The Amphitheatre of Pompeii, 1971.
Slow zoom in from the highest rung of stone seating to the centre of the circular arena. From far away, we see four figures hunched in front of giant speakers. Dust hangs in the blinding sunlight, cutting a mid-air shade unevenly. As the camera gets closer, we see that the four figures are playing to technicians tweaking knobs on a network of soundboards.
A horizontal tracking shot across equipment cases:
PINK FLOYD, LONDON
Pan to a sleepy Mount Vesuvius in the background. Pink Floyd has travelled to the oldest surviving Roman amphitheatre to perform for an audience of their own roadies.
In the name of art? Hardly.
“Chapter 24,” from their album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, is the first song on the set list, although it never made it onto the officially released film. Don’t ask me how I found it.
The narrator chatters: “On August 24, in the year 79 CE, Vesuvius spewed pumice and ash for a solid day, burying the city under a twenty-metre blanket. This was the day after Vulcanalia, festival for the Roman god of fire.”
Roger Waters chugs through bass notes that echo on the slate slabs of the amphitheatre. Close-up stock footage of lava bubbling and boiling, while Nick Mason hits the cymbals, synching up to the imagery far too precisely. The microphone catches wind and adds a new layer of fuzz to the distortion.
The lyrics echo the words of the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, supposedly describing the steps involved in performing a divination:
Six in the third place means
The image of the Turning Point
Six at the top means
Misfortune from within and without.
At Pompeii, however, on instruments that shatter in sunbursts of every colour, we see a different interpretation. It’s obvious that the Floyd are singing about the stages of a developing flame. The band hasn’t even played the first bridge of the song yet, and we see pangs of the first three: red becoming visible (525°C), cherry dull (800°C), and cherry clear (1,000°C).
Rick Wright is fucking the Farfisa organ, and we can tell by the kryptic look on his face that he’s leaning into chords entirely new to him. Professional recording is the best time to improvise, because you can always rewind the tape if you forget the finger steps.
Cross-fade to footage of stone gargoyles found at the Pompeii ruins. The facial grimaces are perfectly preserved. Whose faces?
Orange deep (1,100°C) and orange clear (1,200°C), the fourth and fifth stages. A cloud passes, and the drum kit shines. The hotter it gets, the shorter the Celsius increments.
The city was uncovered nearly 1,700 years after the eruption, when archaeologists found curious pockets in the solidified ash. They twigged on the human shapes of these holes, injected them with plaster, and made casts of Pompeiani frozen in their last moments of life. Coiled bodies in situ, fear etched into furrowed foreheads.
Nick Mason breaks a drumstick and expertly replaces it before the next cymbal crash.
At five kilometres away from the volcano, magma didn’t get the Pompeiians and neither did fire. Wisps of pyroclast are harmless, but when they snowball into an avalanche, there’s nowhere to run. Ash is a nightmare.
Six in the third place means
The image of the Turning Point
Six at the top means
Misfortune from within and without
Bright white (1,400°C) is the sixth stage.
Dolly shot of the camera circling the band. They seem to be getting tired in the heat, maybe sick of playing to a phantom crowd. They slog on with the song, but now it looks automatic. Roger Waters’ face is an oily pizza. Any bursts of energy are probably just retakes carefully spliced together. Two guys, probably bored sound engineers, sit together under an umbrella drinking cans of San Pellegrino soda.
Archaeologists were surprised to unearth erotic frescoes at Pompeii. The video clips are littered with black censor bars, but they outline must-see body parts rather exquisitely:
A woman sprawled on a pile of crêpe fabric, with a centurion diligently eating out her cunt.
A bearded man with wolverine legs fucking a goat. The animal is in full revolt.
A woman doing the “reverse cowgirl” over another woman’s hand. There’s a Mona Lisa thing going on, because we can see traces of her face, beneath the fresco, where she was once facing her fisting partner.
A mural of Priapus and his giant cock were not found until 1998, after a heavy rainfall washed away the mud that was covering it.
The sun wanes, and “Chapter 24” is nearing its finish, but this raging 1,400°C is by no means the end. A technician turns on a light rig and floods the band with 1,500°C dazzling white: the seventh stage of fire. Pink Floyd have had a good week. The Book of Changes agrees:
On the seventh day comes return
It furthers one to have somewhere to go.
David Gilmour plays a plangent guitar note and hits the whammy bar to make it cry. Why does he have to ruin everything? He doesn’t even belong in this song.
Nobody ever mentions Herculaneum, the narrator complains, the other city that Vesuvius destroyed.
Zoom in on a piece of tourist graffiti:
SODOM AND GOMORRAH, YOU HAD IT COMING
Cut to the opening bars of “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.”