Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii
1972 concert documentary film
Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii is a 1972 concert film directed by Adrian Maben with the English rock band Pink Floyd performing at the ancient Roman amphitheatre in Pompeii, Italy. The band performed a typical live set from the era, but there was no audience beyond the basic film crew. The main footage in and around the amphitheatre was filmed over four days in October 1971, using the band's regular touring equipment, including a mobile 8-track recorder from Paris (before being bumped up to 16-track in post-production). Additional footage filmed in a Paris television studio the following December was added for the original 1972 release. The film was then re-released in 1974 with additional studio material of the band working on The Dark Side of the Moon, and interviews at Abbey Road Studios.
The film has subsequently been released on video numerous times, and in 2002, a director's cut was released on DVD, which combined the original footage from 1971 with more contemporary shots of space and the area around Pompeii, assembled by Maben. In April 2025, a 4K restoration, Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII, was shown in cinemas by Trafalgar Releasing and Sony Music Vision, and released on home media shortly after. This was followed by an album with the remixed songs and outtakes, which was released on 2 May 2025 and topped the music charts in several countries. A number of bands have taken inspiration from the film in creating their own videos, or filming concerts without an audience.
Background
Filmmaker Adrian Maben, interested in combining art with Pink Floyd's music, contacted David Gilmour and the band's manager, Steve O'Rourke, in 1971 to discuss the possibilities of making a film in which the band's music was played over images of paintings by René Magritte, Jean Tinguely, Giorgio de Chirico and others.
The public source identifies “Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii” as 1972 concert documentary film. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Pink, Floyd and Live.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q169558. 10 of 10 selected statements include explicit references; 10 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1972, 1971, 1974 and 2002.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.