Ian Emes, Filmmaker for Pink Floyd and Duran Duran, Dead at 73

Ian Emes, the British artist and film director who worked with acts like Pink Floyd, Duran Duran and Paul and Linda McCartney, has died at the age of 73. A cause of death has not been given.

"Our sincere condolences to his family and friends," Pink Floyd posted on social media following the news.

Emes trained at the Birmingham College of Art, and in 1972 his animated film French Windows, which was set to Pink Floyd's "One of These Days," was played on the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test. Keyboardist Rick Wright saw the film and contacted Emes.

"Pink Floyd called me!" Emes recalled to the Birmingham Post 2010. "They were my gods and they wanted to see me. I thought I had done something wrong initially. I thought they wanted to tell me off. I rented a preview theater in London's Wardour Street and all four of them arrived. We ran the film."

Pink Floyd loved the work and subsequently commissioned Emes to work on animations for "Speak to Me," "Time" and "On the Run" from The Dark Side of the Moon.

Watch Pink Floyd's 'One of These Days' Video

Later in the '70s, Emes created a film to accompany Linda McCartney's song, "The Oriental Nightfish."

"I got pissed on whisky and put the music on as loud as it would go, and lay on my back in the living room and let it wash over me," Emes recalled of that project. "The whisky did indeed help, and I came up with this weird idea where alien forces enter this building where someone who looks like Linda McCartney is playing a Gothic Expressionistic Wurlitzer."

In 1982, Emes worked on a film for Duran Duran's "The Chauffeur."

"I remember that we had given Ian a very tight brief about what we wanted visually, but what he delivered way surpassed all of our expectations," the bands' keyboardist Nick Rhodes said in a tribute post to Emes on Instagram, following his passing. "It was a truly inspired and spellbinding film that added an entirely new dimension to the music."

Watch Duran Duran's 'The Chauffeur' Video

More recently, Emes created a 55-minute film for Pink Floyd's 2019 album, The Endless River.