Woodstock, Altamont and the Isle Of Wight are etched into the historical past books as probably the most well-known festivals of the late 60s and early 70s. However there have been loads of others – and a few of them are notable for the unsuitable causes. The UK’s Weeley and Bickershaw festivals have been two of them, whose excessive climate, pitched battles between Hells Angels and safety and basic air of chaos put them nearer to Armageddon than the Summer time of Love. In 2007, author and musician Mick Farren – who attended each – appeared again at his time on the entrance traces.
Mud-covered figures waded and stumbled in a viscous, calf-deep mire. Someplace throughout the waterlogged wasteland the Flamin’ Groovies have been pounding out Teenage Head because the rain fell relentlessly. One determine within the muddy throng was distinguishable by the way in which he was working two flashing electrical yo-yos on the identical time. He was a wandering rock pageant hippie yo-yo vendor, and I all of a sudden and irrationally needed one. “How a lot for a yo-yo?”
I don’t bear in mind his reply, however it will have made no sense. I’d been in rain and dust for 48 hours. Cash had ceased to have any significance. If I had any it was soggy pulp in my pocket. What I did have, nonetheless, was alcohol. Earlier within the day my companions and I – freaks from underground papers IT and Oz, plus Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies – had made a booze run to city. The yo-yo vendor was now eyeing the bottle of Bacardi in my hand.
“Swap you a yo-yo for a success of rum?” I accepted readily. Such was the way in which at an old-school pageant.
This encounter was on the Bickershaw Competition, staged in a badly drained discipline with a pond within the center, someplace outdoors Wigan in Could 1972. The rain had teemed down for 3 days, till the location resembled the Western Entrance in World Struggle I, and it solely stopped raining when the Grateful Useless started to play.
Now that rock festivals are extremely organised backyard events at former vacation camps and transformed airfields, with star performers and creature comforts, it’s arduous to think about how, 1 / 4 of a century in the past, they might have been such debacles of mayhem and chaos that they resembled rehearsals for the apocalypse.
A lot has been written about Woodstock, Altamont and the Isle of Wight – the great, the unhealthy, and the ugly of the early music fests – however different reveals have been all however forgotten with the passage of time. Which is a pity as a result of many have been equally weird occasions, particularly when the goals of their promoters ran head-first into the truth of inflicting a big tent-town on some unsuspecting rural geography after which filling it with a short lived inhabitants of rock’n’rollers decided to behave with excessive illegality.
The Bickershaw Competition was one prime instance of old-school rock-festival anarchy within the UK. One other was the Weeley Competition that occurred a 12 months earlier, simply outdoors Clacton, in August 1971. The Weeley Competition was the diametric reverse of Bickershaw. The climate was scorching and dry, and – as an alternative of slowly sinking right into a sea of liquid mud – Weeley erupted into raging grass fires, and violent confrontations between the pageant’s safety males and outlaw motorbike golf equipment.
Each occasions appeared good on paper. Every featured a stellar invoice: the posters for Weeley boasted the Faces, T.Rex, Standing Quo, Rory Gallagher, King Crimson, Mott The Hoople, Mungo Jerry and the Pink Fairies, whereas Bickershaw supplied its drenched and mud-covered crowd the Kinks, New Riders Of The Purple Sage, Dr John, Hawkwind, Nation Joe McDonald, The Unimaginable String Band, Donovan and Wishbone Ash, plus an historic set by Captain Beefheart and the specifically reassembled Magic Band, and the primary four-hour set by The Grateful Useless ever seen by a British viewers. The promoters assured fairly priced food and drinks, a free camp web site, and ample rest room and washing services. Because it turned out, nonetheless, these have been the least of anybody’s worries.
To say these promoters have been inexperienced is hardly honest. Within the early Nineteen Seventies no one actually knew how one can run an enormous open-air rock occasion. Blackhill Enterprises – who offered the free live shows in Hyde Park – had turn into adept at selling reveals that lasted just some hours within the afternoon. A 3-day occasion was a really completely different matter, and essential elements have been inevitably ignored.
The promoters of Bickershaw have been a set of native businessmen, led by TV presenter Jeremy Beadle, they usually had both didn’t ask some essential questions. Was Could within the north of England actually heat sufficient for an open-air pageant? Was a web site with standing water an acceptable place for a rock pageant, and what would possibly occur if it rained? At Weeley, just one query actually wanted to be requested: what possessed the native Spherical Desk – who freely admitted that they had by no means organised something greater than a donkey derby – to imagine that they might run a serious rock pageant as a charity occasion?
One essential error was that the Spherical Desk uncared for to mow the location’s lengthy grass earlier than erecting the stage and making ready the tenting floor. By the point the gang settled in they have been ankle deep in bone-dry tinder and fireplace was a transparent and current hazard. When the underground press gang from IT and Oz arrived a lot of parked automobiles had exploded and burned. The Pink Fairies, who had arrived earlier, informed lurid tales of smoke, flame and gasoline explosions. And if that wasn’t unhealthy sufficient, the Hells Angels and the safety goons have been about able to go at it.
Seemingly, the outlaw bikers had been performing some efficient fireplace management, however once they began to imagine a quasi-official standing they ran head-first into the pageant’s actual safety. All through the course of in the future, spasmodic fights broke out, till the bikers have been cornered in a backstage space. A report within the underground paper Frendz described their final stand: “A vigilante committee fashioned consisting of concessionaires, safety males, (very heavy, out of labor commandos and so forth) and stage arms. Armed with monkey wrenches, golf equipment, sledgehammers, they marched on the Angels. Three have been taken to hospital unconscious, not less than one with a fractured cranium, many extra badly overwhelmed up. Stories indicated that one of many Angels had died in hospital.”
With the bikers vanquished, the safety males acted like an occupying military. 4 of them, hefting nasty cudgels, approached the truck and the MASH-style tent the place the Pink Fairies and the IT/Oz crew have been camped. “You lot are a bunch of Angel lovers, proper?”
Not wishing to be duffed up, we did our greatest to look mystified, however it was counter-culture frequent data that the Pink Fairies, Hawkwind and a lot of the underground press have been on good phrases with Loopy Charlie and the Hells Angels London chapter. Simply to compound issues, Paul Rudolph, the Fairies’ guitarist, had been roaring around the campsite all afternoon on a Triumph filth bike. Mystification appeared to work, although. Safety didn’t appear to think about us a risk and moved on with phrases of contempt.
And but, whereas these violent dramas have been being performed out on one a part of the location, the punters throughout discipline knew little or nothing about it, and have been solely involved that King Crimson carried out magnificently; that the Faces have been virtually too drunk to do it; or that Marc Bolan, by sheer pressure of will, received over a hostile crowd outraged by his current pop-star success. Though Marc was accused of loads in his brief life, lack of bottle was by no means a cost. Bolan confronted down possibly 50,000 pissed-off rock followers and politely requested that they “make love some place else”. The group faltered for a second. “What did he say?” Then realisation dawned that this was elf-speak for “fuck off”. A ragged cheer unfold: Marc had gained some main rock’n’roll credibility.
Later, when the stage had shut down for the night time, unusual bellows hire the air. “Wally!” The shouts got here at random from all components of the sector. “Wally! Wally!” Legend insists that Weeley was the beginning place of this bizarre follow, a declare supported on www.ukrockfestivals.com by a publish from Weeley attendee Brian Nugent: “The actual Wally was sitting simply in entrance of me, and his buddies have been attempting to get him again after a go to someplace. They began shouting his title and fairly quickly everybody joined in.” A personality known as Wally Caton, nonetheless, fervently disputes this: “I used to be on the Isle of Wight pageant within the late 60s, my buddies have been on the lookout for me and known as my title. And shortly after, everyone was shouting ‘Wally!’ I by no means did meet up with my buddies, however the man sitting in entrance of you was not the true Wally, I’m.”
Nobody, nonetheless, was shouting “Wally!” at Bickershaw. The tribal cry would have been misplaced within the downpour. Shortly after the encounter with the yo-yo salesman, I had bluffed my means onto the stage, to shelter from the storm and get near Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. Looking from the stage and into the gang, the sheets
of rain have been, to say the least, bizarre – like an enormous aquarium with the water on the surface. However the Captain was the Technicolor second in a sodden and monochrome weekend. The Magic Band have been nothing wanting Venusian, enjoying warp-power, pan-galactic blues and performing an unearthly conga line as they did it.
Mike Plumbley has a whole Bickershaw diary on www.iowrock.demon.co.uk, and he confirms my very own broken recollections: “A be-caped and bearded Captain made it out to centre-stage and started to snarl with all of the venom of Howling Wolf moanin’ at midnight. Between verses the Captain wailed mouthfuls of south-side Chicago harp. Behind him the band’s choreographed slapstick dance veered someplace between Elvis Presley and the Marx Brothers.” I simply accepted the cosmic aptness of encountering the Captain in a Lancashire downpour.
For a lot of the drowned plenty, although, the Grateful Useless have been the celebrities of Bickershaw, and Deadheads’ compulsive archiving has given the pageant extra prominence in rock historical past than it possibly deserves. Bickershaw can also be preserved on a 2007 DVD from Ozit Morpheus Information which clearly reveals how the solar really broke by means of when the Useless started to play. I don’t imagine, even in 1972, the Grateful Useless might management the climate, however I discovered the coincidence unsettling.
My henchman Boss Goodman, then again, was energised. “Wanna see how shut we will get to the Useless?” he requested. I nodded. It solely appeared proper. I had achieved the identical to see Beefheart.
Between us we had amassed a large number of backstage credentials, and he labored his well beyond all checks and challenges, till the 2 of us reached Goodman’s final goal and have been squatting like mud-men straight behind Jerry Garcia’s audio system. To do the identical right now can be not possible, when musicians are as protected as presidents, however this was the period of wonderful chaos. Properly right into a swirling solo, Garcia noticed us. He smiled wearily. He had seen all of it earlier than.
Between songs, the Useless’s Bob Weir confirmed the band’s populist knack of maintaining with native politics: “I perceive that that invoice they have been attempting to push by means of the legislature right here was defeated.” Garcia and a lot of the crowd didn’t perceive, and Weir defined: “The Night time Assemblies Invoice. It was defeated final night time. It signifies that you guys can go forward and have all of the festivals you need.”
The Night time Assemblies Invoice was a parliamentary response to occasions like Weeley and Bickershaw that may have cripplingly over-regulated open-air live shows through the midnights. Organising any pageant would have turn into not possible. The Invoice’s defeat was welcomed within the rock world.
The massive and anarchic old-school festivals have been a sworn statement to the facility of rock’n’roll, they usually demonstrated simply how a lot discomfort and doable bodily hurt individuals have been keen to tolerate so as to hear music. Legends declare {that a} teenage Joe Strummer and a younger Elvis Costello have been at Bickershaw, and the present impressed each to start out their very own bands. The reality, nonetheless, was that by 1972 these Armageddon-style festivals have been on their means out, and, predictably, it was all all the way down to cash. The promoters of each Weeley and Bickershaw misplaced fortunes, and buyers for extra of the identical grew to become not possible to seek out.
And but Weeley and Bickershaw have their place, if solely as tales of historical hallucinating glory for old-timers to inform by the fireplace. I imply, the place, on this new century, might drugged wastrels get so near each the Grateful Useless and Captain Beefheart in the identical weekend?
This function initially appeared in Basic Rock situation 135 (July 2009)
