Pink Floyd (Missing 1966-2001 Live Performance Footage)

The British psychedelic/progressive rock group Pink Floyd achieved several hundreds of live performances from their beginnings to 1995. However, only three live albums and four video titles were officially released by major labels, and the huge majority of the shows was recorded by fans using stealth equipment; in fact, the band admitted that none of their shows were professionally recorded nor filmed (this is not entirely accurate: several soundboard recordings and even pro-shot films surfaced and were released by RoIO [Record of Illegitimate/Indeterminate Origin] labels and even by the official labels).

As it was usual with many bands in the 70s, most the live shows had a very strict no-camera rule, making the video recording very difficult for both audience and TV: very little footage has been filmed by news station, compared to the extensive time the band played. This decision was made by the band management as a marketing strategy: Creating a mystical image of the group (by releasing very little amount of photographs for example) eventually led more people to buy the albums and follow the band. While the band has made several TV appearances, full-length live footage is rare (with some exceptions, notably a few pro-shots at music festivals).

Syd Barrett Era (1966-1967)
Pink Floyd made mostly TV appearances during the period when the group was led by Syd Barrett; the magazine Record Collector listed at least 20 live performances, but only 5 (more or less) of these shows have been found.

Most of these TV extracts disappeared due to the common method of wiping the tapes, very usual among companies like the BBC at this time, Several events are poorly documented: sometimes a TV crew is only briefly mentioned in a local newspaper, without any picture. Very little is known about the group appearance in foreign TV shows. Finally, there are some documentaries that are believed to include footage from the band, but nothing can be confirmed since the tapes were lot or erased in most of the cases.

Thanks to pirates copies, some of the TV broadcasts in question resurfaced in various degrees of video quality, like Top of the Pops, The Look of the Week or American Bandstand TV Show.

1968-1970
A fair amount of TV appearances, mostly on French and British TV, are mentioned in Record Collector. Unfortunately, most of this footage remains elusive, probably locked in archive vaults or lost forever, still due to the tapes-wiping practice.

The Pink Floyd Video Anthology from the RoIO label Harvested, which is generally accepted as the most complete unofficial video collection of the band, features a little less than 20 TV segments from this era (after the departure of Syd Barrett), complete or not, despite extensive researches.

Hyde Park & Fête de l'Humanité (1970)
Pink Floyd was one of the groups performing live on the 5-hours Hyde Park free concert in London, on July 18th, 1970. Beside the audio of the whole Pink Floyd segment (1 hour long) was entirely recorded by audience tapers, the whole 280-minutes show was filmed as well by Hoppy Hopkins (the founder of the legendary underground “UFO” club where Pink Floyd previously played) for TVX. This footage is conjectured to has been used in documentaries or TV news reports, but the full version is nowadays unavailable, as it remains in Hoppy's possession. Actually the reel was digitally transferred in 2004, and it revealed the terrible deterioration of the magnetic band: only Atom Heart Mother was entirely recoverable and was subsequently spread. The 5 other songs were too damaged and/or suffered tracking problems. The full performance was allegedly screened two times publicly, shortly after the concert, but represents today the holy grail for many Pink Floyd fans and collectors as it is considered as unfindable. Jack Moore from Videoheads Group videotaped 4 of the 6 songs performed this day by Pink Floyd but only two of them (namely

The Embryo and Atom Heart Mother) were watchable, again due to the deterioration of the tape (which was also hard to transfer, as it was an archaic tape format). Videoheads taped more Pink Floyd concerts (such as the first public performance of Atom Heart Mother at the 1970 Bath festival, or the Amsterdam Rock Circus gig two years later) which got leaked, as Jack Moore had been against the sharing of his footage (until a few years ago, when he started uploading videos to Youtube). With Moore's decease in February 2014, the fate of his 72,000 hours of video archives is uncertain.Another public appearance of Pink Floyd is the concert at the Fête de l'Humanité, on September 12 th, 1970 in Paris. According to the book “In The Flesh: the complete performance history”, 500,000 people witnessed the show and the French TV filmed it, likely for a news report. But this footage was never broadcasted; As of now, the INA (Institut National de l'Audiovisuel, the French equivalent of the Library of Congress for audiovisual content) has not released any of this footage (the INA collects content from the public TV channels in France). It is unknown whether this footage still exists somewhere. Back in 1970 there were two public TV channels in France, but the archived footage from these two channels belongs now to the INA: either the reel is stored in archives and has not been noticed by the INA, or is lost.

The Dome, Brighton: The full show (1972)
On June 28th, 1972, the group performed live in Dome, Brighton (UK) and was professionally filmed in the objective to use parts of the video as promotional clips for EMI. Only the video snippets of Careful With That Axe, Eugene and Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun were released, whereas witnesses of the show reported that more than two songs were filmed. These two extracts were later spread, shared by traders and widely broadcasted on TV for years, but the rest of the show is missing, maybe unusable or judged useless by its owners. The audio of the gig was taped by audience recorders, but the video remains elusive. In 2001, to promote the upcoming release of Echoes: The Best Of Pink Floyd, EMI put these two clips on promotional VHS, mystifying the fans again about the existence of the other footage. In 2012, the Blu-Ray disc included in the Dark Side of the Moon Immersion Boxset featured these two clips again, but this time restored and remastered to 1080p. But to the deception of the fans, the rest still was not included.

Existence Unconfirmed & Rumors
Royal Festival Hall, April 14th 1969 : Film director Anthony Stern was called by the band to attend their latest piece, The Man and The Journey. However, he only got the permission to film the rehearsals and was later thrown out by the security. Hence only tantalizing B&W footage of the rehearsals exist; story confirmed by Stern. But it is believed by some people that Stern was “busted” at the end of the first set (“The Man”), and so he may have filmed half of the concert. If this recording actually exists, it is unknown whether it will surface any time. Stern has been transferring his work into newer formats but hasn't mentioned this concert.

Pittsburgh, June 20th 1975 : There are rumors among Floyd fans about a pro-shot recording of this gig, but various photographs from witnesses show no apparent camera during the performance. It is possible that a TV station shot some video there as the concert was featured by the Press, but no video is available today, from TV or from the management.

Several news reports and music programs filmed the group in motion, but only snippets of these were actually broadcasted. Full recording of the following concerts might (but doubtfully) exist in archives: February 24th to 26th, 1971 : German TV ZDF was present at the Hamburg and Offenbach concerts for the program “Aspekte”.

August 6th, 1971 : Hakone Aphrodite Festival, filmed daylight by Japanese TV, where Atom Heart Mother was played.

June 15th, 1971 : Concert in the Abbaye de Royaumont, filmed by French ORTFTV.

July 1st, 1971 : Ossiacher Musikforum, with a brass/choir version of Atom Heart Mother.

August 15th, 1971 : Program “Get To Know” on ABC features an overdubbed extract from Careful With That Axe, Eugene in B&W, shot daylight at the Randwick Racecourse in Sydney.

July 5th, 1975 : 5 minutes of footage from the band playing at the Knebworth Festival was broadcasted on French TV TF1 for a news report. Excerpts from Raving and Drooling and Shine On You Crazy Diamonds, shot daylight with a single camera.

All that remains from the 1977 tour period are silent home movies shot on 8mm, available in more-or-less poor quality due to the imperfect transfer and the state of the reel (compared to a gig from 1973 in Atlanta, filmed on 8mm that was recently restored and released on Blu-Ray, the previous home movies are in bad shape).

The possibility of seeing new footage from the 1966-1995 era depends on broadcast of never seen before material, on the work of the fans community and also on the rightsholders.