Festivals Britannia Page #4

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That was why I went there.

And he was absolutely amazing.

Absolutely out of this world. On another planet.

You know, Hendrix...

that was just blistering.

He put stuff together so perfectly off the top of his head, you know?

# Well, I stand up next to a mountain

# I chop it down with the edge of my hand... #

#..Well, I stand up next to a mountain

# Chop it down with the edge of my hand... #

The bit that I do remember is a firework going up

at the end of Hendrix, when it looked like the stage was on fire,

and it went up into the roof of the stage,

and there was clouds of smoke billowing out.

And somebody's on the mic, saying,

"The stage is on fire, the stage is on fire.

"Can we have a fire appliance here? The stage is on fire."

Sort of this droning voice going on.

And my heart sank at that point. I thought, "Well, this is it.

"The stage is going to burn down. This is the end of it."

# This is the end Beautiful friend... #

Outside the perimeter fence, the number of disgruntled people

unwilling to pay entry was growing by the day.

As makeshift shantytowns emerged,

the area became known as Desolation Row.

Everybody had gone into these trees that were all overgrown

and higgledy-piggledy, and they built themselves little shelters in there.

So you had the place teeming with Hobbits that

were all living in the lane.

And in fact, you had a better view of the stage from the hill

than you did from the enclosure, where you had to pay.

So we put out a flyer about this, then all hell broke loose.

The hippy ideology of free music was about to come face to face

with the commercial reality of the Isle of Wight,

and the fence became a potent symbol of that divide.

You will not be allowed in without a ticket,

so please have a ticket. Have it ready to show the stewards.

There was this anarchic sort of feeling about the whole thing,

where people were saying, "Well, this is a rip-off.

"Tear the walls down. It should be free."

They weren't taking into account that perhaps the whole thing cost a lot of money to put on.

We're coming in the shadow of Woodstock here in 1970,

which had been declared free and had been thought to be an amazingly cool event,

because it was free, and that we were uncool because we weren't free.

So there was that comparison some would make,

including one of the people that spoke from the stage.

I've been to Woodstock, and I dug it very much.

I've been to about ten f***ing festivals, and I love music.

I just think one thing -

this festival business is becoming a psychedelic concentration camp!

It was like a sort of a cattle market inside the walls, and then there were

all these French anarchists saying, "Tear down the walls!"

It really was like the barbarians attacking the gate.

It was somewhere between chaos, anarchy and Monty Python.

# No reason to get excited

# The thief he kindly spoke... #

We've got no money for the artists! What are we going to do?

I could see it from the stage.

You'd see it burning in the distance.

You've got to understand, it's, like, half a mile away.

But even when I finished a song, I could hear

the Celtic nations going at it.

I could tell. It was just like Braveheart or something.

On its last day, the festival was declared free,

and despite it being a triumph musically,

many left the Isle of Wight with a sour taste in their mouth.

# All along the watchtower... #

It was in the end destroyed in a sense by the anarchy thing,

and they blew it. In a sense,

the world changed after that. In my mind,

the Isle of Wight was the end of something rather than the beginning of something.

At the end of that festival, I was standing inside, having got inside,

in front of the main stage there in literally about two or three feet

of beer cans and kicking them around and thinking to myself,

"There's got to be a better way of doing a festival than this,"

because, basically, no-one was happy.

You know, the bands weren't happy, the management weren't happy,

the people weren't happy, and it was a clash of ideals.

# As gentle times... #

#..Go rolling... #

As a new era dawned, an aristocratic hippy by the name of Andrew Kerr

had an idea that he hoped would reconnect festivals

with Britain's ancient, more spiritual past.

I was very keen that the thing should be peaceful

and it should be a spiritual revival. That's what I was after.

And because I saw the spirit in the crowd at the Isle of Wight,

let's reproduce it when the money isn't involved with it.

Do you see what I mean?

# Together in the sand... #

I think Andrew Kerr was the first who decided that

this was a sort of place for a gathering on a huge scale,

which should be free to everybody.

If you ever climb the Tor on a misty day and you find yourself

up in the clouds above the rest of the world, islands popping up

out of the sea, as it were, it's an extraordinary sight.

#..Do send their distant call... #

If ever there was to be a sort of rebirth

of the spiritual nature of Britain,

then it should be at the spiritual heart of the country, in Glastonbury.

Having found the perfect location, it was suggested Andrew get in touch

with a local dairy farmer who had put on a festival at his farm

in Pilton the previous year.

He was a strange hippy, but he was quite a good-looking one,

and he was quite charming, and it didn't take much convincing.

I think we almost immediately got on, and I said,

"Look, I want to put on this festival.

"It's going to be free, all the bands are going to play for nothing,

"and it's going to be absolutely beautiful."

I mean, there was three or four of us that were involved with it, and it was quite a romantic idea.

Basically, Arabella came into some money,

and she virtually paid for it,

so the three of us, I suppose, financed it, really.

So it wasn't really free, it was just free

to the people that came to it.

And they really believed that they were going to change the world.

But they were pretty stoned, though, that's the thing.

I mentioned wandering around through the surrounding

cornfields before, and there's still one or two people doing it.

Probably they're all out of their heads, anyway, tripped out completely.

The thing about Glastonbury Fayre, really the very first one, was it was just f***ing magical.

We came past the farm and over and looked down into the valley.

There was the Pyramid Stage, all lit up,

and Traffic just out there playing music.

# Let me in, baby I don't know what you got

# But you'd better take it easy Cos this place is hot

# And I'm so glad we made it

# So glad we made it

# You gotta gimme, gimme, gimme some lovin'... #

It was like, "Wow!" You know?

"Is this for real?" You know?

Cos this is what we wanted.

Turn the bass drum down a bit!

Glastonbury Fayre in 1971 was a free-festival experiment.

It was to be more than just a free concert in a field.

A uniquely British blend of spirituality, LSD and pop culture

combined to create something truly original.

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