Revisit the trippy screen projections for Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon tour 1974



(Credit: Roger Tillberg / Alamy)

Music

Revisit the trippy screen projections for Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side of the Moon' tour, 1974

Sun 27th Nov 2022 21.00 GMT

Pink Floyd can be regarded as the fathers of a few different musical movements. Not only did they help propel the art of the concept album into the mainstream, but they are widely regarded as the foundational stones of a swirling movement known as acid rock. During the mid-1960s, Roger Waters, Syd Barret, Richard Wright and Nick Mason would use their love of art, jazz and psychedelic propulsion to infiltrate a new rock and roll style.

The band’s style would evolve and develop over time, but the central theme of expansive mind-altering music remained a core value for the group, even as Barrett left the band and was replaced by David Gilmour. The group would become a composite of so many different styles that trying to define their sonic ethics accurately is an uphill task, to say the least.

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One thing that everyone can agree on though is that although Pink Floyd, throughout the ’70s and beyond, established a style that is viewed as prog, it wasn’t prog in the same way as, say, King Crimson or Yes. This Pink Floyd version of prog-rock could quite easily fit into the category of psychedelia as it could with all the bombastic wizardry of prog. The psychedelia the band pumped into their music was replicated in their album sleeves, their videos and, of course, their on-stage performances.

On the 1974 Dark Side of the Moon Tour, the band would enlist the help of a screen projectionist to create an otherworldly experience that few could have imagined in the early-1970s. This coupled with their advancements in sound equipment, the band provided an all-encompassing experience like no other and ensured that Pink Floyd would be widely regarded as one of the greatest live acts of the decade.

Pink Floyd had been toying with the idea of unique on-stage performances from the very start of their career. In 1967 the band used colourful light displays, bubbling oil projections and other means of swinging ’60s psychedelia to enrapture their tripped-out audiences while they played their out-of-this-world sounds. But, by the time they had hit the big time in the ’70s, the group knew they needed something more permanent for their tours, so they enlisted the then-unknown filmmaker Ian Emes.

Emes had already created an animation titled French Windows which he set to the Pink Floyd song ‘One of These Days’. it featured swirling landscapes and rotoscope dancers and captured several high-profile awards, including a spot on British TV. Emes said of the experience: "Having seen my film French Windows on BBC’s The Old Grey Whistle Test, the band commissioned me to make their first-ever animated film, which they subsequently toured the world with. ‘The Time’ sequence is used to this day. It was a breathtaking experience to see my film projected live at Wembley Arena before a huge crowd of tripped-out fans."

These animations were coupled alongside some Kubrickian films of Heathrow airport and abandoned hospitals to create an experience that no band could have come close to dreaming of in the early-1970s. Watch a collection of these concert screen projections below, as well as the full bootleg of the performance from Wembley 1974.

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