‘The Committee’: existential 1960s surrealism soundtracked by a pre-fame Pink Floyd

It took them three attempts to settle on a name, but when they did, Pink Floyd wasted little time in becoming one of their generation’s defining acts. As time progressed, the group became increasingly operatic and cinematic in their songwriting, personas, and stage shows, so it was fitting they got an early taste of the movie business before they became superstars.

Before preemptively heeding the advice of Justin Timberlake’s Sean Parker in The Social Networkby dropping the “the” because it’s cleaner, the band that originated as The Pink Floyd Sound had already dropped a word from its moniker after renaming itself The Pink Floyd.

When they were still carrying that final prefix, the band contributed to the soundtrack of a suitably surreal British noir. In the late 1960s, cinema and music in the United Kingdom were becoming more experimental than ever before, reflecting the sweeping societal and cultural changes that were blowing through the world. Peter Sykes certainly embraced that with The Committee, a monochromatic noir that’s basically 55 minutes of peculiarity.

Manfred Mann lead singer Paul Jones plays the unnamed protagonist, who shares a car with a man who wants to talk about the mundanities of life. A fortuitous bout of engine trouble waylays the small talk, only for the young man to commit vehicular decapitation via the car’s bonnet, only to sew the poor fella’s head back onto his shoulders, which brings him back to life because it’s that kind of late-60s film.

That sets the stage for what’s to come, with the office drone subsequently beckoned to join the titular committee several years down the line. They head off to a country estate, a lot of trippy and hallucinatory stuff goes on, and then he ultimately fucks off home after hitching a ride with a woman.

Conceived when they were still Pink Floyd but released after they’d shortened themselves again and released their first two studio albums, The Committee lives on as a cult curio for several reasons. The first and most obvious is that Pink Floyd contributed to the soundtrack, with one composition later bearing fruit as the progenitor of ‘Careful with That Axe, Eugene’.

The second is that it’s a very difficult movie to track down and get a hold of in its original and unaltered form, whether it’s for a Floyd fanatic or anyone with a vested interest in the intentionally vague and maddening drug-addled experiments Britain’s aspiring auteurs were churning out with increased regularity as the cinema became more psychedelic than ever before.