FOREWORD
From its roots in the early 1970’s, the festival scene became the hub of the ‘underground’ in the early to mid 1980’s. You could spend the whole summer from May until the end of September travelling between the 20 to 30 free festivals that took place in locations all around Britain. Some were small gatherings of 100 or so people, whilst others might see an attendance of a few thousand. The highlight of the free festival year was the massive gathering at Stonehenge over the month of June, that in its final year saw 50,000 people celebrating the summer solstice together within a huge tented city, and all for free!
People went to the festivals for all sorts of reasons. Most festivals were free to get into, offering a very cheap summer break in the countryside for the mass of urban dwelling hippies, punks, squatters and students, united by their alienation from the world of Thatcherism and their collective lack of hard cash. You could party as late and as loud as you wanted to, meet all manner of weird and wonderful people, and have as many bizarre conversations as your brain could cope with, ably assisted, if you wished, by the general availability of a cornucopia of reasonably priced psychoactive drugs! The other main attraction, of course, was the bands.
Every festival had at least one music stage, and most had a few. There was no ‘official’ line up and no music policy. If you had a band, and you got your shit together to get the band and its equipment to the festival, you had a gig. Some bands made it to every festival and became stars on the scene in their own right. Bands like Hawkwind, Here and Now, Ozric Tentacles and later on Eat Static and Banco de Gaia were, and still are, synonymous with the scene that spawned them.
The festival pioneers of the 1970’s inspired those of the 1980’s, and likewise those of the 1980’s inspired further generations to keep the festival spirit going. The festivals are rarely free these days, but their spirit lives on in events like the UK’s Big Green Gathering and Strawberry Fayre, and in the US Burning Man, as well as at any number of smaller events around the world. People just like to get together and party. As the sign at the entrance to the Stonehenge Free Festival read, ‘It’s never too late to have a happy childhood’!
Michael Dog, London, 2003