More – Ibiza film score before the myths

Schroeder’s Ibiza film, EMI 1969

In June 1969, More arrived as Pink Floyd’s first proper film score, written for Barbet Schroeder’s Ibiza film and recorded in roughly a week. Schroeder wanted the music inside the scenes: a car radio, a party cassette, the sound of a room with a beat under it. EMI treated the project as its own job. The band produced the record, working without Norman Smith’s usual control at Abbey Road.

The tracks sit a long way apart. “Cirrus Minor” is the quiet opening, slow, with a lot of air. “The Nile Song” and “Ibiza Bar” are hard rock, more direct than most of what the Floyd had put out. “Green Is the Colour” is an acoustic folk ballad, and Lindy Mason’s penny whistle runs through the arrangement. “Cymbaline” goes after the music business. Gilmour sings the nightmare quietly enough to step into. The instrumentals (“Main Theme”, “Quicksilver”, “Dramatic Theme”) stretch the experimental side the band later carried into much larger rooms.

Hipgnosis designed the sleeve. On the record, the quartet after Syd Barrett moves between a folk song, a bar-band number and tape experiments. More is the soundtrack of a film that later kept a small cult, and the album stayed attached to it. Songs from it went into the live suites “The Journey” and “The Man”. “Green Is the Colour” still turns up with Gilmour, and with Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets, decades later.