Pink Floyd: a restored version of the “Echoes” video has been released, taken from “Crystal Voyager”, the cult 1973 surf film

Pink Floyd have released a restored, high-resolution version of the spectacular footage that accompanies “Echoes“, the 23-minute masterpiece from the 1971 album “Meddle”. The footage comes from “Crystal Voyager”, a 1973 Australian documentary that became something of a cult classic in surf cinema, and it breathes new life into one of the most evocative encounters between the British band's music and moving images.
The release coincides with the celebrations for “Meddle”, which will return to shops on 17 October in a special “San Tropez Orange Marble” colored-vinyl edition, distributed by Sony Music for National Album Day.

The story of the footage dates back to the early 1970s. “Crystal Voyager”, directed by David Elfick, told the story of surfer, photographer and filmmaker George Greenough, who also wrote the script and provided the narration. Greenough had achieved something extraordinary for the time: footage shot from inside the waves, thanks to a camera strapped to his body, which allowed viewers to see the ocean from the perspective of someone riding through it on a board.
To accompany those sequences, Greenough was looking for music that could capture their hypnotic, immersive quality. The solution came almost by chance, while listening to a record his mother had given him: Pink Floyd's “Meddle”. The long composition that filled the entire second side, “Echoes”, ran for almost exactly the same length as his edit, around 23 minutes. The pairing of the wave footage with the track's psychedelic atmospheres seemed an immediate perfect match.

One obstacle remained, however: getting the band's permission to use the music. Greenough and Elfick didn't have the money to buy the rights, but they managed to strike an original deal with Pink Floyd. The two filmmakers would be allowed to use “Echoes” in the documentary, and in exchange the band would be granted permission to screen the footage during their own concerts.
Nick Mason still recalls the astonishment the musicians felt when they first saw the result, during an Australian tour: “We first saw it while we were on tour in Australia and we were all left speechless. It was absolutely sensational. Nowadays everyone has a GoPro strapped to their wetsuit, but back then it was incredible to see that guy with a camera fixed to his chest riding through the water tunnel”.

The drummer also recalled the particular creative climate in which “Meddle” was born, one of the albums that marked Pink Floyd's shift from their early psychedelic experiments to the compositional maturity of “The Dark Side Of The Moon“. “At the time it really felt like an experimental piece of work, because essentially we were left to our own devices and didn't have a real producer. In a sense we produced the album ourselves, which also meant that the engineers at Abbey Road Studios were more than happy to get involved and see what they could do. The best thing about 'Meddle' is that you can hear a band playing purely for the pleasure of it. It's probably one of our most free-spirited albums in terms of performance. It was the kind of experience we couldn't wait to repeat”, Mason recalled.
With its instrumental build-ups, David Gilmour's liquid guitars, Richard Wright's keyboards and its long passages of sonic experimentation, “Echoes” still stands today as one of the peaks of the Floyd catalogue. Greenough's images, with their swirling water, flashes of light and underwater perspectives, seem to translate that visionary character into visual form, turning the composition into a kind of audiovisual journey.

More than half a century on, the restoration allows this experiment to be rediscovered in its original splendor, from a time when sports-filming technology was still in its infancy and the union of progressive rock and experimental cinema could open up entirely new horizons.

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