Just announced as a special edition, being sold only in Japan (presumably due to licensing/release agreement), is a very interesting package celebrating the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s pair of concerts at Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park, Hakone, Japan – the band’s first in that country. The background to the release is this: an original 16mm film of Atom Heart Mother from the 1971 Hakone Aphrodite shows was recently discovered. A long time was spent digitizing, restoring and remastering, and to mark the 50th anniversary of the ’71 Hakone Aphrodite event, a special edition (a two disc set of a CD and Blu-ray) of Atom Heart Mother will be released on August 4, 2021 in Japan. The Blu-ray disc contains the restored footage of Atom Heart Mother, showing the band on stage performing the song, and travelling around Japan, together with some additional bonus footage of Pink Floyd’s crew, setting up the show, dealing with issues, etc., which hasn’t been seen before. The pack comes with a 60-page photo book with never-seen-before photos, a reproduction programme, flyer, poster and ticket reprint which all looks great! More details can be found at PinkFloyd.jp (https://www.pinkfloyd.jp/), although if you can’t read Japanese you’ll need to use Google Translate or similar. Orders can now be placed through various links found at sonymusicjapan.lnk.to/PF_gjb (https://sonymusicjapan.lnk.to/PF_gjb) including Amazon Japan, HMV, Sony Music Store, and others. We suspect that most, if not all, of these retailers will happily ship the item worldwide, although in certain countries customs duties or import taxes will be levied, so please be aware of this and check before ordering. If you want to see a quick comparison of a short part of the footage, comparing the newly restored film with what many of us will have been familiar with for many years, here’s something that Sony Music Japan have put together:
