Pink Floyd - London 1966-1967

Pink Floyd - London 1966-1967
by Peter Whitehead

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DVD details

Actor: John Dunbar (II), Nick Mason, Richard Wright (II), Roger Waters, Yoko Ono
Director: Peter Whitehead
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Live, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
DVD Release Date: 2005-10-04
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Snapper UK

DVD Reviews of Pink Floyd - London 1966-1967

DVD Review: Syd Barrett, RIP
Summary: 5 Stars

Syd Barrett will be greatly missed. His whimsical songwriting style was unique and greatly influenced many famous musicians like David Bowie. This dvd is an essential purchase for those wishing to know about a genuis.

DVD Review: Great material, endlessly repackaged...
Summary: 5 Stars

First off, this *is* great. It's a Holy Grail in Psychedilic Music. The Pink Floyd footage here pre-dates their EMI Contract, the band signed the releases, so it's the earliest available Pink Floyd footage and music to be legitimately found *anywhere*, coming from Feburary 1967. (Another underground film, "San Francisco" has the Floyd playing a long version of Interstellar Overdrive from 1966, but it's an audio soundtrack; no film of the band to go with it). It's also one of the very few non-bootleg DVDs that actually has the Floyd's founder, Syd Barrett present, and without the drug-induced confusion that would cause his departure from the band a year later.

However, this has got to be the fifth, or sixth time (at least) that this material has been re-packaged and re-released. And it's same material that's been available since the original 1988 VCR release. If you've already bought it before, you'll find nothing new in this edition. If you've somehow *missed* the previous incarnations of this release though, buy this with confidence, it's the real thing.

DVD Review: Be warned- for completists only!
Summary: 2 Stars

I bought this DVD out of curiosity after reading a Syd Barrett biography, thinking that it was a retitled version of "Let's Make Love in Swinging London." Such is not the case. It is about 30 minutes of Pink Floyd in a rehearsal studio, doing a painfully extended psychedelic jam of Interstellar Overdrive, and an improv piece called Nick's Boogie. There is also some black and white footage of the band performing a gig at the UFO club. The director filmed these performances with the intent of splicing footage into his documentary on swinging London. One would think that the original documentary would be included as an extra, but it is not. The interviews of Michael Caine, Mick Jagger and Julie Christie are almost incomprehensible, due to their thick British accents, and possibly whatever they had been smoking prior to the interview.
The John Lennon footage shows him wandering around the event with a friend, but it is all silent and shot in black and white.
For hardcore Syd Barrett fans and Pink Floyd completists only.

DVD Review: CORPOREAL CLOG
Summary: 3 Stars

We are once again asked to witness the snarled and ultimately predatory relationship between music and commerce. This DVD should be promoted as a short film by Peter Whitehead, supplemented by shorter interviews with Michael Caine, Julie Christie and a few others (uniformly uninteresting interviews, by the way). Then one could approach this for what it is, the work of a filmmaker who happened to like what Pink Floyd got up to on stage and decided to edit event footage using Floyd's music as the soundtrack -- the ONLY soundtrack by the way: no location sound occurs anywhere. When you watch the performance the sound you hear is the sound of studio overdubs, not of live performance. Had this DVD been titled "Let's Make Love in London, A Short Quasi-Documentary Film Featuring Mostly Stoned Audience Members Trying to Dance to a Soundtrack by Pink Floyd" one assumes interest would be significantly lower. Instead, it is billed as a film about Pink Floyd, which it clearly is not.

Looked at as a documentary snippet of an era in which noodling -- with sound or with images or with other persons -- was elevated to high art, this DVD stands as little more than a mildly interesting example of period style, never attaining the heights of better works of the time which could be indexed as "style, period."

Looked at as a Pink Floyd concert, you will be better off slipping on the "full length" CD versions of the hastily-made studio takes of a somewhat rambling "Interstellar Overdrive" and a nearly disposable "Nick's Boogie". (As an unrelated aside, "Nick's Boogie" does beg the listener to participate in a rather playful thought-experiment: What would the early work of Floyd, up to and including Umma Gumma, have sounded like if Nick Mason had been forced to play without his tom-toms?)

As another reviewer has already correctly noted, with some effort this could have been of great interest (Think Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Syd Barrett, et al) had those in a rush to grab a few bucks considered a better, more honest effort to include relevant information and opinions about the events, the time and the place from the artists involved. Absent of Whitehead's somewhat self-congratulatory tone, others directy involved in the events documented here remain literally mute. But before we get ahead of ourselves on compiling a list of possible improvements, given the bald-faced greed demonstrated by the manner in which this material is "packaged", do the artists even matter in this case?

HAPPY '08 UPDATE: It's good to see that the manufacturer has done the right thing and discontinued this DVD.

DVD Review: buyer beware-2 floyd songs & irrelevant filler
Summary: 2 Stars

i guess the interviews are relevant, by the fact that they are indeed from the 60's. that's about it. you get to hear julie christie, michael caine, david hockney, and jagger talk about their feelings. i knew that the floyd performed only two songs, but i did expect to see 'the floyd' during these performances. it's more like a music video, with occasional shots of the band. a time capsule of history i agree, but if you're going to release a dvd and call it a 'pink floyd' dvd, have more than 28 and a half minutes of the band (shown sporadically), and some meaningless interviews to round it out to an hour. just another example of using the 'pink floyd' name to sell a dvd. should have known better when 'rolling stone' gave it a good review. 2 stars cause it's syd barrett even if you don't get to see very much of him. (or the rest of the band for that matter) very disappointing.

Description of Pink Floyd - London 1966-1967

In terms of archival value, Pink Floyd: London, 1966-1967 is essential viewing for Floyd collectors and anyone who's curious about the swinging pop scene of London at the dawn of the psychedelic era. Casual fans be warned: This is not a concert film, per se, nor will it satisfy anyone looking for a comprehensive history of "The Pink Floyd" (as the group was originally known) in its earliest incarnation. Rather, Peter Whitehead's film--originally titled Tonite Let's All Make Love in London (after a line from an Allen Ginsberg poem)--was created as a dreamy, avant-garde portrait of the "Swinging London" scene, set to the music of Pink Floyd (in this case the improvisational epics "Interstellar Overdrive" and "Nick's Boogie"), accompanied by performance footage from the legendary UFO Club in 1966, a recording session at London's Sound Techniques studio on January 11, 1967 (which Whitehead specifically arranged to capture his soundtrack), and footage from the momentous "14 Hour Technicolor Dream" festival held at Alexandra Palace on April 29th, 1967. White combined elements of all three events to create his audiovisual collage--a kind of time-capsule mindscape that successfully conveys the spacey atmosphere of Pink Floyd's early (and instant) popularity.

However fleeting (he's glimpsed relatively briefly, coaxing otherworldly sounds from his guitar, patched into a Binson Echorec tape echo device), the presence of Floyd cofounder Syd Barrett will prove fascinating to any devoted fan. The "Crazy Diamond" appears quite stoned (or at least totally immersed in his music), while Roger Waters provides a driving bass pulse, looking ever so much like a young, mod intellectual. Rick Wright appears calmly at his keyboard (also using the Binson Echorec), and Nick Mason drums through his experimental "Boogie," parts of which were transposed into the title track of A Saucerful of Secrets. The music (far more indicative of Early Floyd than the later studio versions) is also included on a stand-alone CD, and while none of this material is substantial enough to be truly fulfilling, it remains a priceless snapshot of the era, with fascinating glimpses of John Lennon attending the "Technicolor" event, unaware that his future wife, Yoko Ono, was presenting a performance-art installment just a few feet away. Whitehead's archival interview clips with Mick Jagger, Michael Caine, Julie Christie, and artist David Hockney add another facet of insight into one of the liveliest periods of popular culture. --Jeff Shannon

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