazz and rock didn’t happen in time for John Coltrane (d. 1967) or Albert Ayler (d. 1970) to participate. Certainly it would have been interesting to hear what this music might have sounded like with a free-jazz saxophonist like Coltrane, Ayler, Ornette Coleman or Pharoah Sanders screaming over it. The Floyd footage is fascinating but also frustrating in that we get to see precious little of the band; in the style of the time Whitehead cut to audience members (including a screen-filling crotch shot of a mini-skirted woman dancing) or other images, and he was also hamstrung by the way rock concerts were staged then, with elaborate light projections (the light artists would frequently get billed on the posters for these shows along with the musicians) that required the rest of the room to be kept in murk, so all you saw of the band were vague shadows on stage. (I went to concerts like this “in the day” and this film brought them back for me.)

Also, it was clear that while the Sound Techniques studio footage was shot in real time with the band actually playing as the cameras rolled, the live footage was evidently shot silent and scored with whatever the band had played in the studio. (Since both pieces were instrumentals, at least Whitehead didn’t have to worry about lip movements and having to synchronize vocals.) So you see very little of how Barrett and company made those amazing sounds, though what you do see shows Barrett developing some interestingly different techniques, including simply throwing objects onto his guitar strings and letting his amps magnify the sound. He also did a lot of slide work but seemed less interested in the normal sound of a slide guitar than in the noise the slide itself made while traversing the strings – and he played with his fret hand very close to the guitar’s body so he would be using the extreme upper range of the instrument. One can easily hear why his guitar technique “threw” the EMI staff producer assigned to do the first Pink Floyd album (and the only one to feature Barrett throughout), The Piper at the Gates of Dawn – which was recorded at Abbey Road Studio Three while the Beatles were recording Sgt. Pepper in Studio Two, and the two bands reportedly checked each other out.

The “14 Hour Technicolor Dream” sequences feature a clearly recognizable John Lennon in Sgt. Pepper regalia showing up to watch a film by Yoko Ono – the imdb.com synopsis claims they hadn’t met each other yet, but they had (their first encounter was when John attended a Yoko gallery show called Unfinished Paintings and Objects in London in the summer of 1966) – that included footage of her famous performance-art work “Cut Piece” (in which a woman is shown with a pair of scissors next to her and the audience is invited to cut off her clothes, piece by piece, with the scissors). The excerpt is fascinating but frustrating and makes me want to see the original Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London (the title comes from a poem by Allan Ginsberg, which he reads a few lines of over the opening credits) because it would be nice to see this footage in the original context – though it’s good to have the Pink Floyd scenes on their own if only because it offers us some rare glimpses of the band’s founding member at his brief artistic peak.