Product Details

• Actors: Syd Barrett, John Dunbar, John Lennon, Nick Mason, Yoko Ono
• Directors: Peter Whitehead
• Writers: Peter Whitehead
• Producers: Colin Miles, Mark Rye
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC
• Language: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 2
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Snapper UK
• DVD Release Date: October 4, 2005
• Run Time: 30 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000AE8KUS
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #71,021 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Pink Floyd - London 1966-1967" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Set the controls for "Swinging London", October 24, 2005

By 

Scott Bresinger (New York, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Pink Floyd - London 1966-1967 (DVD)

First off, this disc is recommeded mainly to Floyd fanatics and Syd Barrett completists, neither of which describes yours truly. Still, this is also useful as a cultural artifact of a brief period of time and place mythologized as "Swinging London," where the burgeoning hippie culture of the late 60's collided with the mod fashionistas that London has always attracted. It was basically then and only then that the terms "hippie" and "hipster" were interchangable. Of course, the presence of cheap and plentiful LSD helped, as well.

The DVD portion of this package is centered around some very early recording sessions for Pink Floyd, who at the time were more interested in largely improvised psychedelic jams, rooted far more in jazz and blues than say, the Grateful Dead and their dreaded progeny, "jam" bands like Phish. This is music to take drugs to listen to music to, as the saying goes. It was not long before the group would start playing actual songs. Within two years of these recordings Syd's mind would be totally fried and a somewhat ghoulish cult would spring up around his final disjointed recordings. Of course, if you watch the brief footage of the band that is included here, one can't help but notice that Syd was already starting on a journey to the center of his mind that he'd never return from. The two lengthy tracks here (one being an early but quite recognizable version of "Interstellar Overdrive") clock in at about a half hour altogether, and that's all the music there is. Purists can listen in the original glorious mono while people who'd like to simulate the drug experience without actually being stoned can take the alternate 5.1 enhancement. For greater convenience, the package also includes a CD with the same music, this time in stereo.

The film on the DVD, shot by Peter Whitehead, is in part an excellent snapshot of what the cultural atmosphere of "Swinging London" was really like, wiping away the commercialized silliness of the "Austin Powers" movies and revelling in a more artistic silliness. A fascinating portrait of the "14 Hour Technicolor Dream" is helpfully condensed to just under 12 minutes, and includes a brief scene of one of Yoko Ono's more notorious performance art pieces, where audience members are invited to cut away at her clothes with scissors. Elsewhere in the crowd is John Lennon, who had not yet met Yoko, filling his downtime from the Beatles by becoming a professional scenester (I'm not knocking him; we should all be so lucky to do that). The only real "special features" are short (about 2-4 minutes apiece) interview segments of celebrities and luminaries--Mick Jagger, Michael Caine, Julie Christie and David Hockney. None of them have much to say, but it still creates a fascinating portrait of the milieu. In any event, the picture quality is wonderful; some of this looks as is if it could have been shot yesterday. Mind you, the direction, full of quick cuts and loopy pans, are more a product of their time, although the influence on music videos is unmistakable.

Don't expect this short release to be a complete learning experience, but it's nevertheless an interesting artifact, and I couldn't help but notice that some of the music bears more than a passing resemblance to current noisemakers such as the Black Dice. History again repeats itself...

27 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars buyer beware-2 floyd songs & irrelevant filler, November 10, 2005

By 

P. G. Weidner "music nut" (Breckenridge, Co. USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Pink Floyd - London 1966-1967 (DVD)

i guess the interviews are relevant, by the fact that they are indeed from the 60's. that's about it. you get to hear julie christie, michael caine, david hockney, and jagger talk about their feelings. i knew that the floyd performed only two songs, but i did expect to see 'the floyd' during these performances. it's more like a music video, with occasional shots of the band. a time capsule of history i agree, but if you're going to release a dvd and call it a 'pink floyd' dvd, have more than 28 and a half minutes of the band (shown sporadically), and some meaningless interviews to round it out to an hour. just another example of using the 'pink floyd' name to sell a dvd. should have known better when 'rolling stone' gave it a good review. 2 stars cause it's syd barrett even if you don't get to see very much of him. (or the rest of the band for that matter) very disappointing.

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars CORPOREAL CLOG, December 26, 2005

By 

Kerry Leimer (Makawao, Hawaii United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Pink Floyd - London 1966-1967 (DVD)

We are once again asked to witness the snarled and ultimately predatory relationship between music and commerce. This DVD should be promoted as a short film by Peter Whitehead, supplemented by shorter interviews with Michael Caine, Julie Christie and a few others (uniformly uninteresting interviews, by the way). Then one could approach this for what it is, the work of a filmmaker who happened to like what Pink Floyd got up to on stage and decided to edit event footage using Floyd's music as the soundtrack -- the ONLY soundtrack by the way: no location sound occurs anywhere. When you watch the performance the sound you hear is the sound of studio overdubs, not of live performance. Had this DVD been titled "Let's Make Love in London, A Short Quasi-Documentary Film Featuring Mostly Stoned Audience Members Trying to Dance to a Soundtrack by Pink Floyd" one assumes interest would be significantly lower. Instead, it is billed as a film about Pink Floyd, which it clearly is not.

Looked at as a documentary snippet of an era in which noodling -- with sound or with images or with other persons -- was elevated to high art, this DVD stands as little more than a mildly interesting example of period style, never attaining the heights of better works of the time which could be indexed as "style, period."

Looked at as a Pink Floyd concert, you will be better off slipping on the "full length" CD versions of the hastily-made studio takes of a somewhat rambling "Interstellar Overdrive" and a nearly disposable "Nick's Boogie". (As an unrelated aside, "Nick's Boogie" does beg the listener to participate in a rather playful thought-experiment: What would the early work of Floyd, up to and including Umma Gumma, have sounded like if Nick Mason had been forced to play without his tom-toms?)

As another reviewer has already correctly noted, with some effort this could have been of great interest (Think Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Syd Barrett, et al) had those in a rush to grab a few bucks considered a better, more honest effort to include relevant information and opinions about the events, the time and the place from the artists involved. Absent of Whitehead's somewhat self-congratulatory tone, others directy involved in the events documented here remain literally mute. But before we get ahead of ourselves on compiling a list of possible improvements, given the bald-faced greed demonstrated by the manner in which this material is "packaged", do the artists even matter in this case?

HAPPY '08 UPDATE: It's good to see that the manufacturer has done the right thing and discontinued this DVD.