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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
UKRockFestivals.com
