The Body is an innovative scientific documentary film that was directed and produced by Roy Battersby (actress Kate Beckinsale’s Trotskyite stepfather) in 1970. The film’s soundtrack, composed by quirky Scotsman Ron Geesin and Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, was released as Music from the Body. Some of Geesin and Waters’ songs made use of the human body as a sort of musical instrument. Pink Floyd were always big on using the heartbeat, but Music from the Body even used farts. One of the songs is called “More Than Seven Dwarfs In Penis Land.”

In Battersby’s film, internal cameras are used to show different parts of the human anatomy in action. The film was narrated by actor Frank Finlay and Battersby’s fellow Trotsky admirer Vanessa Redgrave.
 

 
“Sea Shell and Stone/Breathe in the Air” plays under the opening credits. If you can’t take the sight of a mother’s breast in a science doc, don’t click play, you’ve been warned, weirdo:

 
Continues after the jump…

 
When they were composing what was ultimately to be called the “Atom Heart Mother” suite with Ron Geesin, Pink Floyd had several working titles, among them “Epic,” “The Amazing Pudding” and David Gilmour’s preferred name, “Theme From an Imaginary Western.”

This June 27, 1970 performance at the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music isn’t the only live record of Pink Floyd playing their 1970 opus with a brass section and choir—they did this a few times—but it’s the first, when the suite was still apparently being called “Epic.”

They finally settled on a title on July 27th, 1970, the date of a BBC radio broadcast with John Peel who needed to call it something. Geesin showed Roger Waters an article in the Evening Standard with the headline “Atom Heart Mother Named,” about a woman with a nuclear-powered pacemaker and they had their album title.

This is certainly the most immediate record of a live “Atom Heart Mother” we have due to it being shot on video and not film to be sync’d up later. And no, this wasn’t shot with a Fisher-Price PixelVision camera (they weren’t on the market at that time) it was most likely recorded on Sony half-inch tape that was looped up on a reel to reel style stationary deck. This would have been the technological height of pro-am video gear at that time, believe it or not.

Starts a little shaky, if not out of tune, but stick with it. Hard to believe fewer than 2000 views on this.