A stalwart of many collections of Pink Floyd material on unofficial video tapes in the eighties, the Stamping Ground Festival film, which documented events in the 1970 event, was unavailable officially for many years. A year or so ago, an official Brazilian release appeared of the film, and this month, a remastered version has appeared in Germany, which is a big improvement to the Brazilian version.

The Stamping Ground Festival itself was held on June 28th 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.

On the Floyd front, there is 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 Mason 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 Waters, naturally.

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

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 German remaster has a cover title of "Rock Fieber" - German for "Rock Fever". However, during the film they still use the original typographic samples and also the original title "Stamping Ground".

Doing a direct comparison with the Brazilian version, the overall picture on this edition is much, much more colourful and also a lot sharper. As with the "Live At Pompeii Directors Cut" DVD they cut off the top and the bottom of the picture frame to give the whole thing a pseudo 16:9 feel. To illustrate this, see the screen shot comparisons below. When you look at the Brazilian shots you can see that the original film was shot in the 4:3 screen format.

Like the Brazilian version the audio track is in Dolby Digital stereo too, but here it sounds much, much clearer. Also it seems that they used some filters to eliminate tape hiss and noise. During the interview sequences you can hear German translations from the off.

Finally it has a new cover - very much in the "seventies pop art style"! The DVD can be ordered, for despatch worldwide, through our special link at Amazon.de. Our thanks to Michael Nickel for the information.