The Pink Floyd song Michelangelo Antonioni deemed “too sad”
Pink Floyd were no strangers to perfectionism. In their quest to pioneer progressive rock, it was an instrumental part of the process. Their sprawling compositions and concept albums were meticulously made, but even they found it difficult to live up to the standards Michelangelo Antonioni placed upon them for Zabriskie Point.
It wasn’t as if they were unfamiliar with the art of film composition either. By the time they were recruited for the project, the band had already taken their first steps into the art form, creating scores for Peter Sykes’ 1968 film noir, The Committee and Barbet Schroeder’s 1969 debut, More. But they were yet to encounter a director quite like Antonioni.
According to the group, the Italian filmmaker was simultaneously controlling and uncertain of what he was looking for. They shared their frustrations around the process of working with him in 2003’s Pink Floyd: The Making of ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’, revealing the song that he rejected for being “too sad,” a track that would later find its way onto their magnum opus, The Dark Side of the Moon.
“I think we were all getting a bit frustrated,” Richard Wright explained, “What does he want?” In the midst of his despair, the keyboard player sat down at the piano in the studio while a particularly violent sequence from the film played. Inspiration struck, and he penned a gorgeously haunting piano piece that would simply be titled ‘The Violent Sequence’.
“I was watching it and, probably because I was feeling a bit tired or whatever, I just started the chord sequence,” he recalled, “At the time, I think everyone thought, ‘This is really good.’” They weren’t wrong. The composition Wright created was beautiful, but it still wasn’t quite right for Antonioni.
The director rejected it because he found it too melancholic. “It is beautiful, but it is too sad,” Roger Waters recalled Antonioni responding, “It makes me think of church.” Though the auteur still wasn’t satisfied, Pink Floyd knew that they had to hold onto the song. Just a few years later, it became the lengthiest track to feature on The Dark Side of the Moon.
Infusing it with more of their own progressive rock stylings and some jazz influences, the track became a Pink Floyd staple. Waters penned lyrics for the song that reflected the binary nature of the title, charting war and inequality, and ‘Us and Them’ was born. The piece was released as the second single from the record, a classic born out of rejection.
Listen to the original composition below.
