Released in Brazil, 2003; produced and available from DVDBrazil.com and also available from FloydStuff.com.

A stalwart of many collections of Floyd material on unofficial video tapes in the eighties, picked up at record fairs, from like-minded friends, or in the small ads in collectors publications, the Stamping Ground Festival film, which documented events in the 1970 event, has long been unavailable officially. That is, until now. DVDBrazil are specialists at obtaining licences for rare, out-of-print films, for publication on DVD as a fairly limited run. This is, therefore, an official release!

The Stamping Ground Festival itself was held on 28th June 1970, and was billed as the Dutch Woodstock. The film features curtailed performances from the likes of Al Stewart, Dr John, Family, Marc Bolan, Jefferson Airplane, The Byrds, Santana, and others, alongside Pink Floyd.

It was with some surprise that I first heard of this DVD release - whilst the footage of Pink Floyd was reasonably easy to get hold of, albeit in variable quality, I had no idea that the entire film was still in existance, and in pretty good quality too! The disc itself has a (fairly tacky) picture of the band dominating the cover, that has been "colourised" to make it more eye-catching.

For those who understand such terms, the disc is in NTSC format (basically, US TV format, which many worldwide TVs can cope with), has no region coding (can be played on any DVD player), and runs for 89 minutes (I won't explain that one!).

Firing up the disc gives you some very colourful, suitably "psychedelic" menus. The sound options menu gives you the possibility of a Dolby 5.1 surround track to accompany the film. Now, as it was recorded in 1970, I very much doubt that this is a genuine 5.1 mix - and listening to it shows it to be a pseudo-surround mix. Slight delay (I guess) is used to give the impression. Hmm. The sound overall is very acceptable, but showing its age, as is the picture. A prety clean print has been used for mastering though with little in the way of negative damage or imperfections.

The burning guitar motif is used throughout the menus, which makes them quite lively but a strange image none-the-less, given the bands included on this title.

The first thing you find when playing this, is that the track listing on the back of the box bears no relation to the order songs and performers appear in the film - which is handy.

The event was obviously quite popular, and the director exploits the Woodstock feel with shots of the huge crowd, drug taking, mild nudity, interspersed with some nice if irrelevent shots of Amsterdam canals and the Dutch countryside. The diversity of the event is clear, despite these travelogue shots thrown in!

There are some good shots of the large inflatable pyramids on the lake, during the day, where you can see the naked women inside "walking" them across the water. These pyramids reappear during the Floyd segment, and it is nice to see exactly what they are. It has never been overly clear in the previously available footage...

The final four shots included in this review all come from the Floyd segment of the film. This is obviously the part you are interested in - is the DVD worthy of your pennies, euros, or whatever? Well, let's see.

Things kick off with an almost four minute, dramatically shortened version of Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun. This starts with footage of what looks like a distress flare being let off in the crowd, before cutting to Nick and the gang, at the point in the song that builds to the gong smashes. Lots of nice close ups of the band in action, taking each member in turn, but spending most time with Nick and Roger, naturally.

The song finishes, we see the inflatable pyramids (as mentioned above) - this time at night - and we hear the final section of A Saucerful Of Secrets, lasting around six minutes. More close ups, but this time David gets more coverage. Rick still loiters in the shadows, tinkering with his keyboards, mostly ignored by the cameras.

In places, the sound and picture seem unrelated during this song. This is not a synchronisation problem, on the whole (although a barely perceptible sync issue IS present briefly) but rather a "let's use the nicest bit of film for this bit and not worry too much about the sound" type of problem.

So, a rare piece of footage of the band live in 1970. Very little in-concert footage of the band exists prior to 1987, let alone as early as 1970. Despite its brevity, this is a good thing to have in your collection, although you will need to weigh up if it is worth buying for just ten minutes. (Having said that, if you like some of the other artists then that will sway your decision).

The concert was shot by (UK) Granada TV, for use in the film, and I presume that they shot the whole of the Floyd's performance. It is a mouth watering thought that this might be sitting in a film can somewhere - and surely an impossible dream that we might one day see the whole thing: Astronomy Domine (8:30 mins), Green Is The Colour/Careful... (12 mins), Atom Heart Mother (18:30 mins), Set The Controls (11:30 mins complete!), A Saucerful Of Secrets (19:30 mins complete!), and Interstellar Overdrive (12 mins).