Aubrey Powell schwärmt von den restaurierten Pulse und Delicate Sound of Thunder Filmen!

Dass erste Interview über Inhalte der “Later Years” Box von Pink Floyd, das uns erahnen läßt was da schönes auf zu kommt, stammt von Aubrey “Po” Powell. HMV.COM TALKS TO … brachte heute ein Interview in dem er über seine Arbeit mit Pink Floyd, einschließlich des kürzlich angekündigten Box-Sets sehr detailiert Auskunft gab!

Besonders aufregend verändert und verbessert müssen sich nachdem die Konzertfilme von PULSE und DELICATE SOUND OF THUNDER haben, den Powell schwärmt vom Qualitätssprung der von ihm restaurierten Aufnahmen! Allein 16 Monate hat er an “Delicate” gearbeitet! “Absolutely beautiful film, it looks amazing …. it’s beautiful, it’s absolutely incredible“, so Thorgerson’s Ex-Partner von Hipgnosis, der sich vorstellen könnte den Film kurze Zeit im Kino laufen zu lassen! Es gibt sogar wage Pläne! Das wäre großartig!

HMV.COM: We saw that there is a lot of unreleased audio-visual material in the new box set, can you talk us through some of that?

AUBREY POWELL: Well, one of the things, for example, is the Pulse concert. With technology now we’ve come to expect the highest quality. I mean, if I film something now I’ll shoot it in 8K. Of course, it’s amazing how technology has changed in the last 30 years, and since the most recent version of Pink Floyd has been out there, it’s changed radically. But when you go back into the archives, which I did recently and looked at everything we could possibly find, you look at a film like Pulse that was released 20 years ago on DVD and probably VHS.

You go back to the original masters and there’s only so much you can do, it was all shot on Beta SP, which is a format I would liken to steam radio. But these days there are ways of manipulation and digital restoration that mean you can bring something up to looking pretty damn good. So that’s one thing that I’ve done and it looks pretty amazing, and of course, because David had all the original master tapes we were able to re-mix the sound. It looks and sounds great.

Aubrey Powell über das Cover Artwork

It’s this landscape with a small child in it and the folding of lamp posts as the child walks down the road. It’s slightly sci-fi and otherworldly, and I suppose it’s a metaphor for power, which is what Pink Floyd is all about. And I think the symbol of a small child walking into the distance in an extraordinary landscape is also something to do with this idea of the Later Years, because all of us – and I include myself and Pink Floyd in this – we’re all in the autumn years of our lives, so it was an important metaphor to make, visually, I think.

What else can we expect from the new box set in terms of visuals?

AUBREY POWELL: I think the most interesting part of the package, for me, was finding 350 film cans which contained the Delicate Sound of Thunder film. What was incredible was that all that film negative was in unbelievably good condition. I digitally restored the whole lot, we up-res’d it to 4K – and in some cases 6K – and previously it had been cobbled together a bit. I realised that Wayne Isham, who was the original director of the film, had shot it all on 35mm and had a terrible job trying to put his film together.

Pink Floyd are never easy to film at the best of times, because of the nature of the concerts. He’d created this melange of images that were all superimposed onto each other, and I couldn’t really work out why he’d done that but then I did, because it basically been shot in quite a ramshackle way. Not deliberately, it was just he nature of how you shot films in those days. There wasn’t the sophistication and communication that we have shooting live concerts now.

So what did you do?

AUBREY POWELL: I took all this film, restored it all and re-edited it. It took 16 months to do it, and we’ve brought it up to the most incredible two-hour concert of absolutely beautiful film, it looks amazing. David re-did the sound and remixed it all, and the result is just spectacular. And it’s the only Pink Floyd concert film, ever, apart from Live at Pompeii. Apart from that, there is no other live film of the whole Pink Floyd band.

They filmed The Wall, but not successfully, it didn’t look very good so they’ve never released it. There have been individual films of David Gilmour’s tours and individual films of Roger’s tours, but there’s never been a Pink Floyd live film that you could show in a cinema. This looks and sounds amazing, it’s beautiful, it’s absolutely incredible.

Are there any plans to do that? Show it in cinemas?

AUBREY POWELL: We’ve shown it a couple of times in a cinema for ourselves, just to make sure that it works! I think there are plans afoot to screen it, but I don’t know, I can’t say more than that because nobody’s agreed to that as yet, but I’m sure something will come of it.

Danke Philipp für den Hinweis!