Steven Wilson has remixed more than his fair share of classic albums over the years, for the likes of Yes, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Chicago, Black Sabbath Gentle Giant, Emerson, Lake & Palmer... The list goes on and on. Yes guitarist Steve Howe is a fan. “I admire him," Howe tells us. "He's one of those really great kind of backroom boys. He loves the music, and he's got these great production skills he brings to it."
But amid that heady list, the film Pink Floyd at Pompeii — MCMLXXII was particularly special for Wilson. The music documentary returns to movie theaters this week (locations and tickets via pinkfloyd.film), with its soundtrack to follow on May 2.
"That was exciting because Floyd is really my favorite band," Wilson tells Guitar Player via Zoom from his home base in London. "I saw that movie when I was a kid. I still remember seeing it at the age of 12 or 13, a grainy print at our local cinema, and just being blown away by it. It made an incredible impression on me.
“So it's a great honor to be involved, and to want to do right by the fans 'cause I myself am an über fan. So I tried to approach it from the point of view of what I would want from a new mix."
The concert film was first released as Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii during September 1972. Directed by Adrian Maben,it documents the group’s performance — the first concert ever staged there — over four days in October 1971. There was no audience, and the performance consisted of material from 1968's A Saucerful of Secrets up through the then-new Meddle. A subsequent 1974 version added studio footage from the making of The Dark Side of the Moon at Abbey Road Studios, including "On the Run" and "Us and Them."
The new MCMLXXII edition was restored by Lana Topham, who's also worked on documentaries for Bryan Adams and Marillion. She handled the project frame-by-frame to transfer the film from its original 35mm into 4K. It rolls out Thursday, April 24, in theaters and IMAX worldwide.
Wilson, meanwhile, created new theatrical and home mixes in 5.1 and Dolby Atmos, helped by the fact that the original mixes by Charles Rauchet and Peter Watts were done relatively well at the time.
"I think any artist like Floyd or Kate Bush, where there's a lot of sound design and there's a lot of layers to the music, a lot of detail to the music — those lend themselves beautiful to being expanded out to spacial audio," Wilson explains. "That's really what I'm doing here; I'm remixing these albums mainly to produce spacial audio, Dolby Atmos and 5.1. I'm not remixing them for the stereo, 'cause the stereos very often are definitive, anyway.
"So when it comes to what would sound amazing in Dolby Atmos and spacial audio, any artist where they have the element of layering to their sound is intriguing. Floyd are a great example. Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel, too."
Wilson says the new Pompeii has "been three years in the making," and he was particularly inspired when he saw Topham's work on the visual end. "The new print is incredible," Wilson says, "so I was also trying to do justice to that in creating the audio soundtrack. It's my favorite era of Floyd; I'm not going to say it's the best era, 'cause objectively speaking what they did after [Pompeii] was the masterpieces. But that area, somewhere between the psychedelic and experimental, improvisational rock music, to me that's the pinnacle.
“And that particular film is the pinnacle of Floyd during the era, because the film points out straight after that how they moved into a very different phase of their career, where the psychedelic and improvisation became much less constituent parts of their sound.
"So for me these are the definitive performances of their repertoire from that era, and it's unbelievable for me to be able to be involved in such an important, pivotal moment in their career."
Wilson — a guitarist himself, of course — adds that immersing himself into the Pompeii recordings gave him greater insight into David Gilmour and his role with Pink Floyd back then.
"What he's playing is often very simple," Wilson explains. "That's the beautiful thing about David — he doesn't play fast, he doesn't shred. He has incredible feel. He has incredible taste in not just choice but he also is brilliant at sound design. Just think of that whole section in the middle of 'Echoes,' with that kind of wah-wah pedal plugged in 'round the wrong way, and the way he kind of channels that into something that's almost morel like 20th century classical music, or electronic music.
"In the great heyday of Floyd that, to me, was the most fascinating thing of what he did, his choice of sound and his sense of sound design, and there it is, all laid out to you in that movie right there. I don't know how much he's into sound design these days, but he probably is, as a tool. I tin he's still curious. He seems fired up about making new records, and obviously he has a great love affair with the guitar as well."
The album version of Pompeii, meanwhile, will include the eight-track performance as well as an alternate take of "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" and an unedited version of "A Saucerful of Secrets."
Wilson shared that he'd "love to go back and do more of the catalog," but for the moment he's busy promoting his latest solo album, The Overview, and preparing for his first solo tour in seven years, which kicks off May 1 in Stockholm, Sweden, with European dates into mid-June and a North American leg starting September 9 in San Francisco and running into October.
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