(Bonus) Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (Adrian Maben, 1972) (Roundtable)
Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (Adrian Maben, 1972).
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
This bonus episode the Fantasy/Animation podcast marks a very special instalment with Chris asked to moderate a roundtable celebrating the launch of the new book Music as Classical Reception: Amplifying Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2025), edited by Dr Emily Pillinger (Reader in Classics and Interdisciplinary Humanities at King’s College london) and Dr Miranda Stanyon (Senior Lecturer, English Literary Studies at the University of Melbourne). The book conceptualises the emerging field of classical reception in music, and looks at the convergence between musicality and classical antiquity across a number of ancient and modern case studies. Joining Chris, Emily, and Miranda to discuss the book is Dr Joanna Paul (Senior Lecturer in Classical Studies at the Open University), who reflects on her chapter from the collection titled “Amplification, Reverberation, and Distortion: The Curious Story of Pompeii and Popular Music” that looks at the 1972 part-concert film part-documentary Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (Adrian Maben, 1972). Topics in this special episode include the reverie of Pompeii (famously buried by the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD) and how the film places the spectator within the simmering soundscape; performance, liveness, and the ‘animation’ (by music) of space; amplification, distortion, displacement, and immediacy in the film’s rendition of Pink Floyd’s musicianship and cohesion (and tension) as a band; documentary, reality, and what visual effects discourse can tell us about the Adrian Maben’s layering of different media forms and temporalities; and the strategies by which Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii narrates the fantasy of Pompeii as a site frozen in time.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**
Suggested Readings
Bratus, Alessandro. 2016. “In-between Performance and Mediatization: Authentication and (Re)-Live(d) Concert Experience.” Rock Music Studies 3 no. 1: 41–61.
Hibberd, Sarah, and Miranda Stanyon, eds. 2020. Music and the Sonorous Sublime in European Culture, 1680–1880. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Paul, Joanna. 2025. “Amplification, Reverberation, and Distortion: The Curious Story of Pompeii and Popular Music.” In Music as Classical Reception: Amplifying Antiquity, eds. Emily Pillinger and Miranda Stanyon, 236–256. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pattie, David. 2022. “Planet Floyd: The Evolution of Pink Floyd’s Live Performances.” In The Routledge Handbook of Pink Floyd, eds. Simon Morrison and Chris Hart, 111–125. London: Routledge.
Stanyon, Miranda. 2021. Resounding the Sublime. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
van Tonder, Cobi, Ruoran Yan, and Lamberto Tronchin. 2025. “Pompeii Performance Soundscapes in the Amphitheater, the Grand Theater, and the Odeon.” Heritage 8, no. 6: article 196, available at: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-9408/8/6/196.