Restored footage of Pink Floyd’s infamous 1975 Hamilton gig to be screened for its 50th anniversary

On June 28, 1975, Pink Floyd, on their way to being one of the biggest bands in the world ever, played a gig in front of about 52,000 fans at Ivor Wynne Stadium in Hamilton, Ontario. It did not go well.

First, the old Ivor Wynne was in a quiet residential area and the neighbours didn’t take kindly to the all the people, their litter, and the noise. Then the Floyd crowd ripped down the gates and stormed into the stadium. But then it got worse.

This was the last North American date of the Wish You Were Here tour and the band did not want to transport any fireworks they had left over from the tour back to England. The solution? Use them all up. They did and it was biblical, with some of the pyro wrecking the Hamilton Tiger Cats scoreboard. As a result, this, the first major event at Ivor Wynne, was the last for many, many years. It wasn’t until 2012 that the Tragically Hip were permitted to play there.

In the crowd was Jim “Speedy” Kelly, apparently the only guy with a camera. He shot as much as he could on lofi Super 8 film. It remains the only motion picture documentation of that gig. Pink Floyd themselves never captured anything from that 1975 tour. This makes the Ivor Wynne footage extremely, EXTREMELY rare and valuable for Pink Floyd fans.

When he died in 2021, he left that footage to his friend, Rob Gonfors. He embarked on a mission to upscale that grainy Super 8 film to modern 4K standards. He succeeded after contacting a company that specialized in doing this sort of thing with artificial intelligence.

On June 28, that footage will be screened in all its audio and video glory at the Playhouse Cinema in Hamilton, exactly fifty years to the day of the show, and not too far from where Ivor Wynne used to be.

We’ll see the only known surviving footage of the concert in its 4K glory. Rob Gonfor will be there to present the film. I’ll be your host for the afternoon (it’s a 3:30pm start) evening and I’ll lead a Q&A afterwards.

Tickets are available here. It will be historic.