Remember When Pink Floyd Had a Rough Time Working for a Famous Film Director in 1970?

On paper, it seemed like the ideal collaboration. The master of 60s New Wave cinema is teaming up with rock music’s finest purveyors of ambitious ambient music. We’re talking about Pink Floyd doing music for a film made by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni.

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Unfortunately, the partnership proved less than fruitful, at least originally. One piece of music eventually transformed into a classic rock standard.

Soundtrack Naturals

Pink Floyd was still finding its way to a new identity in 1970. They had grabbed the London underground music scene by the lapels with their stunning 1967 debut album The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. Shortly after, however, Syd Barrett, the artistic driving force behind that record, was fired from the band due to his unpredictable behavior.

Floyd replaced him with guitarist David Gilmour and tried to move on from Barrett’s quirky pop songs, instead building on their reputation as architects of trippy soundscapes. They always combined their live music with the visual element provided by psychedelic light shows. As such, their music seemed a natural fit for movies.

They had provided the soundtrack for a 1969 film called More, which was a bit under the radar. But then they received a call from Michelangelo Antonioni, a darling of the cinema world at the time. He was making a film, and he thought that Floyd would be perfect for the soundtrack. The band soon made their way to Rome to work on music for the film Zabriskie Point.

A Fussy Director

Antonioni had made his mark with the 1966 film Blow-Up, which surveyed the youth culture in London at the time. It was around that time that he went to see Pink Floyd play and was blown away by the sights and sounds of the experience.

With Zabriskie Point, he turned his attention to the scene in California. Perhaps the setting should have been a sign that the Brits in Floyd might not have been the best choice to do the soundtrack. Antonioni constantly nitpicked the music that the band delivered to him for the movie.

In the end, Floyd only accounted for three tracks on the Zabriskie Point soundtrack, one of which, bizarrely enough, was a country and western-style number. Antonioni used music from other artists, including The Grateful Dead, Kaleidoscope, and The Youngbloods, to fill out the score. Pink Floyd frittered away about a month in Rome with little to show for it. But an unused piece of music would eventually come in very handy.

What About “Us”?

Rick Wright, Pink Floyd’s keyboardist, wrote a piano piece for Zabriskie Point called “The Violent Sequence”. Antonioni rejected it on the basis of it being too sad. Roger Waters, Floyd’s chief lyricist, didn’t share those same objections.

When Pink Floyd was making The Dark Side Of The Moon album, released in 1973, they went back to Wright’s piece. Waters added lyrics that expressed his feelings about the inanity of war and slotted the piece into the song cycle about the things in life that can make a person go mad.

The renamed song, “Us And Them”, is a stunner, featuring not just Wright’s plaintive piano but also a furious sax solo from session player Dick Parry and some of Waters’ most moving lyrics. One wonders if Pink Floyd ever thanked Michelangelo Antonioni for the gift he gave them by initially rejecting this amazing song.

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