Listen to the “lost” Pink Floyd soundtrack for 1970s head trip drama flick, Zabriskie Point – the only American film from Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni.
Pink Floyd‘s music is nothing if not cinematic. And while their live shows were forever entwined with theatre, they rarely dove into the world of film scoring.
That being said, they did dabble in their early years, mostly in the period just after Syd Barrett’s departure (but pre-Dark Side of the Moon, a time when they were finding their feet musically without their chief songwriter).
One such example is their soundtrack for celebrated Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 head trip drama flick, Zabriskie Point.
According to Dangerous Minds, Pink Floyd were at one point billed to be the sole composers for the soundtrack.
They wrote eight songs for the film, but only three were used in the end. The sessions produced tracks like Heart Beat, Pig Meat, which features the band’s first use of a human heartbeat as an instrument (but not their last); The Violent Sequence, which would go on to become Us and Them from Dark Side; and Come in Number 51, Your Time Is Up, a reworked version of their track Careful With That Axe, Eugene from Ummagumma.
Antonioni added tracks from The Youngbloods, Roy Orbison, Jerry Garcia, The Kaleidoscope, Patti Page and the Rolling Stones to round out the film’s score.
As an interesting side note from Dangerous Minds, Antonioni visited the Doors when they were recording “L’America” for L.A. Woman. In the end “the director inexplicably turned down the track, which could have worked spectacularly well in his film.”
You can actually listen to a while bunch of the outtakes from the Zabriskie Point sessions on hugely expensive, Floyd box set The Early Years (on Spotify). But be sure to check out some of the gems mentioned above below.
[via Dangerous Minds]
