Festivals Britannia Page #2

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of the anarchic potential of festival culture.

The point about the battle, if there was a battle, a genuine battle,

in Beaulieu, was between so-called trad fans and modern-jazz fans.

But the theory was that the Acker Bilk fans got annoyed cos a modern-jazz band was on,

and maybe they expected Acker to be on earlier, and he wasn't, or no-one told them.

Maybe they didn't know Acker was on later.

And they pushed and shoved, and they knocked down a television tower, a tower

holding lights for the television people filming it, you see?

What damage, in fact, do you think was done to BBC equipment?

- We've lost something like seven or eight microphones.

- Just stolen?

Vanished overnight, virtually.

Where they are, well, goodness only knows.

It really become quite impossible to go on satisfactorily broadcasting?

We had to come off the air five minutes early.

The Battle of Beaulieu, we called it.

And they all rushed the stage at one time and

got on a piano to get up onto the roof.

And the piano collapsed.

People were trying to lift it up, to get it level.

I said, "No, leave it, leave it, it's all right. I can manage like this."

So they eventually got it up with some bloke underneath it

with a couple of cracked ribs or something.

Lord Montague said to me, "Play them the blues to calm them down."

That wasn't going to do any good, but we played them blues.

It didn't make any difference. They were still leaping about the place.

I think you always have to remember that the Brits have always been

very strong on gangs.

One of the things I think festivals provided

was a chance for those people to met, the people in the gang.

It was just young people...

..going through a mild form of protest, basically,

that "We want our world".

# Oh when the saints

# Go marching in... #

While these two jazz tribes skirmished, a more serious political movement was gathering pace

as an increasingly politicised British youth took to the streets

in the early Sixties.

# Ban the bomb! Ban the bomb! Ban the bomb! Ban the bomb! #

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marches, the Ban the Bomb marches, as they became dubbed,

they again were a bunch of kids going out for a weekend,

unsupervised, in the country,

but rather than partying they were saving the world.

We went on those marches because

they were huge social gatherings -

admittedly, all in a long queue.

But they were gatherings of people of the same mind who were

pretty determined that this was not going to go forward.

They were a festival on the march.

We marched from Aldermaston to London.

They were festivals of singing, they were festivals of idea,

they were a march for freedom.

The heady mix of youth, politics and music were

combining to create the rumblings of Britain's first countercultures.

But as the Sixties were revolving, so was a generation's musical taste, and nowhere was this more apparent

than at the National Jazz & Blues Festivals during the mid-Sixties.

It had its own earthy kind of feel, if you like, and the music was from a very broad church.

You had to be semiconscious not to realise that something was

changing, something was afoot.

There was an awful lot going on in the Sixties. I mean,

it was such a time of development, of change.

The jazz and the folk music was getting left behind.

Everything was sort of switching around.

It's interesting to see how you just look at how the bills changed,

you see how they sort of drifted from being jazz into jazz

and blues into being blues and into blues and rock and then into blues and rock and psychedelia.

But it wasn't just the music that was changing.

By 1967, duffel coats were being replaced by beads.

Pipes were out, flowers were in.

This was the Summer of Love, and the birth of the hippy was upon us.

The actual Summer of Love, being '67,

was probably when we in the bohemian world had finally married

popular song with folk music and revolutionary ideas.

The Flower People have their own taste in music, and their favourite

performers are not necessarily big names in the pop charts.

For them, the highlight of this festival

was a relatively unknown singer called Arthur Brown.

The hippy thing was,

particularly in the beginning, a movement towards innocence, towards

not feeling bound by duty, feeling that perhaps fun was a good element of life

and that maybe that was a better judge

than correctness or duty or anything else.

- Would you call yourself a hippy?

- Yes.

Would you claim Arthur Brown for your own.

I mean do you think he's one of you?

Most definitely, yes. Yes.

Um, he seems to speak for the hippies.

# Call out the instigators

# Because there's something in the air...#

It was just kind of a rebellion.

Everybody was still wearing bowler hats in those days, and Britain was very boring.

You know, the national dish was sort of pie and mash with sort of nasty liquor on it,

being served out of things that looked like public toilets.

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore comes along.

Now you can make fun of judges, you can make fun of the Queen and the police.

So it's like Victorian Britain

is finally being dismantled, Queen Victoria has finally gone.

There was a sort of division...

as it were, the pre-war generation, the people who wore suits,

you know, to the people who wear jeans.

MUSIC:
"WHITE RABBIT" by Jefferson Airplane

The whole Haight Ashbury scene in San Francisco, I think it spilled over into this country,

and the alternative culture in America

became the popular culture in this country.

The hippy movement started, and LSD, which had been used originally

for creating better war,

became a tool for opening the heart,

the mind, or at least seeing the heart.

Then the music flowed from that place.

# Remember

# What the Dormouse said

# Feed your head

# Feed your head... #

Turn on, tune in, drop out.

APPLAUSE:

As the world suddenly changed from monochrome to technicolour,

Peter Jenner and Andrew King decided to put on a series of free concerts in Hyde Park in the late 60s.

With the like of Pink Floyd, Roy Harper and the Rolling Stones, the Hyde Park concerts

became a place for the emerging British counterculture to turn on, tune in and drop out.

# Nobody's got any money in the sun

# Oh, dear me, what a terrible drag... #

There's no question that the Hyde Park concerts

happened because we read about there being concerts in San Francisco, in Golden Gate Park.

Hyde Park was beautiful - right by the Serpentine,

and the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, T. Rex,

endless bands which played there -

and it was a very, very beautiful scene.

#..All the folkie student population wearing rucksacks... #

That day in the Cockpit at Hyde Park was amazing.

I'd never played to that amount of people before.

There were 10,000 people there, which was amazing for that period.

It was the high noon of our lives.

#..Than a Chinese wrestler's jockstrap cooked in chip fat

# On a greasy day... #

It was like a mushrooming moment

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