OK, the so-called Ultimate Critical Review of Atom Heart Mother arrived this morning and well, its not actually as disapointing as I thought it would be. Theres a number of annoying things, particularly Krusher's delivery from an autocue, altho I expect he was probably reading off a blackboard, hes annoying after the first 10 minutes, hes unbearable by the end (which is a shame as I once asked him to play some Poison Idea at a Lawnmower Deth gig and he was very nice and did the honours). The few minutes spent on the background of the band is basically a collection of segments from widely seen clips in poor quality (Look Of The Week, Emily Promo and KQED, actually the KQED footage isnt bad but if you want to watch it you might as well get the whole thing). The footage from BBC's Omnibus special is of particularly bad quality, I have an off-air tape a million times better, and whats more its in sync! the footage used here isnt. The ''experts'' interviewed appear to be related to the mad women that appear on ''Its Only TV But I Like It'' that describe the celebrities. Fat Old Sun is given only 5 minutes and Alans Psychedelic Breakfast only 3 minutes of the 94 minute running time (which it turns out includes the extras) whilst If and Summer 68 are completely overlooked! The biggest disapointment is the the one thing they try to sell the DVD on, being the Bath Festival footage, if you spliced it together you might get 2 minutes worth, at a stretch, if youre lucky, and then you'll be even luckier if you can make much of it out! The extras are basically adverts for 2 DVD's, namely the ''Chillout To The Music Of Pink Floyd'' (2 audio tracks under some rather poor CGI, one of which is probably incomplete, unless their version of AHM is meant to be under 4 minutes) and ''The Pink Floyd Chamber Suite'' (which is a video collage). And so to the upside. Ron Geesin is brilliant! witty, incitive and generally pretty fascinating (as any man that collects adjustable spanners should be), its particularly nice to see him in his home studio altho the Radio KAOS bashers will be distraught at the sight of a Fairlight
, thats really about it as upsides go but the Ron pieces are worth seeing, in the ad for Chamber Suite theres a segment of Celestial Voices which sounds beautiful so I think I'm going to pick that up, the only other upside is that at least this time round its not a thinly veiled advertisement for Mostly Autumn. So this may be the ''Ultimate Critical Review'' of Atom Heart Mother, the thing is its the only one and as soon as a group of chimpanzee's decide to get together to make a DVD about the album the makers of this one will very likely have to change its title! So there!
