Pink Floyd’s Special Release of ‘Atom Heart Mother’ Features Lost Performance Footage

Pink Floyd‘s 1970 album Atom Heart Mother is getting a rerelease this year, according to an announcement from social media. The album will be released on December 8 on CD. The pièce de résistance is a Blu-Ray DVD of recently uncovered performance footage from Japan’s 1971 Hakone Aphrodite Festival with a behind-the-scenes mini-documentary.

“Originally only released in Japan in 2021,” reads the band’s social media post on X, “the set contains some unique memorabilia–a special photo book containing many rare, never-seen-before photos, reproductions of the pamphlet, poster, concert ticket, and flier distributed at the event.”

The post continued, “The only Floyd footage at Hakone Aphrodite that exists is that of the 16-minute-long suite ‘Atom Heart Mother.‘ The location of the master film and how it was shot had been a mystery for a long time. However, after fifty years, the original 16mm film was discovered in a fan’s garage. The meticulous processes of digitizing, restoring and remastering was undertaken and finally this enhanced video will be released outside of Japan.”

Atom Heart Mother was Pink Floyd’s fifth studio album, and their first to hit No. 1 on the U.K. charts. It was remastered on CD in 1994, and again in 2011. The package will be released on December 8 but can be ordered now on Pink Floyd’s website, Amazon, or through a local record store through Record Store Day.

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The full “Atom Heart Mother” suite is around 25 minutes long, but when the band played it live, they eventually cut it down to 15 by omitting the brass and choir sections while on tour after they caused too many problems. The last time the suite was played live by the entire band was in 1972 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, according to the 2006 book Echoes: The Complete History of Pink Floyd.

Critical reaction to Atom Heart Mother was fairly mixed, but there were some critics who dissed the record completely, including every member of the band. David Gilmour said that the album was “a load of rubbish,” in an issue of Guitar World Presents Pink Floyd from 2002. He continued, “We were at a real down point … I think we were scraping the barrel a bit at that period.”

Similarly, as reported by The Word, Roger Waters once told BBC Radio 1 in 1984, “If somebody said to me now–right–here’s a million pounds, go out and play Atom Heart Mother, I’d say you must be fucking joking.”

Clearly, Pink Floyd has an interesting relationship to this album. Despite his critical remarks, Gilmour performed the suite once more in 2001 as part of the Chelsea Festival with co-composer Ron Geesin, who presented on its history. Now, fans can own another part of that history with the upcoming release.

(Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)