The ‘More’ album: Pink Floyd’s first film soundtrack and the constraints it forced

Before ‘More’, Pink Floyd’s albums were built around loose concepts and extended live jams. Then director Barbet Schroeder asked them to score a movie about drug addiction and free love on Ibiza. Suddenly the band had to write short, functional pieces that matched specific scenes—no room for the 20-minute drift they’d perfected on A Saucerful of Secrets.

The biggest constraint was time. The band recorded the whole soundtrack in just two weeks at Pye Studios, mostly improvised around the film’s rough cuts. You can hear the rush in tracks like “Green Is the Colour,” a simple folk ballad that was basically written in the control room. But the tight deadlines also pushed them toward economy: “The Nile Song” is one of the heaviest, most direct songs they ever made, with no space for the usual space-rock atmospherics.

More importantly, ‘More’ forced Pink Floyd to think like editors. They couldn’t just jam for fifteen minutes—they had to cut, repeat, and arrange for narrative flow. That discipline carried directly into their next album, Ummagumma, and eventually into the precise construction of The Dark Side of the Moon. The movie’s acoustic-led tracks also gave David Gilmour his first real showcase as a songwriter, shifting the band away from Syd Barrett’s whimsy toward a bluesier, more grounded sound.