In January 2020 I attended a music festival. On the face of it, this is not a remarkable statement - it is estimated that in 2019 over a quarter of the UK adult population visited a music festival of one kind or another. But 2020 has been the year without festivals, with virtually no live music happening since March. I was lucky to be able to spend a long weekend in Glasgow at the beginning of the year and to catch three gigs from the twenty-day Celtic Connections festival that takes over the city’s music venues for the month. While we were there, ominous news stories circulated about a new virus from the Far East, and we regarded the city’s Chinese tourists warily.
They were three fine gigs (Fatoumata Diawara; Salsa Celtica and Kokoroko) and allow me to have some happy musical memories from this benighted year. But since then there has been only silence, and in two articles I will try to fill the void by drawing on my recollections of nearly fifty years of festival-going to offer, as the title says, an incomplete and personal history of British music festivals. In this article I will cover the origins of music festivals, and will take the story up to the end of the twentieth century. In a subsequent article I will look at the huge explosion of festivals that has happened since 2000.
What is a music festival? A simple definition could be, any musical event promoted as such. In 2019, over one thousand music events were listed by efestivals.com. They embraced a multitude of musical genres (from classical to heavy rock); timescales (from one day to several months); locations (from farmland to inner-city concert halls) and ticket costs (from free to several hundred pounds). The classic “greenfield” pop festival, of which Glastonbury is the leading example, made up only a small number of the total. To acknowledge the complexity of the term, and to provide some structure to my tale, I will use my own definition:
A number of live music performances, promoted together, that take place over a particular period of time and in a defined geographical area.
Best I can do. But it does allow me to include my experience of such diverse offerings as Glastonbury, Celtic Connections, the BBC Proms, and a host of other outdoor and indoor events.
Inevitably, however, my experience of music festivals is partial, and there are large areas that I have never experienced. Some may feel that this disqualifies me from writing about this topic, but it won’t stop me, I’m afraid. Here are the main things that are outside my personal experience.
The Early Years: The formative years of pop and rock festivals were the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, which was rather before my time – I was eleven at the time of the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967; thirteen in 1969 when Woodstock set the standard for all future festivals, and while I was at least in the right continent when the Isle of Wight festivals of 1968-70 brought festivalling to Britain, I was still no older than fourteen. However, as we will see later, my first experience was pretty early on, in 1972.
Free Festivals: While some of the festivals I have attended have had free admission, I never attended any of the free festivals of the 1970s and 1980s that were associated with the New Age Traveller movement. As we will see, my association with that movement was very peripheral, being confined to a brief encounter with members of the “Peace Convoy” at Glastonbury 1986. I also never attended any of the illegal raves that replaced the free festivals in the early 1990s. And this brings me to another rather fundamental omission…
Drugs: Contrary to typecasting, I am no fan of drugs (alcohol is quite a different matter). None of my festival experiences have been accompanied by drugs, and I do not feel I have missed anything by not indulging. Indeed, as far as I am concerned, drugs could be completely absent from Britain’s music festivals. I have never been offered drugs, no one has attempted to sell me drugs, I’ve never been stopped and searched for drugs, never been inconvenienced by others’ drug taking and never seen anyone made ill by drugs. It seems I’m not the only one; the medical services report from Glastonbury 1986, which was attended by 60,000 people, revealed that the main medical issue treated was…hay fever. Only 22 drug-related medical matters were addressed, and the doctor reported that “our figures suggest a negligible drug problem if its effect on our workload is taken as the sole criterion of its severity”.
Children: Early festivals were not, of course, child friendly, for the simple reason that they were aimed at young people who were barely out of childhood themselves. As time went on, those early attendees grew up and had families, and festivals began to provide facilities for children. Today, many festivals promote themselves on their family-friendliness. However, I never took my children to a festival. This was partly because my wife and I are very wary campers and have always shied away from camping with our children, and partly because, for us, festivals are about the music, and we would not have been able to appreciate the music with children in tow. Hopefully we did not scar our children for life by not taking them to festivals when they were young. They have all been to festivals with their friends in more recent years, and we went to Glastonbury 2013 as a family, with their partners as well.
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| The Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury 1983, awaiting the arrival of headliners UB40 |
The Origins of Music Festivals
The earliest music festivals can be traced back to the eighteenth century, and some contemporary classical music festivals have a very long history. The annual Three Choirs festival that takes place in Worcester, Gloucester and Hereford cathedrals claims to be the oldest music festival in the world, tracing its origins back over three hundred years to 1715. The BBC Proms, which bills itself as “the world’s greatest classical music festival”, is a relative newcomer, dating from 1895. Folk and jazz festivals started to be held in the 1950s. The Newport Jazz festival, held annually in Rhode Island, USA since 1954, claims to have set the mould for subsequent popular music festivals, and Bert Stern’s film of the 1958 festival, Jazz on a Summer’s Day, set the style for future iconic festival films. In Britain, the first Sidmouth folk festival was held in 1955 and the first Beaulieu jazz festival in 1956. Beaulieu provided an early focus for youth culture, and the 1960 event included the first example of festival violence, when a mass fight broke out during a set by those rogueish rabble-rousers Acker Bilk and his Paramount Jazz band.
The first significant pop music festival was the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, held at an agricultural fair ground in California during the “Summer of Love”. It was an early expression of 1960s counter-culture and featured leading artists such as Simon and Garfunkel, Jimi Hendrix, the Who, the Grateful Dead and many others. It was filmed by director D.A. Pennebaker (Monterey Pop), and was a benchmark for Woodstock, which took place two years later. The film shows hippiedom in its infancy; the audience is seated in neat rows of chairs in the circular arena, dressed casually but soberly, with hair that still had a few inches to grow. Beneath the surface, however, the counter-culture was coming to the fore, with a particular brand of LSD, Monterey Purple, circulating widely.
Woodstock was the first major “greenfield” festival, taking place not in Woodstock itself, but on land owned by dairy farmer Max Yasgur near Bethel, New York State, in August 1969. It was conceived as a commercial enterprise and aimed to attract 100,000 music fans, however events quickly ran away from the organisers. An estimated 400,000 people turned up, forcing them to allow those without tickets to attend for free. There was insufficient provision for bad weather, and rain caused major delays to the schedule – Sunday headliner Jimi Hendrix did not get on stage until Monday morning. Woodstock’s iconic status as the apotheosis of 1960s ‘Peace and Love’ derives from the fact that, by some miracle, there was minimal trouble or violence among the crowd, despite the delays, disorder and lack of facilities. Another iconic film (Woodstock, directed by Michael Wadleigh) secured its mythical status. In fact, not all was peace and love; concession stands were burnt down, equipment was stolen, land was defiled and the organisers lost money. Farmer Yasgur turned down requests to hold a follow-up festival in 1970. Attempts by the festival’s founders to revive the spirit of Woodstock in its anniversary years of 1994, 1999 and 2019 were all, in different ways, unsuccessful.
Pop festivals were up and running in Britain by the end of the 1960s. Reading festival claims to be the oldest British popular music festival still in existence, having begun as a successor to the Beaulieu Jazz festival in the early 1960s, before gradually moving towards pop and rock. The Isle of Wight festival was first held in 1968, and the 1969 event, a few weeks after Woodstock and headlined by Bob Dylan, attracted 150,000 people. Despite setbacks such as the violence-marred event at Altamont Speedway in December 1969, headlined by the Rolling Stones, festivals were here to stay on both sides of the Atlantic. Chris Anderton suggests that contemporary music festivals:
“should be regarded as a leisure pursuit and a lifestyle choice; as an opportunity to forge, experience or renew friendships; to express musical preferences and fandom in a public forum; to enjoy the spectacle and excitement of live performances; and to spend a weekend in the company of like-minded people”.
Each festival-goer will have their own specific priorities within this broad menu. The appeal of festivals is such that they have grown into a multi-million pound business that serves a significant portion of the music-loving public. For the rest of this article, and its follow-up, we will focus on music festivals in Britain, and my experiences as a festival-goer of nearly fifty years standing.
The 1970s
By the mid-1970s I was an avid gig attendee, but my experience of music festivals during that decade was limited. Festival-going was still a minority activity; there were a limited number of festivals, and many were outside the mainstream. Large scale festivals were few and far between. The 1970 Isle of Wight festival achieved notoriety when hundreds of thousands of people tore down the fence surrounding the site, forcing the organisers, Woodstock-style, to declare it a free event, and prompting the local council to pass an edict that effectively banned the festival until 2002. A large event in Weeley, Essex, apparently organised by the local Round Table as a fundraiser, was peaceful but poorly organised. Reading festival was effectively the only major greenfield festival to run through the decade.
The first Glastonbury festival was held as a low-key event in 1970, organised by another dairy farmer, Michael Eavis, who hoped the profits would pay off his mortgage. The headliners were Tyrannosaurus Rex, led by Marc Bolan and 2,000 people attended, but the event lost money. In 1971, Eavis was persuaded to lend his land to a small free festival organised by upper-class hippies Andrew Kerr and Arabella Churchill (grand-daughter of Sir Winston), and headlined by Traffic. This event was filmed by Nicholas Roeg as Glastonbury Fayre, which became an archetypal depiction of the counter-cultural hippy movement, concentrating as much on the antics of the audience (including much nudity) and the idealistic views of the organisers as on the music. That idealism was summarised by Andrew Kerr in his vision for the festival:
"It will be a fair in the medieval tradition, embodying the legends of the area, with music, dance, poetry, theatre lights and the opportunities for spontaneous entertainments. There will be no monetary profit - it will be free...The aims are...the conservation of our natural resources; a respect of nature and life; and a spiritual awakening".
12,000 people attended, but the event lost money. The next proper Glastonbury festival did not take place until 1979, and it was the 1980s before it began to grow into today’s behemoth.
The 1970s saw the development of an alternative free festival culture, spurred on by the advent of the ‘New Age Traveller’ movement. Small, free festivals were more numerous than the larger, commercially orientated events. New Age Travellers in the early years were often middle-class and university-educated people who had chosen to adopt an alternative way of life, and made a living by moving around the free festival circuit, working behind the scenes or selling food or home-made goods to attendees. The free festivals were overall tolerated by the authorities during the decade, to the extent that in 1975 the Labour government supplied a site at a disused airfield at Watchfield, Oxfordshire, to enable a festival to take place that in previous years had been held in Windsor Great Park. Free festivals continued throughout the decade and into the 1980s. A fairly small group of sympathetic bands were regular headliners, often performing for free, including Hawkwind, Gong, Here and Now and Ozric Tentacles, with local amateur bands making up the rest of the line-ups. As we will see, the Thatcher government of the 1980s was much more hostile towards the Traveller movement and the free festivals were eventually suppressed.
May own experience of music festivals in the 1970s was much less exotic. I attended two events during the decade that fall under my own definition of a festival. The first was in September 1972, when at the age of 16 I shelled out £1.25 for a ticket to the one-day Melody Maker Poll Winner’s event at the Oval Cricket Ground. It was only the second gig of any nature that I’d been to, and was consequently an unfamiliar experience, made more disorientating by the fact that I had previously been to the Oval on several occasions to watch cricket (including the fifth Test between England and Australia just a few weeks before). I was reassured by the plummy loudspeaker announcements made by Surrey County Cricket Club’s secretary during the day, urging people to keep off the ‘square’. It was the great days of Prog Rock, and Prog bands dominated the line-up, which included Focus, Genesis (with Peter Gabriel in his fox suit), Wishbone Ash and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. In time-honoured fashion, small-scale violence broke out during the set by the only non-Prog band, Argent, who were greeted by a hail of beer cans. For some reason, Wishbone Ash came on after the headliners ELP, and I missed much of their set as I had to get the train home.
My other 1970s festival experience was even more low-key, being a half-day at Stainsby Folk Festival, while on holiday in Derbyshire in 1978. Folk festivals had been quietly growing during the decade, and Stainsby still takes place every year, not much bigger than it was then. I recall the event taking place in a largish marquee in a rural setting. I think there was a ceilidh in the afternoon, and then a set by the headliners, The Tannahill Weavers. Despite being a fan of folk music I have rarely attended a ‘pure’ folk festival since then, preferring more ‘hybrid’ events that include folk artists among more rock-orientated acts.
The 1980s
Commercial festivals slowly became established during the ‘80s. Glastonbury became a (more or less) annual event, growing from 18,000 attendance in 1981 to 50,000 in 1989. Long-running ‘specialist’ festivals such as WOMAD and Monsters of Rock (now Download festival) began in the 1980s. At the same time, greenfield festivals were still few and far between and sometimes struggled to attract sufficient customers. A 1986 report by theFestival Welfare Services organisation listed a total of 110 events in the UK during that year, ranging from the 2nd Annual Magic Mushroom Picnic in Bedfordshre to stadium gigs by the likes of Wham and Queen. Just 35 events of more than one day duration were listed, not all of which were greenfield festivals.
The free festival movement was troubled throughout the decade by government and police persecution, and by the introduction of unsavoury elements into the traveller community, but there were a number of ‘legitimate’ free events put on by local councils and other bodies. I can, with some validity, tell the story of the 1980s from my own experience, and that is what I shall attempt to do.
I went to Glastonbury three times during the decade, in 1983, 1984 and 1986, and witnessed the beginning of its stratospheric expansion. 1983 was the year that the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act was introduced. This required the festival to be licensed by the local council, and tensions over the licence dominated the decade for Michal Eavis and his team. The license limited attendance (in 1983 to 30,000 people) and brought in a long list of requirements for access roads, water supply and hygiene. Despite this, there was still a rough and ready feel to the event. In 1983 and 1984 I travelled down by car, and both years, despite the provision of parking, was forced to abandon the car by the side of a road and walk with my gear to the site. Provision of food and drink was rudimentary compared to today, and I had to bring both with me. Luckily, the weather was good both years (in 1983 I carelessly got severe sunburn), so I did not have to experience the joys of Glastonbury mud. But memories of Glastonbury’s infamous ‘long drop’ toilets will stay with me for ever. At the time, the pits were dug out each year, and were liable to collapse around the edges. One did so in 1984 and I saw a jeep drive up with two large, bearded middle-aged men in wellies (this was before the days of professional stewards and maintenance staff), who proceeded to climb into the pit and dig the walls out with spades. One looked very much like Michael Eavis, but I doubt that his involvement with the running of the festival stretched quite that far! There was a block of wood-fired showers that was both unisex and open plan.
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| Moving Hearts on stage, Glastonbury 1983 |
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| 1983 was a sunny year at Glastonbury |
In the early ‘80s, the number of stages was limited and the music was edgy, even on the main Pyramid stage. In both 1983 and 1984, the Sunday night headliners were artists from Nigeria (King Sunny Ade in 1983 and Fela Kuti in 1984), though the Saturday headliners were popular British ‘new wave’ artists (UB40 and Elvis Costello), both accompanied by the then state-of-the-art laser display. In both years I saw a number of folk artists on the Pyramid stage, including the Chieftains, Moving Hearts, Tom Paxton, Fairport Convention and John Martyn. A marquee stage and a small outdoor acoustic stage were the only alternatives and I did not bother with the non-music activities in the Theatre or Green Field areas. I also don’t remember much about the various political speakers that dotted the programme on the Pyramid stage.
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| In the 1980s, the alternative stages at Glastonbury were small and low-key. This is the Marquee stage in 1983, with Poly Styrene, formerly of punk band X-Ray Spex (second from the left, not including the Buddha), during her Hari Krishna phase |
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| A classic (but uncommon) festival scene |
By 1986, the music had become more mainstream, and consequently less to my taste (there was a classical stage – but you don’t go to Glastonbury for classical music and it did not become a long-term fixture). The festival was bigger and probably had better facilities, but seemed to have less soul and I was not inclined to return, and did not do so until 2013.
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| The Smiths onstage at Glastonbury 1984, in a set curtailed by a stage invasion |
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| Fairport Convention at Glastonbury 1984 (they had also appeared in 1971), warming up for their own Cropredy festival a few weeks later |
1986 was the year that the ‘Peace Convoy’ of New Age Travellers paid an unexpected visit to Glastonbury. The advent of the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher overturned the broadly tolerant official attitude to travellers and their free festivals, and the 1980s saw increasingly prohibitive laws and regulations, spurred on by scare stories in the right-wing press and enforced by sometimes intimidatory police tactics. A particular focus was Stonehenge, which had become the site of an annual free festival around the time of the summer solstice. In 1984, this was attended by around 30,000 people. In 1985, the government banned the Stonehenge festival, but a convoy of Travellers’ vans and buses, dubbed the ‘Peace Convoy’ attempted to reach the site. The convoy was ambushed by police in a field about seven miles from Stonehenge, its vehicles were trashed, 16 travellers were hospitalised and 537 were arrested. The event was shown graphically on prime time TV news programmes and became known as the Battle of the Beanfield.
In June 1986, the Peace Convoy was again confronted by the police at Stoney Cross, Hampshire. There was less violence, but many of the travellers’ vehicles were impounded. The group managed to reach Glastonbury, arriving just before the festival. Michael Eavis allowed them to stay and set up their own informal event on fields behind the festival site. I can recall seeing some of the lurid vehicles that had escaped impounding and travellers canvassing donations from festival-goers to pay the fines to retrieve those that had been confiscated.
Opinions about the travellers and their presence at Glastonbury and other festivals inevitably varied. Some saw the travellers as fundamentally decent individuals who happened to want to live in an alternative way, and who had become vilified by the Tory government and the right-wing press to divert attention from more pressing social and economic problems. The opposing (mainstream) view was that they were anti-social vagabonds, living off benefits and interested only in drink and drugs. The reality, of course, was between the two extremes. While the original 1970s travellers were in the main resourceful and idealistic (and essentially law-abiding), by the mid-1980s they had been joined by economic ‘refugees’ from Thatcherism, and by some, known by other travellers as ‘Crusties’ or ‘Brewheads’, who lived up to the right-wing stereotype. As the decade wore on, Glastonbury continued to provide a home for travellers, but by the end of the decade the movement was becoming overtaken by anti-social elements and hard drugs and further legislation eventually stifled both the traveller lifestyle and the free festival culture that accompanied it.
The other side of the Free Festival coin was the occasional one-off free events put on during the ‘80s by local authorities and other bodies. I attended a few such events organised by the Greater London Council (GLC) in the first half of the decade. At the time, the leader of the Council was Ken Livingstone, a left-winger and accomplished populist. In June 1981 the GLC held a free one-day event titled “It’s only Rock and Royal” in Crystal Palace Park, on the same afternoon as the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, and I went there following working an early shift – the slightly curious choice of headliner was the veteran American band, Spirit. In 1983, the GLC held three events to mark its self-proclaimed ‘Peace Year’ and I went to one in Brockwell Park, Lambeth, held in support of CND, with Madness topping the bill. In 1984, the GLC’s theme was “Jobs for a Change” and I went to an event in the precincts of County Hall itself, and had the thrill of seeing the Smiths for free (I also saw them that year at Glastonbury, in a notoriously curtailed set). I can recall going to a couple of other free events in South London parks around the same time, before leaving London for the North West in 1985. I must admit that, while sympathetic to the political messages underpinning these festivals, watching live music for free was a greater incentive to attend. In 1986, the programme of festivals was brought to a halt by the abolition of the GLC by the Tory government.
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| Appreciative audience members watch the Smiths at County Hall, London, in May 1984, a few weeks before their appearance at Glastonbury. The underpants did not stay on |
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| A one-day free festival at Clapham Common bandstand in 1984, starring African Connection, fronted by Sierra Leone's Abdul Tee-Jay, demonstrating that festivals can be small as well as big |
A very different type of festival that I attended during those years was the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts (now the BBC Proms) held each summer in the Royal Albert Hall. On several occasions I joined the queue for the traditional first-come-first-served standing tickets, priced at a democratic £5 each and saw some fine performances by leading orchestras and soloists.
Finally, my longest-lasting relationship with a music festival began in 1987, when I first attended Fairport Convention’s annual Cropredy festival. Fairport had been my favourite band of the 1970s. They officially disbanded in 1979, but began a series of annual reunions in the Oxfordshire village of Cropredy, where some of the band were living at the time. By the mid-1980s, the band had reformed and the reunions had become a two-day festival – and both continued until put on hold by the 2020 virus. Following my first visit in 1987, I have been to part or all of the festival most years, and would have attended in 2020 if it had taken place. The festival’s 1987 slogan, “Veni, Vidi, Imbibi”, is enshrined in the title of this article.
A person who had attended Cropredy (the festival has had several official titles, but will always be known to regulars as simply ‘Cropredy’) in 1987, and then had not returned until 2019, would find that remarkably little had changed. It has occupied the same site adjacent to the village, and has remained the same size (around 20.000 capacity). Unusually for a festival of this size, it has always had a single stage, and the main arena is set out in the same way each year, with stalls on either side, toilets at the top of the field and a small children’s area looking down on the crowd and the stage. The long bar, open to the elements, is always on the left-hand side as you look at the stage, and there is famously no backstage bar, to encourage artists to mingle with the audience (I saw one day, wobbling arm in arm cheerfully but unsteadily from the bar area, two somewhat addled forty-something ladies – Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span and Jacqui McShee of Pentangle). The festival has always had a symbiotic relationship with the village – many villagers offer their services to the festival, or make some extra money from it. My regular morning routine for at least the past twenty years has been to buy a newspaper from the village store, have a shower in the Cricket Club’s changing room, and then breakfast at the Canoe Club’s headquarters by the canal. The cricket club’s facilities are practically of minor county standard, and the festival must have made a significant contribution to its finances over the years.
Changes from the early years have been incremental. In 2000 the festival expanded to three days – again bucking the trend of other festivals by taking place Thursday – Saturday rather than Friday – Sunday. An informal ‘fringe festival’ has developed in the village, with stalls and local bands playing in the pubs. Most noticeably, the audience, which is still predominantly made up of fans of Fairport Convention, has aged with the band, leading to row upon row of camping chairs where once people would have stood or sat on the grass.
This was a phenomenon that was not anticipated in the 1980s, when festivals were largely the province of the young. The Festival Welfare Services report could state in 1986 that “Festivals are a microcosm of society (with the exception of elderly people)”. Today, older people are avid festival-goers and an issue for festivals such as Cropredy is the extent that they continue to cater for their traditional audience (which, like several former members of the band, are not now all on the right side of the turf), or whether they seek to renew themselves by trying to attract new attendees with a wider range of artists and amenities.
The 1990s
The 1990s saw a shift in the ethos and the organisation of festivals. In the 70s and 80s, festivals were largely still conceived as the descendants of Woodstock, and even mainstream festivals retained echoes of 1960s counter-culture, and were regarded in the media as hotbeds of sex, drugs, dirt and disorder. In the 1990s, festivals shifted futher away from their hippy roots and became more firmly a part of the leisure industry. This move was partly driven by legislation, which forced ever more stringent standards on festivals applying for local authority licences, and effectively killed off the new age traveller and free festival movements, and partly to meet the changing expectations of audiences.
The challenge to keep existing audiences and attract new blood became more acute when those attracted to festivals in the 1970s and 80s settled down and gained careers and families. Festivals began to become family-friendly, with more salubrious facilities and activities for children. As I mentioned earlier, these moves were not sufficient to tempt me to take my own young family to festivals, and consequently my experience of the 1990s was limited to an annual pilgrimage to Cropredy while my wife minded the kids, and a couple of snatched afternoons at local free festivals. The latter were ‘legitimate’ free festivals, supported by local authorities or commercial sponsors. For some years, the WOMAD organisation put on an annual free festival in the somewhat unlikely setting of Morecambe in Lancashire, taking over a number of venues around the town, and in 1993 I saw a couple of fine sets from Remmy Ongala and Edward the Second. Then in 1994, Heineken sponsored a series of free events in a number of towns and cities, and I caught the Christians and Tom Robinson on a Sunday evening in Avenham Park, Preston. It was a shame that I had not gone on the Saturday, as second on the bill were a young and largely unknown band that created quite a stir, and went by the name of Oasis. When I finally did see Oasis live, some twelve years later, it was as one of a crowd of 70,000 in Heaton Park, Manchester.
In the early 1990s, the traveller-associated free festival scene was still active in a small way, but was being overtaken by the ecstasy-fuelled “Rave” scene, which took over the free-festivals’ reputation for noise and disorder and was similarly clamped down on by the Tory government. Matters came to a head in 1992, when a small travellers’ festival was taken over by ravers, leading to a week-long rave at Castlemorton Common, Worcestershire. West Mercia police allowed the event to happen, but the noise and filth generated by an estimated 20,000 ravers gave the government license to act, and the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act effectively finished off both the travellers and the ravers.
The traveller movement was already tainted by the infiltration into the movement of ‘crusties’ and ‘brewheads’, who brought with them hard drugs and drug dealers. In 1990, there was a major confrontation between travellers and security guards at Glastonbury festival, leading to 200 arrests, and the cancellation of the next year’s festival. In 1992 it returned, with a 70,000 capacity, There was further trouble in 1995, when the perimeter fence was torn down by revellers getting in for free, leading to today’s ‘Iron Curtain’ fence. By the end of the decade, the official attendance had grown to 100,000.
The number of festivals increased markedly during the nineties, but remained far short of today’s figure. The professionalization and commercialisation of festivals continued during the decade. Large event promotion firms became established that put on festivals along with concert and tours, such as the American company SFX Entertainment, founded in 1996, and now known as Live Nation Entertainment. Michael Eavis went into partnership with the Mean Fiddler organisation to assist in the running of Glastonbury, despite opposition from other organisers who feared that it would lead to commercial ‘sellout’. Many festivals sought to attract commercial sponsorship. The apotheosis of the new style of festival was V Festival, first held in 1996, that deliberately sought to distance itself from the counter-culture by booking mainstream pop and rock acts and providing high-quality facilities to become “a festival for those who don’t like festivals”. V stood for Virgin, the event being sponsored by Virgin Media.
V Festival was aimed at 16 – 34-year-olds, and sought to regularly renew its audience. Cropredy festival, on the other hand, relied on retaining its core audience, which aged along with the members of Fairport Convention. In 1997, the band celebrated its 30th anniversary, with its members and fans now pushing 50, and the rows of camping chairs spreading across the arena field. In their different ways, V and Cropredy encapsulated the greenfield festival scene in the late 1990s: large versus medium-sized; corporate versus cottage-industry; sponsored versus independent. Twenty years later, V festival was no more; abandoned after Virgin withdrew its sponsorship, while Cropredy was still going strong, with band and fans approaching their 70s. But that is for another article…
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| Growing up with their audience: Fairport Convention at Cropredy 1993 |
Sources Used
Anderton C (2006) (Re)constructing Music Festival Places. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Wales
Aubrey C & Shearlaw J (2004) Glastonbury: An oral history of the music, mud and magic. London: Ebury Press
Christopher D (2003) Mean Fields: New Age Travellers, The English Countryside and Thatcherism. Unpublished PhD Thesis, London School of Economics
McKay G (2015) The Pop Festival: History, Music, Media, Culture. London: Bloomsbury Academic
