OBSCURED BY VOLCANIC CLOUDS

Photos courtesy of The Rebel Lens Gallery

Imagine Nob’s feelings, that sensitive Afghan hound howling along with David Gilmour’s harmonica in Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii. The band, enigmatic rock stars that they are, get to go hang out on some ruins and crank their amps, and Nob is stuck with the short end of the... knob, recording his moaning in a boring sound studio on the outskirts of Paris, probably with some A&R guy breathing down his neck.

2022 marked the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s landmark concert film Live at Pompeii, but it took until April of 2025 for us to get the film released back to the public screens, this time with an updated 4K restoration and IMAX version. It’s truly a monolithic film, a time capsule of a band about to begin their most fruitful period musically, not to mention a stunning visual achievement in its own right. During the shooting of this eventual masterpiece, a young French cinematographer named Jacques Boumendil shot some candid behind-the-scenes photos while working on the set as a camera operator. Maybe to match the mystique of the space rockers and their crew, Jacques kept these photos to himself for the better part of 50 years. And now, all this time later, these photos become a rarely seen look at the production of a special gig in a truly iconic setting. If you’re a Pink Floyd fan, it would just be embarrassing if you didn’t get Boumendil’s account and check these pics out.