Pink Floyd’s ‘More’ Soundtrack: First Film Score and a Quiet Shift Toward Prog

Pink Floyd’s first proper film score was for Barbet Schroeder’s 1969 movie More — a low-budget, sun-scorched flick about addiction and counterculture. The band had dabbled in incidental music before (the 1968 short The Committee), but More was their first full soundtrack album, written to order and recorded quickly between February and April 1969. It’s a weird, uneven record that doesn’t get the same love as the big four, but it’s essential if you want to hear Floyd leaving behind the spacy acid-rock of A Saucerful of Secrets and groping toward something earthier.

The album splits into two moods. One side is acoustic, pastoral, and folk-tinged — “Green Is the Colour” and “Cymbaline” feel like field recordings from a lost summer, with Waters’ and Gilmour’s voices floating over nylon-string guitars. The other side is heavier: “The Nile Song” is a distorted proto-metal freakout, and “Ibiza Bar” rides a bluesy riff that wouldn’t sound out of place on early Deep Purple. That duality shows the band experimenting with dynamics and structure, pulling away from unstructured jams toward tighter songwriting. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s the sound of four guys learning how to work within a film’s constraints — and stumbling onto the quieter, more cinematic textures they’d perfect on Atom Heart Mother and Meddle.