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 fever dream and recorded in roughly a week. This was not leftover atmosphere pasted onto pictures. Schroeder wanted the music to live inside the frame: car radio, party cassette, room tone with a pulse. EMI treated the project as special; the band produced themselves, stepping past Norman Smith’s Abbey Road leash for a freer hand.
The album swings between worlds. “Cirrus Minor” opens like mist over chalk cliffs. “The Nile Song” and “Ibiza Bar” hit with a hard-rock snarl the Floyd rarely chased so directly. “Green Is the Colour” is an acoustic folk ballad with Lindy Mason’s penny whistle threading sunlight through the arrangement. “Cymbaline” needles the music business while Gilmour’s vocal keeps the nightmare soft enough to enter. Instrumentals (“Main Theme”, “Quicksilver”, “Dramatic Theme”) stretch the experimental muscle that would later fill stadiums with different architecture.
Hipgnosis wrapped the sleeve. Inside, the post-Barrett quartet sounds hungry for roles: folk storyteller, bar band, tape sorcerers. More is a workshop and a postcard from a film that made the soundtrack half its cult. Songs migrated into live suites (“The Journey”, “The Man”), and “Green Is the Colour” still travels with Gilmour and with Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets decades later.
More marked the first instance when Pink Floyd wrote music to properly accompany a film. Schroeder wanted the music to seem appropriate to the scene, so in some instances you hear the Floyd’s music played over a car radio, at a party, on a cassette player.
(Pink Floyd, official album note)
Released 13 June 1969 in the UK on EMI Columbia, More sits between the early psychedelic sprawl and the conceptual machinery still ahead. It is uneven by design, which is part of its honesty. A film about ascent and burn asks for multiple temperatures; the band obliged without sanding the edges.
Return to it and the soundtrack brief is still clear: cheap tape, penny whistle, heavier guitar than the early singles, cues written for Schroeder’s Ibiza story. More is not Dark Side. It is Floyd learning to score pictures while still a working band on EMI Columbia vinyl. The heat in the title is geography, not metaphor.
