Over five decades after Pink Floyd recorded their iconic Live at Pompeii performance in the ancient Italian ruins, the concert is experiencing a resurgence of interest on social media platforms like TikTok—perhaps to the chagrin of frontman David Gilmour, who thought the Pompeii performance was “rather embarrassing.”
The footage of Pink Floyd performing in the ruins of an ancient amphitheater has become one of the most distinct performances of the band’s career, which came over a decade before the band would make their mark on another historical Italian city, Venice.
The cultural, musical, and historical significance of Live at Pompeii is certainly nothing to sneeze at. Nevertheless, watching the film back makes Gilmour cringe with hindsighted shame.
David Gilmour’s Perspective of Pink Floyd in Pompeii
While we often associate Pink Floyd’s Live at Pompeii film as a subsequent addition to their greatest hits, the concert movie came out one year before arguably one of their most commercially successful records, Dark Side of the Moon, two years before Wish You Were Here, and eight years before The Wall. Simply put, the band had a long way to go in their career when they stepped foot in the ancient Italian town at the base of Mount Vesuvius.
According to frontman David Gilmour, this naivete is part of why he struggles to watch the iconic film in his older years. “I find it rather embarrassing,” he later admitted (via Louder Sound). “I’m sure it’s a lot of fun for many people, but not much for me.” He described himself as a “young chap” in the film, adding, “If I hear him speak, like in Live at Pompeii, I do find it excruciating because he was pretentious and naïve.”
Gilmour was only 25 years old when he and the rest of the band performed in Pompeii, and as anyone who has passed that year of “adulthood” can attest, it can be difficult to look back on a time when a version of yourself that was so young wholeheartedly believes they aren’t. And, of course, an enduring film like Live at Pompeii that makes this brazen confidence immortal only adds to the secondhand embarrassment. “I don’t think any of us thought [the film] would be as well-received and last in people’s minds for as long as it did,” Gilmour said.
Hosting an Anti-Woodstock in Italian Ruins
The height of Beatlemania, the Summer of Love, and the Woodstock Arts and Music Festival of 1969 had already come and gone by the time Pink Floyd and their camera crew set up in the ancient Italian town. The film’s director, Adrian Maben, wanted to create a concert film that stood apart from the rest—an appropriate ode to Pink Floyd’s eclectic, psychedelic catalog.
Maben came up with the idea of Pink Floyd performing in the Pompeii amphitheater after he visited the ruins on holiday and lost his passport. As he explored the area alone, searching for his passport, the oppressive silence stuck with him. This, Maben argued, would be the perfect antithesis of previous films that depicted shrieking, fainting audience members.
“The main idea of the film was to do a sort of anti-Woodstock film, where there would be nobody present, and the music and the silence and the empty amphitheater would mean as much if not more than a million crowd,” Maben explained. Perhaps, in hindsight, David Gilmour would wish he had leaned into that contemplative, irreverent silence a little bit more while they filmed Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii.
Photo by Bayerische Rundfunk/Ortf/Kobal/Shutterstock
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