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This programme contains some strong language. | 0:00:02 | 0:00:05 | |
There are more music festivals these days than you can shake a pair of designer wellies at. | 0:00:10 | 0:00:15 | |
One in ten British adults attended a festival this year. | 0:00:15 | 0:00:19 | |
It's a billion-pound industry. | 0:00:19 | 0:00:20 | |
The latest craze of the media age beamed directly into your homes. | 0:00:20 | 0:00:25 | |
From anarchy and freedom in the '60s, to the mobile phones and cash points of today, | 0:00:27 | 0:00:32 | |
the British festival has been an ever-evolving battleground for society's hopes and ideals. | 0:00:32 | 0:00:39 | |
This is the story of Britain's love affair with the festival. | 0:00:39 | 0:00:44 | |
And how a handful of mavericks, dreamers and drop-outs | 0:00:44 | 0:00:48 | |
felt the calling of the music of rebellion and the wild. | 0:00:48 | 0:00:51 | |
How different generations have sought an alternative | 0:00:51 | 0:00:54 | |
way of life through festivals and how that has changed the British cultural landscape forever. | 0:00:54 | 0:01:00 | |
Ah, the British summer. | 0:01:14 | 0:01:16 | |
Cricket on the village green. | 0:01:16 | 0:01:19 | |
An ice-cream at the pier. | 0:01:19 | 0:01:21 | |
A day at the races and... | 0:01:21 | 0:01:24 | |
MUSIC: "Song 2" by Blur | 0:01:24 | 0:01:29 | |
The music festival has become part and parcel of our summer months. | 0:01:36 | 0:01:42 | |
It's a yearly pilgrimage into the countryside to wallow in mud, music and mayhem. | 0:01:42 | 0:01:48 | |
A youthful rite of passage. | 0:01:48 | 0:01:51 | |
A place where people go to lose themselves and discover each other. | 0:01:51 | 0:01:56 | |
When you arrive at the festival, it's as if your life has now been cut | 0:01:59 | 0:02:05 | |
from the life that you lived. | 0:02:05 | 0:02:08 | |
I think it is freedom. | 0:02:08 | 0:02:10 | |
People are looking for freedom, | 0:02:10 | 0:02:12 | |
even if they're not quite sure what it is. | 0:02:12 | 0:02:14 | |
They are looking for the idea to go into a field | 0:02:14 | 0:02:17 | |
with a group of other people and have a bit of a fire | 0:02:17 | 0:02:20 | |
and dance around to some music and escape the walls. | 0:02:20 | 0:02:23 | |
It's that feeling that you're not alone. It's really important. | 0:02:25 | 0:02:28 | |
And that you're part of a group. | 0:02:28 | 0:02:31 | |
I think it's some sort of spiritual need, maybe, | 0:02:34 | 0:02:37 | |
for people to go and get together and enjoy each other's company | 0:02:37 | 0:02:41 | |
and let a bit of steam off, really. | 0:02:41 | 0:02:44 | |
For many, a festival is about the call of the countryside and getting back to basics. | 0:02:48 | 0:02:53 | |
It's got its own magic. I mean, it's all about being alive. | 0:02:54 | 0:02:58 | |
Back to those memories when you're looking up at the stars | 0:02:58 | 0:03:00 | |
for the first time. | 0:03:00 | 0:03:01 | |
And I think it's as simple as that. | 0:03:01 | 0:03:04 | |
The idea of actually going out into the country and sitting on green fields, | 0:03:04 | 0:03:09 | |
with a lovely sunset, stars in the sky, the moon at night, and all that kind of thing. | 0:03:09 | 0:03:15 | |
There's certain smells like the camp-fire-at-dusk smell. | 0:03:15 | 0:03:19 | |
There's a sort of excitement which comes with it because | 0:03:19 | 0:03:22 | |
it's turning into darkness | 0:03:22 | 0:03:24 | |
and it feels like it could go in any direction at that point. | 0:03:24 | 0:03:29 | |
# Out here in the fields... # | 0:03:29 | 0:03:30 | |
For others, it's about the unifying force of the music. | 0:03:32 | 0:03:35 | |
There is something magical about coming together and having that | 0:03:35 | 0:03:39 | |
sort of transcendent moment where your band that you love | 0:03:39 | 0:03:42 | |
plays a song that you love when you're in the environment | 0:03:42 | 0:03:45 | |
that you love with all these people that suddenly you love, | 0:03:45 | 0:03:48 | |
cos they all love this moment too. | 0:03:48 | 0:03:50 | |
CROWD SINGS: # Na na na-na-na na | 0:03:50 | 0:03:53 | |
# Na-na-na na, hey Jude | 0:03:53 | 0:03:58 | |
# Yeah, yeah, yeah... # | 0:03:58 | 0:04:00 | |
You feel the emotion, in the middle of a song, I mean, | 0:04:03 | 0:04:06 | |
you feel the emotion and you go, "What did I do?" | 0:04:06 | 0:04:10 | |
It's just all over the whole place a mile back. | 0:04:10 | 0:04:13 | |
And you start to feel it like a wave go with you. | 0:04:13 | 0:04:16 | |
But these fundamental forces that draw us to festivals every year are nothing new. | 0:04:21 | 0:04:28 | |
What has seemingly turned into a corporate juggernaut has older, more humble roots. | 0:04:28 | 0:04:34 | |
The two voluntary sufferers of Chipping Campbell | 0:04:34 | 0:04:37 | |
had thoroughly entered into the spirit of festival week. | 0:04:37 | 0:04:40 | |
The idea of a festival goes back into antiquity. | 0:04:40 | 0:04:44 | |
The great cosmic moments, if you like, which occur every year, which are the longest and shortest days, | 0:04:44 | 0:04:50 | |
were always anciently celebrated | 0:04:50 | 0:04:52 | |
up and down the shires and the rest of it, | 0:04:52 | 0:04:55 | |
in fairs, events, gatherings and music and merry-making. | 0:04:55 | 0:04:59 | |
This seems to be as old as man. | 0:04:59 | 0:05:02 | |
There was dancing on the village green. | 0:05:02 | 0:05:05 | |
I feel there's a certain element in the British cultural DNA that | 0:05:05 | 0:05:09 | |
really kind of lends itself to rural gatherings. They are traditional. | 0:05:09 | 0:05:13 | |
They go back almost before time. | 0:05:13 | 0:05:16 | |
Sheep fairs and horse fairs and Michaelmas. | 0:05:16 | 0:05:22 | |
The festival itself has become huge. | 0:05:22 | 0:05:24 | |
The Jazz Festivals, I think, | 0:05:24 | 0:05:27 | |
were definitely among the first, if not the first. | 0:05:27 | 0:05:29 | |
The actual breeding ground of pop festival | 0:05:38 | 0:05:42 | |
would have to be jazz festival, because at jazz festival you have | 0:05:42 | 0:05:46 | |
the complete freedom of alternative culture, and jazz, of course, | 0:05:46 | 0:05:51 | |
has been the sound of bohemia since 1920. | 0:05:51 | 0:05:55 | |
A young generation was emerging from the austerity of post-war Britain, | 0:05:59 | 0:06:03 | |
desperate to let its hair down and get its knees up. | 0:06:03 | 0:06:07 | |
In search of an identity and a cause, | 0:06:07 | 0:06:10 | |
jazz would be their rallying call as thousands of teenagers gathered | 0:06:10 | 0:06:13 | |
whilst a bewildered establishment looked suspiciously on. | 0:06:13 | 0:06:17 | |
The raucous, gay, sad music of a generation more closely scrutinised than young people have ever been. | 0:06:17 | 0:06:23 | |
This is a cross section of the young - students, office workers, | 0:06:23 | 0:06:27 | |
shop girls, apprentices enwrapped by rhythms that separate them from the old. | 0:06:27 | 0:06:32 | |
Or are they so separate, so different from the way young people have always been? | 0:06:32 | 0:06:36 | |
Certainly, they mature earlier physically, which creates problems. | 0:06:36 | 0:06:40 | |
You go into a jazz festival, you can jump up and down as much as you like, | 0:06:40 | 0:06:45 | |
and you can drink as much as you like without getting arrested. | 0:06:45 | 0:06:49 | |
All you do is fall on the floor, fall on the grass! | 0:06:49 | 0:06:51 | |
Freedom. | 0:06:56 | 0:06:57 | |
Freedom for the individual. | 0:06:57 | 0:07:00 | |
And... | 0:07:00 | 0:07:02 | |
there wasn't much about after the war. | 0:07:02 | 0:07:05 | |
When the first festivals started happening, | 0:07:05 | 0:07:08 | |
rationing was still in place - food rationing, petrol rationing. | 0:07:08 | 0:07:12 | |
You tend to forget this. | 0:07:12 | 0:07:15 | |
You know, the young people that had grown up during the war | 0:07:15 | 0:07:20 | |
had had a pretty frightening time. | 0:07:20 | 0:07:23 | |
This new generation in search of a taste of freedom | 0:07:27 | 0:07:31 | |
initially gathered in the nation's dance halls. | 0:07:31 | 0:07:34 | |
But their hunger for an escape from convention | 0:07:34 | 0:07:37 | |
led them out into the country in search of something different, | 0:07:37 | 0:07:40 | |
even a young Rod Stewart. | 0:07:40 | 0:07:43 | |
You couldn't have a rave-up in a dance hall. | 0:07:44 | 0:07:48 | |
You had to walk across the floor and ask a girl to have a waltz or something. | 0:07:48 | 0:07:52 | |
But if you were in a field, | 0:07:52 | 0:07:55 | |
you felt free. | 0:07:55 | 0:07:57 | |
The lawns of Palace House were given over to the sixth Beaulieu Jazz Festival. | 0:08:00 | 0:08:05 | |
It's the event at which the fans forget the conventional life, let themselves go and dress like crazy. | 0:08:05 | 0:08:11 | |
In 1956, an aristocrat by the name of Lord Montague | 0:08:14 | 0:08:19 | |
began to put on a yearly jazz festival at his home in Hampshire. | 0:08:19 | 0:08:24 | |
He had the facility of doing what he wanted to do at his own estate - | 0:08:24 | 0:08:27 | |
no neighbours with their innocence and so on. | 0:08:27 | 0:08:30 | |
And he fancied having a jazz do, | 0:08:30 | 0:08:32 | |
and he would have the ability of doing it. | 0:08:32 | 0:08:35 | |
And it was just a larger jazz concert. | 0:08:35 | 0:08:39 | |
They were a bit like the art-school dance taken to the country, | 0:08:39 | 0:08:44 | |
and people would dress weird. | 0:08:44 | 0:08:45 | |
It was the Chelsea arts ball decanted into a meadow. | 0:08:45 | 0:08:48 | |
It kind of shocked the locals and upset the sheep. | 0:08:48 | 0:08:51 | |
It became very, very successful. | 0:08:51 | 0:08:53 | |
And, sadly, sort of petered out | 0:08:53 | 0:08:57 | |
because of the inability of certain people to behave themselves | 0:08:57 | 0:09:02 | |
when they got a few pints into them. | 0:09:02 | 0:09:05 | |
In 1960, a mixture of youthful overenthusiasm, tribalism and cider | 0:09:07 | 0:09:13 | |
caused what would become known as the Battle of Beaulieu. | 0:09:13 | 0:09:16 | |
Britain was about to catch its first glimpse | 0:09:16 | 0:09:19 | |
of the anarchic potential of festival culture. | 0:09:19 | 0:09:22 | |
The point about the battle, if there was a battle, a genuine battle, | 0:09:23 | 0:09:28 | |
in Beaulieu, was between so-called trad fans and modern-jazz fans. | 0:09:28 | 0:09:32 | |
But the theory was that the Acker Bilk fans got annoyed cos a modern-jazz band was on, | 0:09:32 | 0:09:36 | |
and maybe they expected Acker to be on earlier, and he wasn't, or no-one told them. | 0:09:36 | 0:09:41 | |
Maybe they didn't know Acker was on later. | 0:09:41 | 0:09:43 | |
And they pushed and shoved, and they knocked down a television tower, a tower | 0:09:43 | 0:09:47 | |
holding lights for the television people filming it, you see? | 0:09:47 | 0:09:50 | |
What damage, in fact, do you think was done to BBC equipment? | 0:09:50 | 0:09:53 | |
-We've lost something like seven or eight microphones. -Just stolen? | 0:09:53 | 0:09:58 | |
Vanished overnight, virtually. | 0:09:58 | 0:10:00 | |
Where they are, well, goodness only knows. | 0:10:00 | 0:10:03 | |
It really become quite impossible to go on satisfactorily broadcasting? | 0:10:03 | 0:10:06 | |
We had to come off the air five minutes early. | 0:10:06 | 0:10:09 | |
The Battle of Beaulieu, we called it. | 0:10:11 | 0:10:13 | |
And they all rushed the stage at one time and | 0:10:13 | 0:10:17 | |
got on a piano to get up onto the roof. | 0:10:17 | 0:10:19 | |
And the piano collapsed. | 0:10:19 | 0:10:22 | |
People were trying to lift it up, to get it level. | 0:10:22 | 0:10:25 | |
I said, "No, leave it, leave it, it's all right. I can manage like this." | 0:10:25 | 0:10:29 | |
So they eventually got it up with some bloke underneath it | 0:10:29 | 0:10:32 | |
with a couple of cracked ribs or something. | 0:10:32 | 0:10:34 | |
Lord Montague said to me, "Play them the blues to calm them down." | 0:10:34 | 0:10:39 | |
That wasn't going to do any good, but we played them blues. | 0:10:39 | 0:10:42 | |
It didn't make any difference. They were still leaping about the place. | 0:10:42 | 0:10:45 | |
I think you always have to remember that the Brits have always been | 0:10:45 | 0:10:51 | |
very strong on gangs. | 0:10:51 | 0:10:53 | |
One of the things I think festivals provided | 0:10:53 | 0:10:55 | |
was a chance for those people to met, the people in the gang. | 0:10:55 | 0:10:58 | |
It was just young people... | 0:10:58 | 0:11:00 | |
..going through a mild form of protest, basically, | 0:11:02 | 0:11:05 | |
that "We want our world". | 0:11:05 | 0:11:07 | |
# Oh when the saints | 0:11:09 | 0:11:10 | |
# Go marching in... # | 0:11:10 | 0:11:12 | |
While these two jazz tribes skirmished, a more serious political movement was gathering pace | 0:11:12 | 0:11:18 | |
as an increasingly politicised British youth took to the streets | 0:11:18 | 0:11:22 | |
in the early Sixties. | 0:11:22 | 0:11:23 | |
# Ban the bomb! Ban the bomb! Ban the bomb! Ban the bomb! # | 0:11:26 | 0:11:30 | |
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marches, the Ban the Bomb marches, as they became dubbed, | 0:11:30 | 0:11:35 | |
they again were a bunch of kids going out for a weekend, | 0:11:35 | 0:11:39 | |
unsupervised, in the country, | 0:11:39 | 0:11:42 | |
but rather than partying they were saving the world. | 0:11:42 | 0:11:48 | |
We went on those marches because | 0:11:48 | 0:11:52 | |
they were huge social gatherings - | 0:11:52 | 0:11:56 | |
admittedly, all in a long queue. | 0:11:56 | 0:11:58 | |
But they were gatherings of people of the same mind who were | 0:11:58 | 0:12:03 | |
pretty determined that this was not going to go forward. | 0:12:03 | 0:12:08 | |
They were a festival on the march. | 0:12:08 | 0:12:11 | |
We marched from Aldermaston to London. | 0:12:12 | 0:12:15 | |
They were festivals of singing, they were festivals of idea, | 0:12:15 | 0:12:19 | |
they were a march for freedom. | 0:12:19 | 0:12:22 | |
The heady mix of youth, politics and music were | 0:12:26 | 0:12:29 | |
combining to create the rumblings of Britain's first countercultures. | 0:12:29 | 0:12:33 | |
But as the Sixties were revolving, so was a generation's musical taste, and nowhere was this more apparent | 0:12:42 | 0:12:49 | |
than at the National Jazz & Blues Festivals during the mid-Sixties. | 0:12:49 | 0:12:54 | |
It had its own earthy kind of feel, if you like, and the music was from a very broad church. | 0:12:54 | 0:13:00 | |
You had to be semiconscious not to realise that something was | 0:13:00 | 0:13:06 | |
changing, something was afoot. | 0:13:06 | 0:13:08 | |
There was an awful lot going on in the Sixties. I mean, | 0:13:10 | 0:13:14 | |
it was such a time of development, of change. | 0:13:14 | 0:13:17 | |
The jazz and the folk music was getting left behind. | 0:13:17 | 0:13:21 | |
Everything was sort of switching around. | 0:13:21 | 0:13:24 | |
It's interesting to see how you just look at how the bills changed, | 0:13:24 | 0:13:28 | |
you see how they sort of drifted from being jazz into jazz | 0:13:28 | 0:13:31 | |
and blues into being blues and into blues and rock and then into blues and rock and psychedelia. | 0:13:31 | 0:13:37 | |
But it wasn't just the music that was changing. | 0:13:39 | 0:13:42 | |
By 1967, duffel coats were being replaced by beads. | 0:13:42 | 0:13:46 | |
Pipes were out, flowers were in. | 0:13:46 | 0:13:48 | |
This was the Summer of Love, and the birth of the hippy was upon us. | 0:13:48 | 0:13:53 | |
The actual Summer of Love, being '67, | 0:13:53 | 0:13:56 | |
was probably when we in the bohemian world had finally married | 0:13:56 | 0:14:03 | |
popular song with folk music and revolutionary ideas. | 0:14:03 | 0:14:07 | |
The Flower People have their own taste in music, and their favourite | 0:14:10 | 0:14:15 | |
performers are not necessarily big names in the pop charts. | 0:14:15 | 0:14:19 | |
For them, the highlight of this festival | 0:14:19 | 0:14:22 | |
was a relatively unknown singer called Arthur Brown. | 0:14:22 | 0:14:25 | |
The hippy thing was, | 0:14:25 | 0:14:27 | |
particularly in the beginning, a movement towards innocence, towards | 0:14:27 | 0:14:32 | |
not feeling bound by duty, feeling that perhaps fun was a good element of life | 0:14:32 | 0:14:39 | |
and that maybe that was a better judge | 0:14:39 | 0:14:43 | |
than correctness or duty or anything else. | 0:14:43 | 0:14:46 | |
-Would you call yourself a hippy? -Yes. | 0:14:46 | 0:14:51 | |
Would you claim Arthur Brown for your own. | 0:14:51 | 0:14:54 | |
I mean do you think he's one of you? | 0:14:54 | 0:14:56 | |
Most definitely, yes. Yes. | 0:14:56 | 0:14:58 | |
Um, he seems to speak for the hippies. | 0:14:58 | 0:15:02 | |
# Call out the instigators | 0:15:02 | 0:15:06 | |
# Because there's something in the air...# | 0:15:07 | 0:15:11 | |
It was just kind of a rebellion. | 0:15:11 | 0:15:13 | |
Everybody was still wearing bowler hats in those days, and Britain was very boring. | 0:15:13 | 0:15:17 | |
You know, the national dish was sort of pie and mash with sort of nasty liquor on it, | 0:15:17 | 0:15:22 | |
being served out of things that looked like public toilets. | 0:15:22 | 0:15:26 | |
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore comes along. | 0:15:27 | 0:15:30 | |
Now you can make fun of judges, you can make fun of the Queen and the police. | 0:15:30 | 0:15:34 | |
So it's like Victorian Britain | 0:15:34 | 0:15:37 | |
is finally being dismantled, Queen Victoria has finally gone. | 0:15:37 | 0:15:42 | |
There was a sort of division... | 0:15:42 | 0:15:45 | |
as it were, the pre-war generation, the people who wore suits, | 0:15:45 | 0:15:52 | |
you know, to the people who wear jeans. | 0:15:52 | 0:15:55 | |
MUSIC: "WHITE RABBIT" by Jefferson Airplane | 0:15:55 | 0:15:58 | |
The whole Haight Ashbury scene in San Francisco, I think it spilled over into this country, | 0:15:59 | 0:16:04 | |
and the alternative culture in America | 0:16:04 | 0:16:07 | |
became the popular culture in this country. | 0:16:07 | 0:16:10 | |
The hippy movement started, and LSD, which had been used originally | 0:16:11 | 0:16:17 | |
for creating better war, | 0:16:17 | 0:16:22 | |
became a tool for opening the heart, | 0:16:22 | 0:16:25 | |
the mind, or at least seeing the heart. | 0:16:25 | 0:16:27 | |
Then the music flowed from that place. | 0:16:27 | 0:16:31 | |
# Remember | 0:16:31 | 0:16:35 | |
# What the Dormouse said | 0:16:35 | 0:16:40 | |
# Feed your head | 0:16:40 | 0:16:44 | |
# Feed your head... # | 0:16:44 | 0:16:48 | |
Turn on, tune in, drop out. | 0:16:48 | 0:16:52 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:16:52 | 0:16:56 | |
As the world suddenly changed from monochrome to technicolour, | 0:16:58 | 0:17:02 | |
Peter Jenner and Andrew King decided to put on a series of free concerts in Hyde Park in the late 60s. | 0:17:02 | 0:17:10 | |
With the like of Pink Floyd, Roy Harper and the Rolling Stones, the Hyde Park concerts | 0:17:10 | 0:17:16 | |
became a place for the emerging British counterculture to turn on, tune in and drop out. | 0:17:16 | 0:17:22 | |
# Nobody's got any money in the sun | 0:17:23 | 0:17:26 | |
# Oh, dear me, what a terrible drag... # | 0:17:27 | 0:17:31 | |
There's no question that the Hyde Park concerts | 0:17:31 | 0:17:34 | |
happened because we read about there being concerts in San Francisco, in Golden Gate Park. | 0:17:34 | 0:17:41 | |
Hyde Park was beautiful - right by the Serpentine, | 0:17:41 | 0:17:44 | |
and the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, T. Rex, | 0:17:44 | 0:17:47 | |
endless bands which played there - | 0:17:47 | 0:17:50 | |
and it was a very, very beautiful scene. | 0:17:50 | 0:17:52 | |
# ..All the folkie student population wearing rucksacks... # | 0:17:52 | 0:17:56 | |
That day in the Cockpit at Hyde Park was amazing. | 0:17:56 | 0:18:03 | |
I'd never played to that amount of people before. | 0:18:03 | 0:18:05 | |
There were 10,000 people there, which was amazing for that period. | 0:18:05 | 0:18:10 | |
It was the high noon of our lives. | 0:18:10 | 0:18:13 | |
# ..Than a Chinese wrestler's jockstrap cooked in chip fat | 0:18:13 | 0:18:17 | |
# On a greasy day... # | 0:18:17 | 0:18:19 | |
It was like a mushrooming moment | 0:18:19 | 0:18:22 | |
that went on seemingly forever. | 0:18:22 | 0:18:26 | |
Everything seemed to be bright and in the process of awakening. | 0:18:26 | 0:18:33 | |
If they're free, if they're put on by amateurs, then you don't have security. | 0:18:45 | 0:18:51 | |
You know, you don't have fences round, you don't know how many people are there. | 0:18:51 | 0:18:55 | |
No barriers, no security. | 0:19:00 | 0:19:03 | |
There were about three policemen. | 0:19:05 | 0:19:07 | |
Most of the free festivals were policed by Hell's Angels at the time. | 0:19:07 | 0:19:12 | |
Nobody needed the police force or anything like that. | 0:19:12 | 0:19:15 | |
And everybody looked after it well. | 0:19:15 | 0:19:18 | |
People were there for the afternoon. | 0:19:24 | 0:19:26 | |
They didn't have to be fed, they didn't have to be managed. | 0:19:26 | 0:19:29 | |
Money didn't have to be collected. | 0:19:29 | 0:19:31 | |
The press were climbing up the back of the stage to take pictures, | 0:19:33 | 0:19:36 | |
and the only security you had were Hell's Angels, who chained the press photographers to get them down. | 0:19:36 | 0:19:43 | |
In some of the later festivals, | 0:19:51 | 0:19:53 | |
particularly as it got to the Rolling Stones festival, | 0:19:53 | 0:19:56 | |
there were hundreds of thousands of people, | 0:19:56 | 0:20:00 | |
and you stood on the stage there, at those festivals, and you thought, | 0:20:00 | 0:20:05 | |
"This is unreal." | 0:20:05 | 0:20:08 | |
# Oh, yeah, yeah... # | 0:20:10 | 0:20:12 | |
When I went to the Stones, I went backstage, | 0:20:13 | 0:20:16 | |
and there was almost like a kind of royal garden party going on! | 0:20:16 | 0:20:19 | |
I don't know if there actually were tea and scones, but it felt as though there should be. | 0:20:19 | 0:20:24 | |
And it was incredibly nice, you know? | 0:20:24 | 0:20:27 | |
MUSIC: "I'M YOURS AND I'M HERS" by The Rolling Stones | 0:20:27 | 0:20:29 | |
# She's gotten bigger | 0:20:40 | 0:20:42 | |
# Somebody else's too... # | 0:20:43 | 0:20:47 | |
You know, the Stones show was just amazing. | 0:20:47 | 0:20:51 | |
I mean, there was amazing little kind of visual things, | 0:20:51 | 0:20:54 | |
like an entire oak tree just filled with people all the way up. | 0:20:54 | 0:20:59 | |
It was gorgeous. Nothing really mattered very much. | 0:20:59 | 0:21:03 | |
It was like a gathering of the clans, in a sense. | 0:21:03 | 0:21:06 | |
It was like, in a way, that's an idea of festival being about community | 0:21:07 | 0:21:12 | |
rather than about just going to a big concert in the open air. | 0:21:12 | 0:21:16 | |
This growing sense of a new society was perhaps most apparent | 0:21:25 | 0:21:29 | |
in the States at Woodstock festival in 1969. | 0:21:29 | 0:21:33 | |
The sheer volume of people wanting to attend forced the organisers to declare it a free event. | 0:21:33 | 0:21:40 | |
The government declared it a national disaster. | 0:21:40 | 0:21:43 | |
This template of a free festival would become hugely significant for the British hippies. | 0:21:43 | 0:21:49 | |
# By the time we got to Woodstock | 0:21:51 | 0:21:55 | |
# We were half a million strong | 0:21:55 | 0:22:00 | |
# And everywhere there was song... # | 0:22:00 | 0:22:03 | |
Definitely, Woodstock changed a lot of things. | 0:22:03 | 0:22:06 | |
There was a school of thought, which was | 0:22:06 | 0:22:09 | |
give the music to the people free | 0:22:09 | 0:22:11 | |
and sell the records afterwards in the shops. | 0:22:11 | 0:22:15 | |
Why charge young people who can't really afford it to hear something | 0:22:15 | 0:22:20 | |
that is of their own generation being generated by themselves? | 0:22:20 | 0:22:28 | |
Why charge them money to do it? | 0:22:28 | 0:22:30 | |
# ..We are stardust... # | 0:22:32 | 0:22:35 | |
The thing I think that we Brits learned from | 0:22:35 | 0:22:38 | |
first Monterey and later Woodstock is that all things were possible. | 0:22:38 | 0:22:42 | |
That gave the business big ideas, but it also brought, | 0:22:42 | 0:22:47 | |
it brought the very best of the rock'n'roll of the period | 0:22:47 | 0:22:52 | |
to an awful lot of people. | 0:22:52 | 0:22:53 | |
# Once upon a time You dressed so fine | 0:23:04 | 0:23:07 | |
# Threw the bums a dime in your prime | 0:23:07 | 0:23:10 | |
# Didn't you? # | 0:23:10 | 0:23:13 | |
Whilst free music was a lovely idea, the commercial potential | 0:23:15 | 0:23:19 | |
of festival culture was becoming increasingly apparent. | 0:23:19 | 0:23:23 | |
# ..You used to | 0:23:24 | 0:23:27 | |
# Laugh about... # | 0:23:27 | 0:23:28 | |
As Woodstock was unfolding, a group of young entrepreneurs from | 0:23:28 | 0:23:31 | |
the Isle of Wight were attempting to produce a commercial festival | 0:23:31 | 0:23:35 | |
that would be its British rival. | 0:23:35 | 0:23:37 | |
# Now you don't seem so proud... # | 0:23:39 | 0:23:41 | |
Our aim was to be business-like and put on a first-class event that | 0:23:41 | 0:23:46 | |
people would enjoy and that we could make money out of, | 0:23:46 | 0:23:49 | |
you know, we could make a living. We weren't looking to exploit it, | 0:23:49 | 0:23:52 | |
we were just trying to do a decent thing, | 0:23:52 | 0:23:54 | |
and we believed that if we could do a decent thing, then next year | 0:23:54 | 0:23:57 | |
people would want to come back and we could do it again and again. | 0:23:57 | 0:24:01 | |
The gigantic, three-day pop festival at Woodside Bay. | 0:24:01 | 0:24:03 | |
It marked the momentary re-appearance of Bob Zimmerman, | 0:24:03 | 0:24:06 | |
alias Dylan, after three years in seclusion. | 0:24:06 | 0:24:09 | |
# How does it feel? # | 0:24:09 | 0:24:11 | |
First, to get Dylan was just amazing. | 0:24:11 | 0:24:13 | |
I mean, it was absolutely staggering that we had that good fortune. | 0:24:13 | 0:24:18 | |
We made an offer that was appealing, | 0:24:18 | 0:24:20 | |
involving a holiday for Dylan and his family and a trip | 0:24:20 | 0:24:25 | |
over on the QE2 and all this sort of thing, and it chimed in with him | 0:24:25 | 0:24:28 | |
feeling that he wanted to get back to work. | 0:24:28 | 0:24:31 | |
And Dylan set sail on the QE2 on 15th August, | 0:24:31 | 0:24:34 | |
which is the Friday of the Woodstock festival. | 0:24:34 | 0:24:38 | |
Dylan should have been at Woodstock. He should have been the number one star at Woodstock. | 0:24:38 | 0:24:43 | |
I've heard it said here today by some of your fans that the new Bob Dylan is a bit of a square. | 0:24:43 | 0:24:48 | |
Is this true? | 0:24:48 | 0:24:49 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:24:49 | 0:24:51 | |
You'll have to ask the fans. | 0:24:51 | 0:24:54 | |
# ..Come on without | 0:24:54 | 0:24:56 | |
# Come on within | 0:24:56 | 0:24:59 | |
# You'll not see nothing like the Mighty Quinn | 0:24:59 | 0:25:03 | |
# Come on without | 0:25:03 | 0:25:07 | |
# Come on within | 0:25:07 | 0:25:09 | |
# You'll not see nothing like the Mighty Quinn | 0:25:09 | 0:25:13 | |
# Whoa, you know, I can do just like the rest | 0:25:13 | 0:25:17 | |
# You know I like my sugar sweet... # | 0:25:17 | 0:25:19 | |
We'd made a name for the Isle of Wight festival | 0:25:19 | 0:25:23 | |
as an international event of absolute supreme stature | 0:25:23 | 0:25:29 | |
by having the biggest name in the counterculture appear. | 0:25:29 | 0:25:35 | |
It was a bit like winning the lottery, almost. | 0:25:35 | 0:25:37 | |
It was that much of a long shot, and it happened. | 0:25:37 | 0:25:41 | |
The Isle of Wight Festival had been a financial success, | 0:25:41 | 0:25:44 | |
and as the Sixties gave way to a new decade, | 0:25:44 | 0:25:47 | |
in 1970 the Foulk brothers aimed for the stars | 0:25:47 | 0:25:52 | |
and managed to book half of them in the process. | 0:25:52 | 0:25:54 | |
An estimated 600,000 people took the ferry to the event of a lifetime. | 0:25:54 | 0:26:01 | |
Arriving for the Isle of Wight, | 0:26:04 | 0:26:07 | |
it was just like everywhere you looked there was | 0:26:07 | 0:26:10 | |
thousands and thousands of young people with backpacks, | 0:26:10 | 0:26:14 | |
sleeping bags, hundreds and hundreds of them just... | 0:26:14 | 0:26:18 | |
moving in waves towards this place. It was amazing. | 0:26:18 | 0:26:23 | |
I remember walking for miles to arrive there and then walking over this hill | 0:26:23 | 0:26:27 | |
and seeing 600,000 people in front of me | 0:26:27 | 0:26:30 | |
and realising all these other people loved the same music as me. | 0:26:30 | 0:26:34 | |
The island cannot cope with the quantity of people. | 0:26:34 | 0:26:36 | |
I mean, whether it's 150 or 50,000 bishops, | 0:26:36 | 0:26:40 | |
it still cannot cope with the quantity. | 0:26:40 | 0:26:43 | |
I want to keep the Isle of Wight the same as it was | 0:26:43 | 0:26:46 | |
when I was born here 75 years ago. | 0:26:46 | 0:26:48 | |
If you have a festival with all the stops pulled out, | 0:26:48 | 0:26:54 | |
kids running about naked, fucking in the bushes and doing every damn thing | 0:26:54 | 0:27:01 | |
that they feel inclined to do, | 0:27:01 | 0:27:04 | |
I don't know if that's particularly good for the body politic. | 0:27:04 | 0:27:08 | |
'Lord Baden-Powell must have been turning in his grave, but the camp fires helped | 0:27:08 | 0:27:12 | |
'many of them to lose their cool, together with the Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation | 0:27:12 | 0:27:16 | |
'throbbing its highly amplified message to the world.' | 0:27:16 | 0:27:19 | |
The Isle of Wight residents must have been terrified. | 0:27:23 | 0:27:26 | |
That's an invading army of 500,000 people. | 0:27:26 | 0:27:29 | |
Somebody might have had the odd flower nicked out of a garden, | 0:27:29 | 0:27:32 | |
a runner bean stolen or something, | 0:27:32 | 0:27:34 | |
but I don't think there was any trouble for the residents at all. | 0:27:34 | 0:27:36 | |
# Take a little dope | 0:27:36 | 0:27:39 | |
# And walk out in the air | 0:27:39 | 0:27:43 | |
# Stars are all connected to the brain... # | 0:27:43 | 0:27:47 | |
Inside the arena, a rippling mass of humanity got its rocks off | 0:27:50 | 0:27:54 | |
to the likes of Miles Davis, The Doors, Joni Mitchell and The Who. | 0:27:54 | 0:28:00 | |
I really wanted to see Jimi Hendrix, you know. | 0:28:24 | 0:28:29 | |
That was why I went there. | 0:28:29 | 0:28:31 | |
And he was absolutely amazing. | 0:28:31 | 0:28:34 | |
Absolutely out of this world. On another planet. | 0:28:34 | 0:28:38 | |
You know, Hendrix... | 0:28:41 | 0:28:42 | |
that was just blistering. | 0:28:42 | 0:28:45 | |
He put stuff together so perfectly off the top of his head, you know? | 0:28:45 | 0:28:50 | |
# Well, I stand up next to a mountain | 0:29:12 | 0:29:15 | |
# I chop it down with the edge of my hand... # | 0:29:15 | 0:29:19 | |
# ..Well, I stand up next to a mountain | 0:29:26 | 0:29:30 | |
# Chop it down with the edge of my hand... # | 0:29:30 | 0:29:33 | |
The bit that I do remember is a firework going up | 0:29:38 | 0:29:41 | |
at the end of Hendrix, when it looked like the stage was on fire, | 0:29:41 | 0:29:44 | |
and it went up into the roof of the stage, | 0:29:44 | 0:29:48 | |
and there was clouds of smoke billowing out. | 0:29:48 | 0:29:51 | |
And somebody's on the mic, saying, | 0:29:51 | 0:29:53 | |
"The stage is on fire, the stage is on fire. | 0:29:53 | 0:29:55 | |
"Can we have a fire appliance here? The stage is on fire." | 0:29:55 | 0:29:59 | |
Sort of this droning voice going on. | 0:29:59 | 0:30:02 | |
And my heart sank at that point. I thought, "Well, this is it. | 0:30:02 | 0:30:05 | |
"The stage is going to burn down. This is the end of it." | 0:30:05 | 0:30:08 | |
# This is the end Beautiful friend... # | 0:30:08 | 0:30:13 | |
Outside the perimeter fence, the number of disgruntled people | 0:30:15 | 0:30:19 | |
unwilling to pay entry was growing by the day. | 0:30:19 | 0:30:22 | |
As makeshift shantytowns emerged, | 0:30:22 | 0:30:25 | |
the area became known as Desolation Row. | 0:30:25 | 0:30:27 | |
Everybody had gone into these trees that were all overgrown | 0:30:29 | 0:30:33 | |
and higgledy-piggledy, and they built themselves little shelters in there. | 0:30:33 | 0:30:38 | |
So you had the place teeming with Hobbits that | 0:30:38 | 0:30:42 | |
were all living in the lane. | 0:30:42 | 0:30:45 | |
And in fact, you had a better view of the stage from the hill | 0:30:46 | 0:30:49 | |
than you did from the enclosure, where you had to pay. | 0:30:49 | 0:30:52 | |
So we put out a flyer about this, then all hell broke loose. | 0:30:52 | 0:30:55 | |
The hippy ideology of free music was about to come face to face | 0:30:58 | 0:31:03 | |
with the commercial reality of the Isle of Wight, | 0:31:03 | 0:31:06 | |
and the fence became a potent symbol of that divide. | 0:31:06 | 0:31:10 | |
You will not be allowed in without a ticket, | 0:31:10 | 0:31:13 | |
so please have a ticket. Have it ready to show the stewards. | 0:31:13 | 0:31:16 | |
There was this anarchic sort of feeling about the whole thing, | 0:31:22 | 0:31:26 | |
where people were saying, "Well, this is a rip-off. | 0:31:26 | 0:31:29 | |
"Tear the walls down. It should be free." | 0:31:29 | 0:31:31 | |
They weren't taking into account that perhaps the whole thing cost a lot of money to put on. | 0:31:31 | 0:31:36 | |
We're coming in the shadow of Woodstock here in 1970, | 0:31:36 | 0:31:39 | |
which had been declared free and had been thought to be an amazingly cool event, | 0:31:39 | 0:31:43 | |
because it was free, and that we were uncool because we weren't free. | 0:31:43 | 0:31:47 | |
So there was that comparison some would make, | 0:31:47 | 0:31:50 | |
including one of the people that spoke from the stage. | 0:31:50 | 0:31:53 | |
I've been to Woodstock, and I dug it very much. | 0:31:53 | 0:31:57 | |
I've been to about ten fucking festivals, and I love music. | 0:31:57 | 0:32:01 | |
I just think one thing - | 0:32:01 | 0:32:03 | |
this festival business is becoming a psychedelic concentration camp! | 0:32:03 | 0:32:08 | |
It was like a sort of a cattle market inside the walls, and then there were | 0:32:19 | 0:32:25 | |
all these French anarchists saying, "Tear down the walls!" | 0:32:25 | 0:32:29 | |
It really was like the barbarians attacking the gate. | 0:32:29 | 0:32:33 | |
It was somewhere between chaos, anarchy and Monty Python. | 0:32:39 | 0:32:44 | |
# No reason to get excited | 0:32:44 | 0:32:47 | |
# The thief he kindly spoke... # | 0:32:47 | 0:32:51 | |
We've got no money for the artists! What are we going to do? | 0:32:51 | 0:32:54 | |
I could see it from the stage. | 0:32:54 | 0:32:56 | |
You'd see it burning in the distance. | 0:32:56 | 0:32:58 | |
You've got to understand, it's, like, half a mile away. | 0:32:58 | 0:33:02 | |
But even when I finished a song, I could hear | 0:33:02 | 0:33:07 | |
the Celtic nations going at it. | 0:33:07 | 0:33:11 | |
I could tell. It was just like Braveheart or something. | 0:33:11 | 0:33:14 | |
On its last day, the festival was declared free, | 0:33:17 | 0:33:20 | |
and despite it being a triumph musically, | 0:33:20 | 0:33:23 | |
many left the Isle of Wight with a sour taste in their mouth. | 0:33:23 | 0:33:27 | |
# All along the watchtower... # | 0:33:27 | 0:33:30 | |
It was in the end destroyed in a sense by the anarchy thing, | 0:33:32 | 0:33:37 | |
and they blew it. In a sense, | 0:33:37 | 0:33:39 | |
the world changed after that. In my mind, | 0:33:39 | 0:33:43 | |
the Isle of Wight was the end of something rather than the beginning of something. | 0:33:43 | 0:33:48 | |
At the end of that festival, I was standing inside, having got inside, | 0:33:48 | 0:33:54 | |
in front of the main stage there in literally about two or three feet | 0:33:54 | 0:33:58 | |
of beer cans and kicking them around and thinking to myself, | 0:33:58 | 0:34:04 | |
"There's got to be a better way of doing a festival than this," | 0:34:04 | 0:34:08 | |
because, basically, no-one was happy. | 0:34:08 | 0:34:10 | |
You know, the bands weren't happy, the management weren't happy, | 0:34:10 | 0:34:13 | |
the people weren't happy, and it was a clash of ideals. | 0:34:13 | 0:34:18 | |
# As gentle times... # | 0:34:45 | 0:34:49 | |
# ..Go rolling... # | 0:34:52 | 0:34:55 | |
As a new era dawned, an aristocratic hippy by the name of Andrew Kerr | 0:34:55 | 0:35:00 | |
had an idea that he hoped would reconnect festivals | 0:35:00 | 0:35:04 | |
with Britain's ancient, more spiritual past. | 0:35:04 | 0:35:07 | |
I was very keen that the thing should be peaceful | 0:35:09 | 0:35:12 | |
and it should be a spiritual revival. That's what I was after. | 0:35:12 | 0:35:18 | |
And because I saw the spirit in the crowd at the Isle of Wight, | 0:35:18 | 0:35:23 | |
let's reproduce it when the money isn't involved with it. | 0:35:23 | 0:35:27 | |
Do you see what I mean? | 0:35:27 | 0:35:29 | |
# Together in the sand... # | 0:35:29 | 0:35:33 | |
I think Andrew Kerr was the first who decided that | 0:35:35 | 0:35:38 | |
this was a sort of place for a gathering on a huge scale, | 0:35:38 | 0:35:42 | |
which should be free to everybody. | 0:35:42 | 0:35:45 | |
If you ever climb the Tor on a misty day and you find yourself | 0:35:45 | 0:35:48 | |
up in the clouds above the rest of the world, islands popping up | 0:35:48 | 0:35:53 | |
out of the sea, as it were, it's an extraordinary sight. | 0:35:53 | 0:35:57 | |
# ..Do send their distant call... # | 0:35:57 | 0:36:02 | |
If ever there was to be a sort of rebirth | 0:36:02 | 0:36:06 | |
of the spiritual nature of Britain, | 0:36:06 | 0:36:09 | |
then it should be at the spiritual heart of the country, in Glastonbury. | 0:36:09 | 0:36:14 | |
Having found the perfect location, it was suggested Andrew get in touch | 0:36:15 | 0:36:20 | |
with a local dairy farmer who had put on a festival at his farm | 0:36:20 | 0:36:24 | |
in Pilton the previous year. | 0:36:24 | 0:36:26 | |
He was a strange hippy, but he was quite a good-looking one, | 0:36:26 | 0:36:31 | |
and he was quite charming, and it didn't take much convincing. | 0:36:31 | 0:36:35 | |
I think we almost immediately got on, and I said, | 0:36:35 | 0:36:40 | |
"Look, I want to put on this festival. | 0:36:40 | 0:36:42 | |
"It's going to be free, all the bands are going to play for nothing, | 0:36:42 | 0:36:45 | |
"and it's going to be absolutely beautiful." | 0:36:45 | 0:36:47 | |
I mean, there was three or four of us that were involved with it, and it was quite a romantic idea. | 0:36:55 | 0:37:00 | |
Basically, Arabella came into some money, | 0:37:00 | 0:37:03 | |
and she virtually paid for it, | 0:37:03 | 0:37:05 | |
so the three of us, I suppose, financed it, really. | 0:37:05 | 0:37:09 | |
So it wasn't really free, it was just free | 0:37:09 | 0:37:12 | |
to the people that came to it. | 0:37:12 | 0:37:16 | |
And they really believed that they were going to change the world. | 0:37:19 | 0:37:26 | |
But they were pretty stoned, though, that's the thing. | 0:37:26 | 0:37:29 | |
I mentioned wandering around through the surrounding | 0:37:29 | 0:37:32 | |
cornfields before, and there's still one or two people doing it. | 0:37:32 | 0:37:36 | |
Probably they're all out of their heads, anyway, tripped out completely. | 0:37:36 | 0:37:40 | |
The thing about Glastonbury Fayre, really the very first one, was it was just fucking magical. | 0:37:40 | 0:37:45 | |
We came past the farm and over and looked down into the valley. | 0:37:50 | 0:37:57 | |
There was the Pyramid Stage, all lit up, | 0:37:57 | 0:38:00 | |
and Traffic just out there playing music. | 0:38:00 | 0:38:04 | |
# Let me in, baby I don't know what you got | 0:38:05 | 0:38:08 | |
# But you'd better take it easy Cos this place is hot | 0:38:08 | 0:38:11 | |
# And I'm so glad we made it | 0:38:11 | 0:38:15 | |
# So glad we made it | 0:38:15 | 0:38:18 | |
# You gotta gimme, gimme, gimme some lovin'... # | 0:38:18 | 0:38:22 | |
It was like, "Wow!" You know? | 0:38:25 | 0:38:28 | |
"Is this for real?" You know? | 0:38:28 | 0:38:29 | |
Cos this is what we wanted. | 0:38:29 | 0:38:31 | |
Turn the bass drum down a bit! | 0:38:40 | 0:38:43 | |
Glastonbury Fayre in 1971 was a free-festival experiment. | 0:38:43 | 0:38:48 | |
It was to be more than just a free concert in a field. | 0:38:48 | 0:38:52 | |
A uniquely British blend of spirituality, LSD and pop culture | 0:38:52 | 0:38:57 | |
combined to create something truly original. | 0:38:57 | 0:39:00 | |
The atmosphere was absolutely chaotic, it was just wonderful, | 0:39:04 | 0:39:07 | |
because there was no security, | 0:39:07 | 0:39:09 | |
there was no backstage or anything like that, no smart caravans | 0:39:09 | 0:39:12 | |
or anything like that. Completely haphazard. | 0:39:12 | 0:39:15 | |
But it worked. | 0:39:15 | 0:39:17 | |
People ring up and say, "Can we come and talk to you? | 0:39:21 | 0:39:24 | |
"We'd like to do such-and-such." | 0:39:24 | 0:39:26 | |
And we had healers and spiritual leaders | 0:39:26 | 0:39:29 | |
and ghost hunters and maze builders and every kind of walk of life. | 0:39:29 | 0:39:36 | |
# ..Something to make you so happy... # | 0:39:36 | 0:39:40 | |
The first Glastonbury Fayre had the most beautiful stage I've ever seen. | 0:39:40 | 0:39:43 | |
It was this pyramid built out of scaffolding and then covered | 0:39:43 | 0:39:46 | |
in polythene sheeting, which reflected the light, | 0:39:46 | 0:39:49 | |
and it was gorgeous. And it was very, very big. | 0:39:49 | 0:39:52 | |
And there were two guys, they had a piece of drain attached | 0:39:57 | 0:40:00 | |
to the scaffolding, and a large iron spike, | 0:40:00 | 0:40:03 | |
which they were about to drive with sledgehammers into the ground. | 0:40:03 | 0:40:07 | |
I suppose to tap in to the convergence of ley lines under the stage. | 0:40:07 | 0:40:12 | |
And one of them looked at the other and said, | 0:40:12 | 0:40:15 | |
"Of course, we might split the earth in half." | 0:40:15 | 0:40:17 | |
And one said, "Do you think so?" And he said, "Mm, maybe, I don't know." | 0:40:17 | 0:40:23 | |
"What the fuck." Then he hit it with a hammer and the earth didn't split in half. | 0:40:23 | 0:40:27 | |
But there was a moment when I thought, "This is going to be really interesting." | 0:40:27 | 0:40:31 | |
Somehow or another, in spite of all that sort of looniness that was going on, | 0:40:34 | 0:40:40 | |
it still happened, which is extraordinary. | 0:40:40 | 0:40:43 | |
# Oh, the heart that keeps on changing... # | 0:40:44 | 0:40:49 | |
Everybody was doing something. And to me, it suddenly clicked, | 0:40:57 | 0:41:03 | |
it was more like the bands that were doing it, all knew each other. | 0:41:03 | 0:41:07 | |
So there was a reason to do it for free. | 0:41:07 | 0:41:10 | |
In the audience there was an American with a cockerel on his shoulder. | 0:41:15 | 0:41:21 | |
He was known as Chicken Man. | 0:41:21 | 0:41:23 | |
And he'd saved it from the slaughterhouse. | 0:41:23 | 0:41:27 | |
I thought a lot of it was very weird. | 0:41:34 | 0:41:36 | |
It looked like a sort of a get together of intergalactic aliens | 0:41:36 | 0:41:41 | |
and sort of really weird looking people. | 0:41:41 | 0:41:45 | |
I wasn't really sure if I was hallucinating or not, | 0:41:45 | 0:41:48 | |
or if this was actually what was really there. | 0:41:48 | 0:41:51 | |
# Sometimes when I am feeling as big as the land | 0:41:53 | 0:41:58 | |
# With the velvet hill | 0:41:58 | 0:42:00 | |
# In the small of my back | 0:42:00 | 0:42:02 | |
# And my hands are playing the sand... # | 0:42:02 | 0:42:05 | |
It did have an air of innocence about it. | 0:42:05 | 0:42:09 | |
It had an air of exploration. | 0:42:09 | 0:42:12 | |
Nobody knew what was going to come from it. | 0:42:12 | 0:42:15 | |
It was a combination of ancient Druidism and modern music, | 0:42:15 | 0:42:21 | |
and confronting the modern world. | 0:42:21 | 0:42:24 | |
# ..Sometimes when I am feeling... # | 0:42:27 | 0:42:31 | |
Like any other family, the hippies can occasionally be seen taking afternoon tea. | 0:42:31 | 0:42:35 | |
The sandwiches and fruit cake are on offer most afternoons | 0:42:35 | 0:42:39 | |
at the home of Miss Christine, a determined lady of over 80. | 0:42:39 | 0:42:43 | |
She lives in Glastonbury and is a staunch defender of the hippies. | 0:42:43 | 0:42:47 | |
She feeds them, has them to stay and encourages them to take baths. | 0:42:47 | 0:42:51 | |
The village people were sort of very broad-minded, I think, | 0:42:51 | 0:42:57 | |
looking back at it now. | 0:42:57 | 0:42:58 | |
There were people walking about nude with top hats on | 0:42:58 | 0:43:03 | |
and knocking on people's doors in the village. | 0:43:03 | 0:43:07 | |
Really, it was quite horrendous. | 0:43:07 | 0:43:09 | |
But they did think it was funny. | 0:43:09 | 0:43:12 | |
It would be very nice to see, not just Glastonbury Fayre happen, | 0:43:12 | 0:43:17 | |
but lots of small festivals happening | 0:43:17 | 0:43:19 | |
with the same motive. You see, we can't tell | 0:43:19 | 0:43:24 | |
what good will come out of it until we try it. | 0:43:24 | 0:43:28 | |
At Glastonbury Fayre, some people felt they had found something special, | 0:43:31 | 0:43:36 | |
a glimpse of an entirely different kind of life. | 0:43:36 | 0:43:39 | |
# Please don't dominate the rap, Jack | 0:43:49 | 0:43:53 | |
# If you've got nothing new to say | 0:43:53 | 0:43:57 | |
# If you please, go back up to check | 0:43:57 | 0:44:01 | |
# This train's going to run today. # | 0:44:01 | 0:44:04 | |
Elsewhere in Britain, commercial festivals such as Wheeley and Bickershaw, | 0:44:05 | 0:44:09 | |
were attempting to pick up | 0:44:09 | 0:44:11 | |
where the Isle of Wight and Bath festivals had left off. | 0:44:11 | 0:44:15 | |
Bickershaw, Lancashire, a mining village on the road to Wigan Pier. | 0:44:15 | 0:44:18 | |
1,500 people, a pit, a pub and not much else. | 0:44:18 | 0:44:23 | |
A place where nothing ever happens. | 0:44:23 | 0:44:25 | |
Until May 1972, when the Bickershaw Pop Festival made it a mecca. | 0:44:25 | 0:44:30 | |
In terms of the festival then, are you going to be ready on time? | 0:44:33 | 0:44:36 | |
It looks as though you're not. | 0:44:36 | 0:44:37 | |
Well, what would convince you that we were? | 0:44:37 | 0:44:41 | |
If the fences were up, the stage was up, everything was ready. | 0:44:41 | 0:44:44 | |
What fences are not up? | 0:44:44 | 0:44:45 | |
They're gates that are not up. Fences are up. | 0:44:48 | 0:44:53 | |
The accusation that this isn't ready, if you don't know anything at all about festivals, | 0:44:53 | 0:44:57 | |
then you might make that statement. | 0:44:57 | 0:44:59 | |
If you know anything about festivals, then you'd say we're about up to date. | 0:44:59 | 0:45:03 | |
# My younger brother | 0:45:03 | 0:45:06 | |
# went to jail... # | 0:45:06 | 0:45:09 | |
But something wasn't quite right. | 0:45:09 | 0:45:11 | |
Amateur businessmen, poor organisation and often horrendous weather, | 0:45:15 | 0:45:20 | |
meant that commercial ventures like Bickershaw never quite established themselves in the early '70s. | 0:45:20 | 0:45:25 | |
But for those that had seen the light at the free-spirited | 0:45:30 | 0:45:33 | |
Glastonbury Fayre, festivals were now becoming less about entertainment, | 0:45:33 | 0:45:38 | |
and more about an alternative nomadic way of life. | 0:45:38 | 0:45:43 | |
The Sixties' hippy dream of a new society was becoming an alternative | 0:45:48 | 0:45:52 | |
reality for a growing number of people, who began to make a new life on the road. | 0:45:52 | 0:45:58 | |
# Leaves are falling all around | 0:46:03 | 0:46:05 | |
# Time I was on my way... | 0:46:07 | 0:46:10 | |
# Thanks to you, I'm much obliged | 0:46:13 | 0:46:15 | |
# For such a pleasant stay | 0:46:17 | 0:46:19 | |
# But now it's time for me to go... # | 0:46:22 | 0:46:26 | |
I think as a result of Glastonbury Fayre in 1971, | 0:46:27 | 0:46:32 | |
a great many people then thought that they had experienced some sort of life-changing situation, | 0:46:32 | 0:46:39 | |
and it prompted them to want to go and set up on their own, | 0:46:39 | 0:46:44 | |
and take over, if they could, common spaces, | 0:46:44 | 0:46:46 | |
what was left of them, and really rekindle the idea of communality, if you like. | 0:46:46 | 0:46:54 | |
I think that was the beginning of | 0:47:01 | 0:47:02 | |
the formation of alternative communities. | 0:47:02 | 0:47:07 | |
Certainly in the West Country, around Glastonbury, you found people | 0:47:07 | 0:47:12 | |
trying to live in yurts or living in caravans. | 0:47:12 | 0:47:16 | |
People starting to follow the festival trail. | 0:47:16 | 0:47:19 | |
Free festivals was a lifestyle thing that we wanted to develop | 0:47:19 | 0:47:25 | |
a way of living out of, rather than just the music thing. | 0:47:25 | 0:47:30 | |
We were like a whole generation on the move, all these people who, | 0:47:39 | 0:47:43 | |
you know, a lot of people would travel from festival to festival. | 0:47:43 | 0:47:47 | |
They basically lived at festivals. | 0:47:47 | 0:47:50 | |
They'd stay on afterwards and clean up after them. | 0:47:50 | 0:47:53 | |
As far as free festivals were concerned, we were the travelling festival. | 0:47:56 | 0:48:01 | |
When we turned up with vehicles and our families, got our stalls out and put them up, you know, | 0:48:01 | 0:48:07 | |
we traded with the local population. | 0:48:07 | 0:48:11 | |
A whole group of like-minded people who would try | 0:48:11 | 0:48:16 | |
to make a living at festivals by making stuff and selling things. | 0:48:16 | 0:48:22 | |
I remember walking in to one, and within 25 minutes I was in charge | 0:48:22 | 0:48:27 | |
of an organic stall. | 0:48:27 | 0:48:31 | |
And the guy didn't come back for two hours. | 0:48:31 | 0:48:34 | |
So I mean, you know, it was like that. | 0:48:34 | 0:48:36 | |
You just didn't have a... | 0:48:36 | 0:48:38 | |
Like, "I'm playing music." | 0:48:38 | 0:48:40 | |
You were part of all of it. | 0:48:40 | 0:48:42 | |
As the free festival movement gathered momentum in the early '70s, | 0:48:49 | 0:48:54 | |
this new alternative culture began looking for a spiritual home, and converged for a series of festivals | 0:48:54 | 0:49:01 | |
in the somewhat provocative surroundings of Windsor Great Park. | 0:49:01 | 0:49:05 | |
The spirit there was quite incredible, it really was. | 0:49:05 | 0:49:08 | |
It was just amazing. The whole feeling. | 0:49:08 | 0:49:11 | |
People were there and could hardly | 0:49:11 | 0:49:13 | |
believe this was happening in England. | 0:49:13 | 0:49:15 | |
And what's more, on the Queen's back door step! | 0:49:15 | 0:49:17 | |
I went down there with a couple of mates. We hitched down there with a little old army tent. | 0:49:17 | 0:49:21 | |
Eventually got to Windsor station, and as we left the railway station there was just a line of hippies, | 0:49:21 | 0:49:26 | |
all the way down through the town, off to the Great Park. | 0:49:26 | 0:49:30 | |
And there were joints going backwards and forwards. | 0:49:30 | 0:49:32 | |
You'd take a puff and pass it on. | 0:49:32 | 0:49:34 | |
As we arrived on the Great Park, | 0:49:34 | 0:49:36 | |
there were Hawkwind playing on the grass. It was just... It was like going home. | 0:49:36 | 0:49:40 | |
MUSIC: "Psychedelic Warlords (Disappear In Smoke)" by Hawkwind | 0:49:40 | 0:49:45 | |
# Sick of politicians, harassment and laws | 0:50:02 | 0:50:05 | |
# All we do is get screwed up by other people's flaws... # | 0:50:05 | 0:50:08 | |
At Windsor we had a chap who turned up with a briefcase. | 0:50:08 | 0:50:10 | |
Came up to me and said, "Do you stage manage?" | 0:50:10 | 0:50:13 | |
I said, "No, I'm just doing the lights. I don't know what a stage manager is actually." | 0:50:13 | 0:50:17 | |
And he said, "I've got this to give out." And I was going, "Oh, right." | 0:50:17 | 0:50:22 | |
You could see out across this great swathe of the audience at Windsor. | 0:50:22 | 0:50:26 | |
And I was thinking, hmm. Between numbers I said, "There's a chap here that's got some... | 0:50:26 | 0:50:32 | |
"if anybody would like something to get high on, just come to the front of the stage." | 0:50:32 | 0:50:36 | |
And there was a huge... People started getting up one by one and it just got mad. | 0:50:36 | 0:50:42 | |
We had to withdraw. | 0:50:42 | 0:50:46 | |
The singer pointed out to the crowd there was a drug squad officer walking through the crowd. | 0:50:46 | 0:50:52 | |
Again, we weren't prepared for the level of response. | 0:50:52 | 0:50:55 | |
About 500 people started moving towards this guy, who promptly legged it. | 0:50:55 | 0:51:01 | |
Pulled out his radio - what a giveaway - | 0:51:01 | 0:51:03 | |
Black Mariah pulled up on the road 200 yards away, | 0:51:03 | 0:51:06 | |
and I'd never seen anybody cross 200 yards faster in all my life, with 400 irate hippies chasing him! | 0:51:06 | 0:51:14 | |
I think Windsor set out to be a carnival festival, but also a political statement. | 0:51:14 | 0:51:21 | |
If you want to really get up the nose of the authorities, have a carnival in the Queen's back garden. | 0:51:21 | 0:51:27 | |
It was very funny, very amusing. But as usual, the pawns got hurt. | 0:51:27 | 0:51:32 | |
What had started out as a bit of fun quickly turned sour when, in 1974, | 0:51:34 | 0:51:40 | |
a bemused Government decided they could no longer ignore this growing movement. | 0:51:40 | 0:51:44 | |
Obviously somebody had decided they needed to show the hippies a lesson or two. | 0:51:44 | 0:51:49 | |
NEWSREEL: 'The police were among the fans before most of them knew it. | 0:51:57 | 0:52:01 | |
'When the young people wakened up to what was happening to them, | 0:52:01 | 0:52:05 | |
'most accepted the inevitable and left then. | 0:52:05 | 0:52:07 | |
'But a large minority resisted, first by forming percussion | 0:52:07 | 0:52:11 | |
'groups in front of unappreciative lines of policemen.' | 0:52:11 | 0:52:14 | |
NEWSREEL: 'There have been 1,002 other convictions. | 0:52:21 | 0:52:24 | |
'As a result, both the Berkshire County Council and the Maidenhead | 0:52:24 | 0:52:29 | |
'and Windsor Borough Council, took the view they had a duty | 0:52:29 | 0:52:31 | |
'to take all possible steps to prevent a recurrence of such a deplorable event.' | 0:52:31 | 0:52:36 | |
They moved in at dawn, and they were just waking people up, smashing down tents. | 0:52:42 | 0:52:48 | |
They were pretty angry, I would say. | 0:52:48 | 0:52:51 | |
They wanted to re-establish their authority. | 0:52:51 | 0:52:54 | |
Or perhaps the Queen had said, "Get those squatters out of my garden!" | 0:52:54 | 0:52:59 | |
So what happened after Windsor was that there was a negotiated deal. | 0:52:59 | 0:53:04 | |
It was obvious they realised that they had gone too far. | 0:53:04 | 0:53:07 | |
And they gave us this huge RAF base called Watchfield in 1975. | 0:53:07 | 0:53:12 | |
NEWSREEL: 'Meanwhile, in Watchfield village, Oxfordshire, the locals citizens prepare for a long siege.' | 0:53:12 | 0:53:18 | |
MUSIC: "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath | 0:53:18 | 0:53:22 | |
It's perhaps to be expected that the people of Watchfield, particularly | 0:53:32 | 0:53:36 | |
the older ones, don't like the idea of the festival one little bit. | 0:53:36 | 0:53:40 | |
Well, the general reaction is pure unadulerated shock and disgust. | 0:53:40 | 0:53:44 | |
It was a bit odd to see police wandering around, because | 0:53:49 | 0:53:52 | |
that was part of the deal - we had to have police on site. | 0:53:52 | 0:53:55 | |
I remember once somebody, some naked guy, standing in front of | 0:53:55 | 0:53:59 | |
three policemen, directing a hundred hippies holding hands, dancing around them in an anti-clockwise direction | 0:53:59 | 0:54:06 | |
to sort of take away all their bad vibes. I mean, it was all light-hearted really. | 0:54:06 | 0:54:10 | |
We actually played for something like seven hours that night, and there were maybe 20,000 people. | 0:54:10 | 0:54:16 | |
And they just did not stop. | 0:54:16 | 0:54:18 | |
It was an all-night party right through till dawn, till | 0:54:18 | 0:54:21 | |
the blisters on my fingers got too much to handle. | 0:54:21 | 0:54:25 | |
It felt a bit artificial - | 0:54:25 | 0:54:28 | |
probably because it was. | 0:54:28 | 0:54:30 | |
It didn't... | 0:54:30 | 0:54:31 | |
because it had had this sort of Government sanction and it had been allocated a spot, | 0:54:31 | 0:54:37 | |
this airfield, it didn't have quite the same feeling of spontaneity | 0:54:37 | 0:54:42 | |
as some of the other festivals. It felt a little odd. | 0:54:42 | 0:54:47 | |
At Watchfield, the freaks, mystics and nomads had been given space to do as they pleased. | 0:54:47 | 0:54:53 | |
But it was on the Government's terms, and not a particularly inspiring site. | 0:54:53 | 0:54:57 | |
The search continued for a spiritual home for the free festival movement. | 0:54:57 | 0:55:02 | |
ATMOSPHERIC MUSIC | 0:55:02 | 0:55:06 | |
Stonehenge was a bit of neutral territory. | 0:55:28 | 0:55:32 | |
And in a way that opened it up for the hippies to come and say, "Well, we lay claim to it." | 0:55:32 | 0:55:38 | |
And in a way the establishment couldn't argue with us, because they had no idea what Stonehenge was. | 0:55:38 | 0:55:45 | |
At that time Stonehenge was still just a pile of stones in | 0:55:45 | 0:55:48 | |
the middle of England that no-one actually cared very much about. | 0:55:48 | 0:55:51 | |
It doesn't belong to the Army. It certainly doesn't belong to... | 0:55:54 | 0:55:57 | |
the Ancient Order of Druids dating back to 1907. | 0:55:57 | 0:56:00 | |
It didn't belong to us either. | 0:56:00 | 0:56:02 | |
But we sort of had an Englishman's right to our prehistoric heritage of weirdness. | 0:56:02 | 0:56:07 | |
That's why Stonehenge is so important - it's there! | 0:56:07 | 0:56:11 | |
It's Stonehenge. | 0:56:11 | 0:56:13 | |
It shouldn't be there. What the hell is it?! | 0:56:13 | 0:56:15 | |
And then the sun rose above the horizon, a spark of light. | 0:56:19 | 0:56:23 | |
And I was feeling... I'd been up for about... | 0:56:23 | 0:56:25 | |
36 hours. | 0:56:25 | 0:56:27 | |
And I suddenly came alive. | 0:56:27 | 0:56:29 | |
I suddenly felt really energised. | 0:56:29 | 0:56:31 | |
And there were tears running down me face. | 0:56:31 | 0:56:33 | |
You know, I was completely amazed by the effects. | 0:56:33 | 0:56:36 | |
And everybody around me had these looks of wonder and joy on their faces as the sun came up. | 0:56:36 | 0:56:42 | |
It came a focus for people who were fairly extreme... | 0:56:45 | 0:56:50 | |
in their views. | 0:56:50 | 0:56:52 | |
People who thought that everything should be free, | 0:56:52 | 0:56:55 | |
and that society should be changed entirely. | 0:56:55 | 0:56:58 | |
The whole basis for society should be looked at. | 0:56:58 | 0:57:01 | |
When you're trying to create an alternative society, | 0:57:03 | 0:57:08 | |
you look back to a time when | 0:57:08 | 0:57:10 | |
maybe society wasn't so structured. | 0:57:10 | 0:57:13 | |
There's always been this sort of... | 0:57:13 | 0:57:15 | |
I suppose people harking back to the old days, or some sort of, | 0:57:15 | 0:57:17 | |
you know, trying to get in touch with their culture, do you know what I mean? | 0:57:18 | 0:57:22 | |
Trying to get in touch with something that's a bit older than | 0:57:22 | 0:57:25 | |
Tescos and whatever else is going around. | 0:57:25 | 0:57:29 | |
And I think there was just this general feeling that Stonehenge stood for something. | 0:57:29 | 0:57:33 | |
The Stonehenge festivals in the mid '70s were as much about community as they were about music. | 0:57:37 | 0:57:43 | |
People didn't go to see rock stars, but rather | 0:57:43 | 0:57:47 | |
to restore a spirit of freedom they couldn't find anywhere else. | 0:57:47 | 0:57:51 | |
The free festival movement had finally arrived. | 0:57:51 | 0:57:54 | |
To watch people arrive at Stonehenge Festival, | 0:57:56 | 0:58:00 | |
and to see them a week after they'd been there, to watch the change in their face, to watch | 0:58:00 | 0:58:06 | |
women just become beautiful - do you know what I mean? | 0:58:06 | 0:58:09 | |
And men just become handsome, all the stress and worry just falls off them | 0:58:09 | 0:58:13 | |
and you just see these people, you know, flowering. | 0:58:13 | 0:58:17 | |
I came across a marquee that held about 800 people. | 0:58:20 | 0:58:23 | |
And there was a troupe of Shakespeare players, | 0:58:23 | 0:58:26 | |
and they were just putting on Shakespeare's plays for free. | 0:58:26 | 0:58:29 | |
There were teepees, banners, funny old trucks all painted up. | 0:58:31 | 0:58:35 | |
You know, like marquees, stages, dogs running everywhere, kids running everywhere in packs. | 0:58:37 | 0:58:42 | |
They were really quite amazing events. | 0:58:42 | 0:58:46 | |
It was a very special time. | 0:58:46 | 0:58:49 | |
During the '70s, the free festival movement | 0:59:00 | 0:59:03 | |
had become a serious attempt at creating an alternative way of life. | 0:59:03 | 0:59:07 | |
By the late '70s, the society it had rejected was in meltdown. | 0:59:09 | 0:59:14 | |
A new generation was emerging at festivals such as Donington and Reading. | 0:59:16 | 0:59:22 | |
Wonder and LSD had been replaced by tension and speed. | 0:59:22 | 0:59:27 | |
The tone had shifted. | 0:59:27 | 0:59:29 | |
MUSIC: "If the Kids Are United" by Sham 69 | 0:59:30 | 0:59:34 | |
# So let's all grab and let's all enjoy... | 0:59:39 | 0:59:42 | |
# If the kids are united... # | 0:59:48 | 0:59:51 | |
At Reading Festival, | 0:59:51 | 0:59:53 | |
in the mid- to late Seventies, there was always conflict. | 0:59:53 | 0:59:57 | |
That's when punk kicked off. It just had this energy - this vibrancy. | 0:59:57 | 1:00:00 | |
You knew something was changing. | 1:00:00 | 1:00:02 | |
And that is that counter-culture - stepping in again when... | 1:00:05 | 1:00:10 | |
change isn't coming quick enough for young people. | 1:00:10 | 1:00:13 | |
It really was the same type of people that made | 1:00:13 | 1:00:17 | |
the punk thing that made the hippy thing. | 1:00:17 | 1:00:20 | |
It's a different time, different drug. | 1:00:20 | 1:00:22 | |
As punk and heavy metal erupted into Britain's festivals in | 1:00:31 | 1:00:35 | |
the early 80s, even at a resurgent Glastonbury, hippy idealism was giving way to a more political | 1:00:35 | 1:00:41 | |
festival culture and suddenly everything looked very different. | 1:00:41 | 1:00:47 | |
We'd put a couple of festivals on - in the early 80s - 81 and 82 - | 1:00:53 | 1:00:58 | |
and Andrew and myself went round | 1:00:58 | 1:01:00 | |
to see Michael after the event and said, we're missing a trick here. | 1:01:00 | 1:01:03 | |
What we need really is the banner to rally under. | 1:01:03 | 1:01:07 | |
We were just anti-Tory really. We were on a crusade really to actually take on Maggie | 1:01:11 | 1:01:17 | |
and to fight the oppression, | 1:01:17 | 1:01:21 | |
and it was very effective. | 1:01:21 | 1:01:23 | |
Effectively, Thatcher's government | 1:01:29 | 1:01:32 | |
created from 1982 onwards an exiled population. | 1:01:32 | 1:01:36 | |
There was a culture of resistance that was threaded through | 1:01:36 | 1:01:43 | |
the free festivals, | 1:01:43 | 1:01:45 | |
the miners' strike, the riots in the cities, | 1:01:45 | 1:01:48 | |
they were all part of opposition to Margaret Thatcher. | 1:01:48 | 1:01:52 | |
We came together in that at places like Glastonbury Festival with | 1:01:52 | 1:01:55 | |
a strong Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament support. | 1:01:55 | 1:01:58 | |
So, to oppose nuclear weapons was to oppose Margaret Thatcher. | 1:01:58 | 1:02:01 | |
To do free gigs in fields, | 1:02:01 | 1:02:04 | |
that alone simply was to oppose Margaret Thatcher. | 1:02:04 | 1:02:08 | |
The growth we have seen in this country in the last five years | 1:02:08 | 1:02:13 | |
is the growth of unemployment - the growth of an uncaring society. | 1:02:13 | 1:02:20 | |
At the same time, the true growth... | 1:02:20 | 1:02:23 | |
In the old hippy days, it was all love, peace and flower power and | 1:02:23 | 1:02:26 | |
bells and things and mystics and cosmics - all that sort of thing. | 1:02:26 | 1:02:29 | |
But now it's more politically orientated insomuch as CND | 1:02:29 | 1:02:33 | |
and it's the same sort of concept and ideals sort of filtered through the years. | 1:02:33 | 1:02:39 | |
This has not only been a nation of money-makers and imperialists, | 1:02:40 | 1:02:46 | |
it's been a nation of inventors, of writers, a nation of theatre and | 1:02:46 | 1:02:51 | |
musicians - an alternative nation and it is this alternative nation which I can see in front of me now. | 1:02:51 | 1:02:58 | |
CHEERING | 1:02:58 | 1:03:00 | |
Festivals were reflecting and questioning Thatcher's new Britain. | 1:03:00 | 1:03:04 | |
Unemployment had reached record levels and anxiety reigned. | 1:03:04 | 1:03:08 | |
People were just leaving the cities in droves - young people with no hope of a job or anything. | 1:03:08 | 1:03:14 | |
Three guys would chuck 100 quid in a buy an old coach from the back of a coach company, | 1:03:14 | 1:03:17 | |
one of their old ones they'd retired - throw a few mattresses in and head off. | 1:03:17 | 1:03:23 | |
And so, what happened was that movement grew and grew and grew. | 1:03:23 | 1:03:26 | |
And, suddenly, instead of just the slightly better off hippies | 1:03:26 | 1:03:31 | |
making their arts fair up in Norfolk - like the Albion fair | 1:03:31 | 1:03:34 | |
and so forth - you drove a whole load of quite hard core working class people | 1:03:34 | 1:03:40 | |
from up north, onto the road. | 1:03:40 | 1:03:42 | |
In 1979, I think there were six vehicles at Stonehenge, you know, | 1:03:42 | 1:03:45 | |
and by 1984, there were thousands of people hitting the road. | 1:03:45 | 1:03:50 | |
More and more people appeared on the festival scenes, drinking. | 1:03:50 | 1:03:54 | |
The whole punk attitude. | 1:03:54 | 1:03:56 | |
Fuck everything, kind of thing, was quite prevalent amongst a growing group of younger | 1:03:56 | 1:04:03 | |
disenfranchised people, who had just given up on living in cities. | 1:04:03 | 1:04:07 | |
-We're just trying to live our lives, that's all. -Yeah, we don't interfere with anyone else. | 1:04:07 | 1:04:11 | |
This world's supposed to be a common treasury for everybody to share - | 1:04:11 | 1:04:14 | |
not people to button up. Do you know what I mean? | 1:04:14 | 1:04:16 | |
No wonder people are starting to get sick. | 1:04:16 | 1:04:18 | |
These people are pushing our people too close. | 1:04:18 | 1:04:21 | |
And like, it's going to start to explode one of these days. | 1:04:21 | 1:04:24 | |
This whole thing is just a total farce. | 1:04:27 | 1:04:29 | |
Cities are going crazy, everybody's going crazy. | 1:04:29 | 1:04:32 | |
It's all because of this - they're trying to impose a police state. | 1:04:32 | 1:04:35 | |
# A lot of people won't get no supper tonight | 1:04:35 | 1:04:37 | |
# A lot of people won't get no justice tonight... # | 1:04:40 | 1:04:45 | |
I used to live in a squat and I always thought it would be great if I could save up enough to | 1:04:45 | 1:04:52 | |
-get hold of something I could own myself and drive about in it and call it my own home. -Call it home. | 1:04:52 | 1:04:59 | |
There was a definite kind of tribalism going on. | 1:04:59 | 1:05:02 | |
The whole New Age travellers and New Age gypsies and the convoy. | 1:05:02 | 1:05:08 | |
There were lots of different little cults of people. | 1:05:08 | 1:05:11 | |
A lot of them were social casualties really. | 1:05:11 | 1:05:14 | |
A lot of them were drug casualties. | 1:05:14 | 1:05:16 | |
They were living outside the law really. They weren't... | 1:05:16 | 1:05:21 | |
completely independent of the system. | 1:05:21 | 1:05:24 | |
A lot of them were on the dole. | 1:05:24 | 1:05:26 | |
So, the authorities saw this movement as rather a threat. | 1:05:26 | 1:05:32 | |
The original hippy idealists were being joined on the road | 1:05:46 | 1:05:50 | |
by a new generation of post punk urban squatters. | 1:05:50 | 1:05:54 | |
This collective would become known as the Peace Convoy. | 1:05:54 | 1:05:58 | |
And as they arrived at Stonehenge festival in 1984, it seemed peace | 1:05:58 | 1:06:01 | |
and love had now fully surrendered to anger and resentment. | 1:06:01 | 1:06:07 | |
See these teeth! Put them in now, go on! | 1:06:07 | 1:06:10 | |
Kick them in now, man! | 1:06:10 | 1:06:12 | |
There were in excess of 100,000 people at Stonehenge. | 1:06:14 | 1:06:18 | |
As with any town that size, you're bound to have a few mischievous elements, shall we say? | 1:06:18 | 1:06:24 | |
Bikers started just mercilessly beating up any punks they could get their hands on. | 1:06:26 | 1:06:30 | |
It was like being in some sort of medieval nightmare. | 1:06:30 | 1:06:35 | |
It was as though the whole thing had hardened up. | 1:06:37 | 1:06:41 | |
The political thing had hardened as well. | 1:06:41 | 1:06:44 | |
It was a reflection of that. | 1:06:44 | 1:06:46 | |
# Welcome home | 1:06:49 | 1:06:55 | |
# You total stranger. | 1:06:55 | 1:06:57 | |
# Welcome back | 1:07:01 | 1:07:06 | |
# The coast is clear. | 1:07:06 | 1:07:09 | |
# Treat you here just like they treat you there. # | 1:07:12 | 1:07:20 | |
I mean, it was scary stuff. It was just wild. People just arrived and did what they wanted to do. | 1:07:20 | 1:07:27 | |
They set up stages, they sold drugs, they did whatever they wanted to do. It was quite scary. | 1:07:27 | 1:07:33 | |
It did look like Apocalypse Now. | 1:07:36 | 1:07:39 | |
There were helicopters flying around with lights and, you know, it was pretty ugly. | 1:07:39 | 1:07:45 | |
In '84, on the way off the site, | 1:07:52 | 1:07:56 | |
we saw a whole bunch of people trashing the police command unit, if you like. | 1:07:56 | 1:08:03 | |
At that point, I thought, you've just finished it. | 1:08:03 | 1:08:06 | |
The increasingly lawless Peace Convoy stood for everything | 1:08:08 | 1:08:12 | |
the establishment despised and in 1985 the tension would reach boiling point. | 1:08:12 | 1:08:18 | |
At one point, we were on our way to a festival up in Cumbria. | 1:08:18 | 1:08:22 | |
I think it was called Blue Moon. | 1:08:22 | 1:08:23 | |
The police were on their way to the miners' strike. | 1:08:23 | 1:08:26 | |
This huge flotilla of police went by and they all had banners in the back saying, "You're next." | 1:08:26 | 1:08:31 | |
It was pretty bloody obvious what was going to happen in Stonehenge '85 - | 1:08:31 | 1:08:35 | |
the Beanfield. | 1:08:35 | 1:08:36 | |
You could see it coming like a train. | 1:08:36 | 1:08:38 | |
The local chief constable had borrowed police from all over the country. | 1:08:44 | 1:08:49 | |
I'm not here to bargain with you. | 1:08:55 | 1:08:58 | |
I'm here to say something to you for you to consider. | 1:08:58 | 1:09:02 | |
Now, you don't have to make an answer now. You can get through to me. | 1:09:02 | 1:09:06 | |
We want to go to Stonehenge. | 1:09:06 | 1:09:07 | |
Well, the Stonehenge Festival, as you know, has been cancelled. | 1:09:07 | 1:09:11 | |
I'm hoping we'll get through the day | 1:09:11 | 1:09:13 | |
without too many people being injured. | 1:09:13 | 1:09:15 | |
Before the actual confrontation happened, | 1:09:15 | 1:09:18 | |
literally minutes before, and as it was happening, | 1:09:18 | 1:09:22 | |
there were instructions coming from senior police officers | 1:09:22 | 1:09:26 | |
to break skulls. | 1:09:26 | 1:09:27 | |
We just want to get off this field as peacefully and quietly as we can. | 1:09:27 | 1:09:31 | |
This lot, all these coppers, are just here for one reason, and that's to cause trouble. | 1:09:31 | 1:09:36 | |
I mean, I don't want to cause trouble. | 1:09:36 | 1:09:38 | |
I ain't going to cause trouble. I ain't got a stick or anything. | 1:09:38 | 1:09:41 | |
There weren't just riot police. There were special forces, there were soldiers. | 1:09:41 | 1:09:46 | |
They had large truncheons and they had their heavy shields and they were banging them | 1:09:48 | 1:09:53 | |
and moving slowly forward and it was surreal. | 1:09:53 | 1:09:55 | |
We were standing there filming this as it was happening. | 1:09:55 | 1:09:58 | |
I was thinking to myself, "I'm in another world." | 1:09:58 | 1:10:02 | |
Open the door, then! | 1:10:05 | 1:10:07 | |
I didn't do anything, mate. They smashed me windows. | 1:10:10 | 1:10:13 | |
They hit me on the head with truncheons! | 1:10:13 | 1:10:15 | |
Then they hit me when I was on the floor! | 1:10:15 | 1:10:17 | |
On the deck, on the deck! | 1:10:17 | 1:10:19 | |
On the deck! | 1:10:20 | 1:10:22 | |
You stay there, boy! | 1:10:22 | 1:10:24 | |
They then started using their truncheons to smash windows. | 1:10:24 | 1:10:30 | |
Hundreds of police officers, batons waving, smashing the window as this thing was still moving. | 1:10:30 | 1:10:35 | |
They brought it to a halt by standing in front. There were a lot of people in it. | 1:10:35 | 1:10:39 | |
It was their home, and they absolutely trashed it. | 1:10:39 | 1:10:42 | |
They just went in and smashed the windows, smashed the door down, | 1:10:42 | 1:10:45 | |
got inside, and all you could hear was screaming. | 1:10:45 | 1:10:48 | |
Someone help me! Help me! | 1:10:48 | 1:10:52 | |
What we, the ITN camera crew and myself as a reporter, | 1:10:54 | 1:10:57 | |
have seen in the last 30 minutes here on this field | 1:10:57 | 1:11:00 | |
has been some of the most brutal police treatment of people | 1:11:00 | 1:11:03 | |
that I've witnessed in my entire career as a journalist. | 1:11:03 | 1:11:06 | |
We're genuine people just like yourselves, and we need help right now. | 1:11:06 | 1:11:12 | |
Please. Help us. | 1:11:12 | 1:11:14 | |
All of you, help us. Stand by us. | 1:11:14 | 1:11:17 | |
Their convoy, in a way, had turned into its own worst enemy. | 1:11:20 | 1:11:23 | |
It had turned into a bit of a Babylon on wheels. | 1:11:23 | 1:11:26 | |
There were still a lot of good people in it | 1:11:26 | 1:11:28 | |
and there was a lot of hope, but there were ugly and greedy sides to it. | 1:11:28 | 1:11:32 | |
I don't know what would have happened if it hadn't been attacked. | 1:11:32 | 1:11:35 | |
I think it needed to change anyway. But it was a brutal way to change. | 1:11:35 | 1:11:39 | |
# I travelled to a mystical time-zone | 1:11:39 | 1:11:43 | |
# And I missed my bed and I soon came home | 1:11:43 | 1:11:48 | |
# A rush and a push and the land that we stand on is ours... # | 1:11:48 | 1:11:54 | |
With the Battle of the Beanfield, the establishment had crushed free festival culture. | 1:11:54 | 1:11:59 | |
The original dream of an alternative Utopian society now lay in tatters. | 1:12:01 | 1:12:07 | |
# A rush and a push and the land that we stand on is ours | 1:12:07 | 1:12:14 | |
# It has been before, so why can't it be now..? # | 1:12:14 | 1:12:17 | |
What was left of the convoy made their way to a place where they knew they could find some sanctuary. | 1:12:17 | 1:12:23 | |
A lot of people were really scared to deal with them, | 1:12:25 | 1:12:28 | |
so Michael ended up driving... | 1:12:28 | 1:12:29 | |
He got the call that they were leaving Stonehenge at 2am | 1:12:29 | 1:12:32 | |
and he was up all night waiting for them. | 1:12:32 | 1:12:34 | |
This is really quite a small village in the middle of the West Country. | 1:12:34 | 1:12:39 | |
So when all these trucks were arriving, people were really scared. | 1:12:39 | 1:12:43 | |
I was dealing with these people on my own, really. | 1:12:44 | 1:12:49 | |
I was just an ordinary Somerset farmer lad, really. | 1:12:49 | 1:12:53 | |
I'd never seen anything like it before. | 1:12:53 | 1:12:55 | |
And they were wild. | 1:12:55 | 1:12:57 | |
They were angry as well. | 1:12:57 | 1:13:00 | |
They were really tough times. People were really embittered after it. | 1:13:00 | 1:13:03 | |
People started living on sites with the wreckage of what they had left over. | 1:13:03 | 1:13:07 | |
But it was really the wreckage of their dream, which was what had been destroyed. | 1:13:07 | 1:13:12 | |
You say we're bad news. We're the good news. | 1:13:12 | 1:13:14 | |
You're so fucking unreliable. | 1:13:14 | 1:13:16 | |
All the work I've been doing for you all the way through... | 1:13:16 | 1:13:18 | |
You invited yourselves here. | 1:13:18 | 1:13:20 | |
I gave you 19, or however many tickets, to come on. I said we'd look after you well... | 1:13:20 | 1:13:24 | |
We gave you the best show you've had here for years. | 1:13:24 | 1:13:27 | |
We said we'd look after you well... I don't know what you expected. | 1:13:27 | 1:13:31 | |
We expected to not be out of pocket. | 1:13:31 | 1:13:33 | |
I've been running this show for 17 years, and I've been fair and reasonable all that time. | 1:13:33 | 1:13:37 | |
If I hadn't been, I wouldn't be here now. I'd be cut to pieces by now. | 1:13:37 | 1:13:41 | |
By the end of the '80s, with Glastonbury struggling with the times | 1:13:44 | 1:13:49 | |
and Reading facing bankruptcy, the outlook for British festivals was bleak. | 1:13:49 | 1:13:53 | |
MUSIC: "What Time Is Love?" by The KLF | 1:13:55 | 1:14:01 | |
But in and around the fringes of Britain's cities, | 1:14:01 | 1:14:05 | |
a new drug and a new generation would combine once again to reignite festival culture. | 1:14:05 | 1:14:12 | |
The whole 1980s acid house and free party stuff | 1:14:12 | 1:14:16 | |
was an actual reaction against the sort of Thatcherite idea, | 1:14:16 | 1:14:20 | |
or the enforced ideology that there was no society. | 1:14:20 | 1:14:24 | |
And I think that's where they made that big mistake, and their mistake created the void that we then filled. | 1:14:24 | 1:14:30 | |
The acid house came along and the ecstasy came along simultaneously, and they were the antidote. | 1:14:30 | 1:14:37 | |
Acid house quickly spread from the inner cities to their ring roads, | 1:14:57 | 1:15:01 | |
as the nation's youth jumped in their Fiesta XR2is, | 1:15:01 | 1:15:05 | |
dodged the police and put their hands in the air. | 1:15:05 | 1:15:09 | |
It was cat and mouse. What people loved about those was...you know, | 1:15:09 | 1:15:14 | |
the meetings, everyone getting together in car parks, and someone's bleep would go off | 1:15:14 | 1:15:19 | |
and he'd go "The party's here", and everyone would convoy down there. | 1:15:19 | 1:15:23 | |
Then another message - "No, it's here", | 1:15:23 | 1:15:25 | |
the police would run there and everyone would shoot off there. | 1:15:25 | 1:15:27 | |
I think people enjoyed that as much as the party. | 1:15:27 | 1:15:29 | |
Sometimes it was absolutely rubbish, and sometimes amazing. | 1:15:29 | 1:15:33 | |
I went to one M25 party that was in a farmer's tunnel that he used for his cattle | 1:15:33 | 1:15:40 | |
to get under the motorway, with a massive sound system and lights at one end | 1:15:40 | 1:15:44 | |
and everybody else at the other end. | 1:15:44 | 1:15:45 | |
It was like something out of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. | 1:15:45 | 1:15:48 | |
CAR HORNS BEEP | 1:15:54 | 1:15:57 | |
But increasingly, the hunt for the rave's secret location would lead to nowhere | 1:15:57 | 1:16:02 | |
but a service station on the M25, where nobody knew what was going on. | 1:16:02 | 1:16:07 | |
What are you doing? | 1:16:07 | 1:16:08 | |
Waiting for someone to tell us where it is. | 1:16:08 | 1:16:10 | |
Isn't that an old story? | 1:16:10 | 1:16:12 | |
-Yeah. -Sounds familiar to me. | 1:16:12 | 1:16:14 | |
Well, apparently only one person knows where it is. | 1:16:14 | 1:16:17 | |
I think the culture of the M25 | 1:16:17 | 1:16:18 | |
was people wanting to make bigger and bigger parties. | 1:16:18 | 1:16:21 | |
It was fantastic fun, and they wanted to make money as well. | 1:16:21 | 1:16:24 | |
There was that money-making element that made them grow, | 1:16:24 | 1:16:27 | |
but we found it was a lot of driving around and not much partying. | 1:16:27 | 1:16:30 | |
A lot of crooks got involved in it. A lot of heavy duty drug dealers got involved in it. | 1:16:30 | 1:16:34 | |
There were big marquees with state-of-the-art sound systems, and all this security with all these | 1:16:36 | 1:16:41 | |
pit-bulls all around it. They were right proper villains. | 1:16:41 | 1:16:46 | |
The rave scene quickly became expensive, unreliable and a bit seedy. | 1:16:48 | 1:16:53 | |
So a handful of sound systems ventured further afield in search of something different, | 1:16:53 | 1:16:59 | |
and in the process, forged an unlikely alliance. | 1:16:59 | 1:17:02 | |
We were going to things like Longstock, which had displaced Stonehenge. | 1:17:11 | 1:17:16 | |
As we got the sound system up and running, travellers would begin to appear out of the woodwork. | 1:17:16 | 1:17:21 | |
It just happened slowly. | 1:17:21 | 1:17:22 | |
I went to one festival and you could hear "Boom, boom, boom". | 1:17:22 | 1:17:27 | |
-It was keeping me up. -I needed to be convinced. | 1:17:27 | 1:17:30 | |
-I thought "I don't like this". -But suddenly, you see all the old guard listening to rave music. | 1:17:30 | 1:17:38 | |
It was just one of them moments of harmony. | 1:17:38 | 1:17:40 | |
Everyone just...you know, crusty travellers were putting on trainers and jumpsuits and baggy clothes. | 1:17:40 | 1:17:45 | |
It was a beautiful moment. | 1:17:45 | 1:17:47 | |
It had the power of the original Summer of Love. | 1:17:47 | 1:17:52 | |
I remember going to one of these kind of parties about 30 miles away from Stonehenge in the end. | 1:17:56 | 1:18:03 | |
On the edge, there was the start of what became Spiral Tribe, | 1:18:03 | 1:18:08 | |
just setting up a sound system next to what was a sort of travellers' festival. The travellers liked it. | 1:18:08 | 1:18:15 | |
The new blood people, the people into dance music, liked it, | 1:18:15 | 1:18:18 | |
and it was all working like a nice little thing. | 1:18:18 | 1:18:22 | |
It came together. We were bringing the music and the system. | 1:18:22 | 1:18:25 | |
They were providing the location and some other things, so, you know, it was a joint venture. | 1:18:25 | 1:18:32 | |
And it was this coming together of two outlaw gangs that briefly | 1:18:37 | 1:18:41 | |
reignited and reimagined the free festival scene in Britain. | 1:18:41 | 1:18:45 | |
The whole free festival and free party scene grew and grew | 1:18:47 | 1:18:50 | |
till you got to Castlemorton, where there was what, 60,000 to 100,000. | 1:18:50 | 1:18:54 | |
# In sweet harmony, in sweet harmony | 1:18:55 | 1:18:59 | |
# In sweet harmony... # | 1:19:03 | 1:19:04 | |
This impromptu festival at Castlemorton, Worcestershire, | 1:19:04 | 1:19:07 | |
in 1992, reached an unprecedented scale through word of mouth alone. | 1:19:07 | 1:19:12 | |
It was the pinnacle of the new underground, | 1:19:12 | 1:19:15 | |
and put the wind up the government all over again. | 1:19:15 | 1:19:19 | |
You had loads of vehicles everywhere. | 1:19:19 | 1:19:21 | |
You had double-deckers, your techno traveller types, your zippy ravers, | 1:19:21 | 1:19:25 | |
your crusties with dogs, your straight-up ravers with beanies and caps. | 1:19:25 | 1:19:31 | |
You had everyone there, and everyone was mingling. The party went straight through. | 1:19:31 | 1:19:35 | |
It started Friday, all day Saturday, all day Sunday to Monday and Tuesday. | 1:19:35 | 1:19:39 | |
And there was a naked man running about by Monday morning. There's bound to be a couple. | 1:19:39 | 1:19:44 | |
A friend said it was the Woodstock of our generation. She was probably right. | 1:19:44 | 1:19:48 | |
Scared the crap out of the government, because what could they do? | 1:19:49 | 1:19:52 | |
There wasn't a police force in the country that could deal with 40,000 people arriving on a place. | 1:19:52 | 1:19:58 | |
The Castlemorton thing was the straw that broke the camel's back. | 1:19:58 | 1:20:02 | |
How many days did it go on? | 1:20:02 | 1:20:04 | |
It was almost like sports coverage on the news. They kept saying, "And another day at Castlemorton..." | 1:20:04 | 1:20:09 | |
REPORTER: 'A week ago, the 20,000 travellers had sprawled all over the common | 1:20:09 | 1:20:13 | |
'at an illegal music festival, with beat music pounding out from numerous discos day and night'. | 1:20:13 | 1:20:18 | |
Why is it on Friday night, we have a man wielding a machete | 1:20:18 | 1:20:21 | |
in our orchard, chasing our lamb, shouting "meat"? | 1:20:21 | 1:20:24 | |
The police came down on them like a ton of bricks, and that was the start of the Criminal Justice Bill. | 1:20:25 | 1:20:32 | |
This summer at Castlemorton and other places saw outrageous | 1:20:32 | 1:20:36 | |
and unacceptable examples of the problems caused by New Age travellers and ravers. | 1:20:36 | 1:20:42 | |
APPLAUSE | 1:20:42 | 1:20:43 | |
There will be no soft option under the Criminal Justice Act. | 1:20:43 | 1:20:50 | |
Celebrate our multicultural society! | 1:20:50 | 1:20:53 | |
Celebrate our right to free assembly, and celebrate our right to party! | 1:20:53 | 1:21:00 | |
MUSIC: "Unfinished Sympathy" by Massive Attack. | 1:21:00 | 1:21:04 | |
The events at Castlemorton presented the government | 1:21:04 | 1:21:07 | |
with an opportunity to force through the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, | 1:21:07 | 1:21:13 | |
a piece of legislation which outlawed open air | 1:21:13 | 1:21:16 | |
gatherings of more than ten people listening to "music characterised by a succession of repetitive beats". | 1:21:16 | 1:21:24 | |
Up to then, dance music had been run mostly by goodwill and happy amateurs. | 1:21:26 | 1:21:31 | |
All of sudden, that was a turning point where people | 1:21:31 | 1:21:34 | |
had to get serious and go "Right, I'm going professional now". | 1:21:34 | 1:21:37 | |
Disorganised festivals, | 1:21:38 | 1:21:41 | |
that's what the government can't deal with. Can't have that much chaos. | 1:21:41 | 1:21:45 | |
Can't have a situation where they can't control people, where people can just do what they want. | 1:21:45 | 1:21:51 | |
It's too much of a threat to them. | 1:21:51 | 1:21:54 | |
They bring the weight of the law on you, and then paint you as the demons that are, I don't know, | 1:21:54 | 1:22:00 | |
corrupting the youth or something, and then bring in new legislation to tighten down on all of us. | 1:22:00 | 1:22:06 | |
It was a period that the UK changed quite dramatically | 1:22:06 | 1:22:11 | |
from what it was to what it became. | 1:22:11 | 1:22:14 | |
MUSIC: "Born Slippy" by Underworld | 1:22:14 | 1:22:18 | |
Music was also changing in the mid '90s, as the underground went overground. | 1:22:23 | 1:22:29 | |
Indie bands turned into pop stars. | 1:22:29 | 1:22:32 | |
Dance music became mainstream. | 1:22:32 | 1:22:34 | |
And festivals reflected this change of mood, as they became fashionable, even cool. | 1:22:36 | 1:22:42 | |
But as they became ever more popular, Britain's festivals | 1:22:50 | 1:22:53 | |
were also being obliged to get serious about law and order. | 1:22:53 | 1:22:58 | |
Even at the traditionally free-spirited Glastonbury, | 1:22:58 | 1:23:02 | |
this new landscape of legislation was reshaping its future. | 1:23:02 | 1:23:07 | |
How many people heard this after last year's event, that music | 1:23:07 | 1:23:11 | |
was stopped, the stage had to be cleared because of severe crushing? | 1:23:11 | 1:23:16 | |
We are proposing to grant a licence for 100,500 people, knowing full well | 1:23:16 | 1:23:21 | |
that the dance tent last year was absolutely horrendous. | 1:23:21 | 1:23:26 | |
It's comical, really. | 1:23:26 | 1:23:27 | |
I think for the safety of people, we've got to go one way or the other. | 1:23:27 | 1:23:31 | |
We either reduce the numbers and make it safe, or we get | 1:23:31 | 1:23:34 | |
a licence for 180,000 people, knowing that this is probably | 1:23:34 | 1:23:38 | |
what's going to turn up, given fine weather. | 1:23:38 | 1:23:40 | |
# Karma police | 1:23:40 | 1:23:45 | |
# Arrest this girl | 1:23:45 | 1:23:47 | |
# Her Hitler hairdo Is making me feel ill | 1:23:47 | 1:23:53 | |
# And we have crashed her party... # | 1:23:53 | 1:24:00 | |
If our festival was going to survive, | 1:24:04 | 1:24:06 | |
then we had to work with the establishment, | 1:24:06 | 1:24:09 | |
because there was no way that fighting the establishment | 1:24:09 | 1:24:13 | |
would result in success. | 1:24:13 | 1:24:16 | |
# This is what you'll get when you mess with us... # | 1:24:18 | 1:24:25 | |
In 2002, Glastonbury Festival was required to erect a super fence in order to keep its licence. | 1:24:25 | 1:24:32 | |
The spirit of anarchy unleashed at the Isle of Wight back in 1970 now seemed symbolically contained. | 1:24:32 | 1:24:38 | |
The idea of a free festival was over. | 1:24:38 | 1:24:42 | |
No-one would get into Glastonbury for free any more. | 1:24:42 | 1:24:46 | |
It was becoming a bit of a monster, because it was very difficult to control. | 1:24:46 | 1:24:50 | |
So the police and the council said, | 1:24:50 | 1:24:53 | |
"Look, you've got to get to grips with this, | 1:24:53 | 1:24:55 | |
"because this is getting dangerous now". | 1:24:55 | 1:24:57 | |
So they determined to design a fence that couldn't be taken down, you see. | 1:24:57 | 1:25:03 | |
With stricter controls and tighter legislation, | 1:25:06 | 1:25:10 | |
festivals over the last decade have ceased to be seen as the open threat they once were to middle England. | 1:25:10 | 1:25:17 | |
There are hundreds and hundreds of festivals, and it's a big money-making thing. | 1:25:17 | 1:25:23 | |
It's a kind of, you know, we band people and put them through a gate | 1:25:23 | 1:25:27 | |
and they can have this, and then we shunt them from this fenced area to another, | 1:25:27 | 1:25:31 | |
guarded by a whole load of specially badged up semi-policemen. | 1:25:31 | 1:25:37 | |
MUSIC: "Yellow" by Coldplay | 1:25:37 | 1:25:41 | |
A surge of television coverage in the past ten years has served to domesticate festivals even further. | 1:25:41 | 1:25:48 | |
Now even the weather has become a national joke. | 1:25:48 | 1:25:52 | |
Almost 100,000 fans have defied the worst weather at the Glastonbury Festival since 1985. | 1:25:53 | 1:25:59 | |
Now it's a multi-million pound business, attracting top performers and an audience of over 100,000. | 1:25:59 | 1:26:04 | |
On the first day... | 1:26:04 | 1:26:07 | |
This coverage has kind of inculcated a generation with the idea | 1:26:07 | 1:26:10 | |
that what you do in summer is go to a rock festival somewhere. | 1:26:10 | 1:26:14 | |
You know, it's a rite of passage for us all now. | 1:26:14 | 1:26:17 | |
How old are you going to let your kids get to before you let them go to a festival on their own? | 1:26:17 | 1:26:22 | |
A lot of what we worked out by trial and error, ad hoc stupidity, magic, | 1:26:25 | 1:26:30 | |
whatever, in the early days, has been codified, changed, | 1:26:30 | 1:26:36 | |
made functional by the entertainment industry. | 1:26:36 | 1:26:40 | |
Everything gets co-opted by the mainstream. | 1:26:40 | 1:26:42 | |
That is what happens in our world. It's very sensitive. | 1:26:42 | 1:26:46 | |
What the advertisers and the marketers see is "What's happening? I want to jump on that. | 1:26:46 | 1:26:52 | |
"There's a bandwagon. Let me get on it". | 1:26:52 | 1:26:54 | |
And they will get on it and make you an offer you can't refuse. | 1:26:54 | 1:26:59 | |
As a result of big business and TV broadcasting moving in, the ideological battle | 1:27:00 | 1:27:07 | |
for the heart of Britain has faded away as music and big name acts | 1:27:07 | 1:27:10 | |
have returned to the forefront of the festival experience. | 1:27:10 | 1:27:14 | |
MUSIC: "Fire" by Kasabian | 1:27:14 | 1:27:16 | |
Obviously, the music scene has changed a lot. | 1:27:29 | 1:27:32 | |
Live music is really precious. | 1:27:32 | 1:27:33 | |
It's the one thing which is real. | 1:27:33 | 1:27:36 | |
You're in the field, you're looking at it, in a world where things | 1:27:36 | 1:27:40 | |
are increasingly online and communication is quite virtual. | 1:27:40 | 1:27:44 | |
Yes, you can experience the download, | 1:27:44 | 1:27:47 | |
but you can't download the experience, and that's what festivals give you. | 1:27:47 | 1:27:51 | |
They give you an experience you can't get anywhere else. | 1:27:51 | 1:27:54 | |
For some, the contemporary festival has become a place of weekend rebellion, | 1:27:57 | 1:28:02 | |
a corporate pastiche of its former self. | 1:28:02 | 1:28:05 | |
But perhaps the essence of the festival experience has never really changed. | 1:28:07 | 1:28:12 | |
We're all looking to be happy, and we're all looking to be part of the human family and to reaffirm that. | 1:28:15 | 1:28:20 | |
That's why people go to festivals. And that is something that can never be repressed. | 1:28:20 | 1:28:25 | |
I think people like to be together, you know, | 1:28:25 | 1:28:28 | |
in an environment where there's nothing to prove or nothing to gain. | 1:28:28 | 1:28:33 | |
You can just be yourself. | 1:28:33 | 1:28:34 | |
Why people go to festivals, the thing that really calls them, is spirit. | 1:28:34 | 1:28:39 | |
They are touched. | 1:28:39 | 1:28:41 | |
And sometimes that touch changes their life for ever. | 1:28:41 | 1:28:45 | |
# Sing along with the common people | 1:28:45 | 1:28:49 | |
# Sing along and it might just get you through | 1:28:49 | 1:28:52 | |
# Laugh along with the common people | 1:28:52 | 1:28:55 | |
# Laugh along, even though they're laughing at you | 1:28:55 | 1:28:58 | |
# And the stupid things that you do | 1:28:58 | 1:29:02 | |
# Because you think that poor is cool | 1:29:02 | 1:29:05 | |
# Want to live with common people like you | 1:29:11 | 1:29:14 | |
# Want to live with common people like you | 1:29:14 | 1:29:17 | |
# Want to live with common people like you... # | 1:29:17 | 1:29:20 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 1:29:20 | 1:29:23 |