If you want to understand where the psychedelic dream of the sixties died and the stadium-filling prog-rock monster of the seventies was born, you have to look at Ibiza. Not the modern, EDM-soaked party island, but the sun-bleached, heroin-stained backdrop of Barbet Schroeder’s 1969 film. This is where pink floyd music from the film more enters the chat. It is a messy, beautiful, and occasionally terrifying collection of songs that most casual fans completely ignore. That's a mistake.
Honestly, 1969 was a weird year for the band. Syd Barrett, their former leader and creative spark, was gone—lost to a mental breakdown that's been mythologized to death. Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Richard Wright, and Nick Mason were left holding the bag. They weren't superstars yet. They were just four guys trying to figure out if they had a future without the man who wrote all their hits.
The Ibiza Sessions: Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control
Schroeder approached the band to score his directorial debut. It was a low-budget French-German production about two drifters who fall into a destructive, drug-fueled spiral. The band didn't have months to slave over it like they would later do with The Dark Side of the Moon. They knocked out the recording at Abbey Road in just eight days. Eight days! You can hear that urgency in the tracks. Some of it feels like a rough sketch, while other parts feel like they’re inventing entire genres on the fly.
Because they were working to a visual cue, they didn't have to worry about writing "singles." This freed them up. You get these jarring transitions from heavy, proto-metal riffs like "The Nile Song" to the gentle, acoustic folk of "Cymbaline." It’s a bipolar listening experience. One minute you’re floating on a Mediterranean breeze, and the next, David Gilmour is screaming his lungs out over a wall of distorted guitars.
"The Nile Song" is actually a huge deal. People talk about Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath inventing heavy metal, but listen to that track. It’s sludgy. It’s loud. It’s arguably the heaviest thing Pink Floyd ever recorded. It sounds nothing like "Wish You Were Here." It sounds like a band exorcising the ghost of the psychedelic pop era.
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Breaking Down the Soundtrack’s Dual Identity
The record basically splits into two camps. You have the actual songs—the stuff with lyrics—and then you have the "incidental" music. These are the weird, ambient soundscapes that arguably laid the groundwork for the band’s later experiments in synthesizers and tape loops.
The Acoustic Melancholy
Tracks like "Green is the Colour" show David Gilmour finding his voice. Literally. This is the moment where his breathy, melodic vocal style really starts to anchor the band. It’s a simple folk song, but it has this underlying sense of dread that fits the movie’s plot perfectly. It’s beautiful, sure. But it’s the kind of beauty that feels like it’s about to crumble.
"Cymbaline" is another standout. It’s one of the first times Roger Waters’ lyrics started to take on that cynical, weary edge that would eventually define The Wall. He’s writing about the absurdity of the music industry and the feeling of being trapped. It’s a nightmare song disguised as a lullaby. The band actually played this live for years, often using "Azimuth Co-ordinator" speakers to make the sound of footsteps move around the audience in circles. It was terrifying for the people in the front row.
The Avant-Garde Experiments
Then you have the instrumentals. "Main Theme" is a slow-burn masterpiece built around a repetitive Farfisa organ line. It’s hypnotic. It’s basically the blueprint for what would become "Echoes" a few years later. Then there’s "Quicksilver," which is just nearly seven minutes of sound effects, eerie echoes, and Richard Wright messing around with his keyboard. It’s not "radio-friendly." It’s barely music in the traditional sense. But it’s essential to understanding the pink floyd music from the film more era because it shows they weren't afraid to be boring or difficult. They were testing the limits of how much atmosphere they could create with minimal input.
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Why This Record Still Matters in 2026
Most people skip More. They go from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn straight to Meddle or Atom Heart Mother. But if you do that, you miss the connective tissue. This soundtrack is the bridge. It’s the sound of a band learning how to be a collective rather than just a support system for a single frontman.
- The Gilmour Factor: This is where Dave takes the lead. His guitar work here shifts from Syd-inspired scratching to the bluesy, soaring lines that would make him a legend.
- Cinematic Ambition: They realized they were good at scoring moods. This led to Obscured by Clouds (another underrated soundtrack) and eventually the visual spectacle of their live shows.
- Genre Fluidity: They weren't "Prog" yet. They were just a rock band that liked to play folk, blues, and avant-garde noise at the same time.
The film itself is a bit of a downer. It’s a cautionary tale about heroin and the end of the "Summer of Love" idealism. The music reflects that. There’s a persistent feeling of sun-drenched decay. It’s the sound of the party ending and the hangover setting in.
Technical Nuances and Recording Oddities
If you listen closely to the vinyl or a high-res digital remaster, you’ll notice how dry the production is compared to their later stuff. There isn't that lush, multi-tracked gloss that Alan Parsons would later bring to the table. It’s raw. You can hear the room. You can hear the imperfections.
In "Cirrus Minor," the song ends with the sound of birds chirping and Richard Wright’s church-like organ. It’s a serene moment, but in the context of the film, it’s deeply ironic. The contrast between the pastoral sounds of nature and the dark themes of the lyrics is something Waters would return to again and again. He was obsessed with the idea that the world looks beautiful on the surface while everything underneath is rotting.
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The track "Up the Khyber" is another weird one. It’s a frantic, drum-heavy piece by Nick Mason and Wright. It feels more like free jazz than rock. It’s short, chaotic, and shows that at this point in their career, nobody was telling them "no." They were just throwing ideas at the wall to see what stuck to the celluloid.
How to Experience This Music Today
If you're looking to get into this era, don't just put it on as background music while you're cleaning the house. It doesn't work that way. It’s too disjointed. You have to treat it like an artifact.
First, find a copy of "Cymbaline" from the Man and the Journey live suites if you can. It gives the song a weight and a theatricality that the studio version lacks. Then, listen to "The Nile Song" on the loudest speakers you own. It will change your perception of what Pink Floyd was capable of.
Actionable Insights for the Floyd Completionist
- Check the Mono Mixes: If you can find the original mono pressings (or digital transfers), "The Nile Song" hits even harder. The stereo spread on the early versions is a bit wonky.
- Watch the Film (With a Caveat): More isn't a "fun" movie. It’s bleak. But seeing how "Green is the Colour" fits into the scenery of the Balearic Islands makes the song much more poignant.
- Trace the Evolution: Listen to "Main Theme" and then immediately play "Echoes" from Meddle. You’ll hear the exact moment where the "Floyd Sound" was codified.
- Don't Overthink It: Some of the tracks on the album, like "Party Sequence," are literally just a few seconds of flutes and percussion. Don't look for deep meaning there. It was just to fill a gap in a scene.
The pink floyd music from the film more represents a band in transition. They were hungry, slightly lost, and willing to try anything. It’s not their "best" album by a long shot, but it might be their most honest one. It captures the sound of four musicians figuring out who they were in real-time, under the pressure of a deadline, with nothing to lose.
If you want to truly know Pink Floyd, you have to spend time in the shadows of this soundtrack. It’s not always comfortable, and it’s definitely not always pretty, but it is essential. Stop looking for the dark side of the moon for a second and look at the harsh light of the Ibiza sun instead. That's where the real story begins.
To get the most out of this era, compare the studio versions on the More album with the live performances captured in the Early Years 1965–1972 box set. The live versions of "Cymbaline" and "Green is the Colour" from 1969 and 1970 are significantly more muscular and exploratory, proving that these songs were the foundation for the sprawling jams that would eventually define the band’s peak years. Look specifically for the "Dramatisation" and "Reverberation" volumes to see how these soundtrack pieces evolved into the stadium-filling epics of the 1970s.