Festivals Britannia Page #6

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And what's more, on the Queen's back door step!

I went down there with a couple of mates. We hitched down there with a little old army tent.

Eventually got to Windsor station, and as we left the railway station there was just a line of hippies,

all the way down through the town, off to the Great Park.

And there were joints going backwards and forwards.

You'd take a puff and pass it on.

As we arrived on the Great Park,

there were Hawkwind playing on the grass. It was just... It was like going home.

MUSIC:
"Psychedelic Warlords (Disappear In Smoke)" by Hawkwind

# Sick of politicians, harassment and laws

# All we do is get screwed up by other people's flaws... #

At Windsor we had a chap who turned up with a briefcase.

Came up to me and said, "Do you stage manage?"

I said, "No, I'm just doing the lights. I don't know what a stage manager is actually."

And he said, "I've got this to give out." And I was going, "Oh, right."

You could see out across this great swathe of the audience at Windsor.

And I was thinking, hmm. Between numbers I said, "There's a chap here that's got some...

"if anybody would like something to get high on, just come to the front of the stage."

And there was a huge... People started getting up one by one and it just got mad.

We had to withdraw.

The singer pointed out to the crowd there was a drug squad officer walking through the crowd.

Again, we weren't prepared for the level of response.

About 500 people started moving towards this guy, who promptly legged it.

Pulled out his radio - what a giveaway -

Black Mariah pulled up on the road 200 yards away,

and I'd never seen anybody cross 200 yards faster in all my life, with 400 irate hippies chasing him!

I think Windsor set out to be a carnival festival, but also a political statement.

If you want to really get up the nose of the authorities, have a carnival in the Queen's back garden.

It was very funny, very amusing. But as usual, the pawns got hurt.

What had started out as a bit of fun quickly turned sour when, in 1974,

a bemused Government decided they could no longer ignore this growing movement.

Obviously somebody had decided they needed to show the hippies a lesson or two.

NEWSREEL:
'The police were among the fans before most of them knew it.

'When the young people wakened up to what was happening to them,

'most accepted the inevitable and left then.

'But a large minority resisted, first by forming percussion

'groups in front of unappreciative lines of policemen.'

NEWSREEL:
'There have been 1,002 other convictions.

'As a result, both the Berkshire County Council and the Maidenhead

'and Windsor Borough Council, took the view they had a duty

'to take all possible steps to prevent a recurrence of such a deplorable event.'

They moved in at dawn, and they were just waking people up, smashing down tents.

They were pretty angry, I would say.

They wanted to re-establish their authority.

Or perhaps the Queen had said, "Get those squatters out of my garden!"

So what happened after Windsor was that there was a negotiated deal.

It was obvious they realised that they had gone too far.

And they gave us this huge RAF base called Watchfield in 1975.

NEWSREEL:
'Meanwhile, in Watchfield village, Oxfordshire, the locals citizens prepare for a long siege.'

MUSIC:
"Paranoid" by Black Sabbath

It's perhaps to be expected that the people of Watchfield, particularly

the older ones, don't like the idea of the festival one little bit.

Well, the general reaction is pure unadulerated shock and disgust.

It was a bit odd to see police wandering around, because

that was part of the deal - we had to have police on site.

I remember once somebody, some naked guy, standing in front of

three policemen, directing a hundred hippies holding hands, dancing around them in an anti-clockwise direction

to sort of take away all their bad vibes. I mean, it was all light-hearted really.

We actually played for something like seven hours that night, and there were maybe 20,000 people.

And they just did not stop.

It was an all-night party right through till dawn, till

the blisters on my fingers got too much to handle.

It felt a bit artificial -

probably because it was.

It didn't...

because it had had this sort of Government sanction and it had been allocated a spot,

this airfield, it didn't have quite the same feeling of spontaneity

as some of the other festivals. It felt a little odd.

At Watchfield, the freaks, mystics and nomads had been given space to do as they pleased.

But it was on the Government's terms, and not a particularly inspiring site.

The search continued for a spiritual home for the free festival movement.

ATMOSPHERIC MUSIC

Stonehenge was a bit of neutral territory.

And in a way that opened it up for the hippies to come and say, "Well, we lay claim to it."

And in a way the establishment couldn't argue with us, because they had no idea what Stonehenge was.

At that time Stonehenge was still just a pile of stones in

the middle of England that no-one actually cared very much about.

It doesn't belong to the Army. It certainly doesn't belong to...

the Ancient Order of Druids dating back to 1907.

It didn't belong to us either.

But we sort of had an Englishman's right to our prehistoric heritage of weirdness.

That's why Stonehenge is so important - it's there!

It's Stonehenge.

It shouldn't be there. What the hell is it?!

And then the sun rose above the horizon, a spark of light.

And I was feeling... I'd been up for about...

And I suddenly came alive.

I suddenly felt really energised.

And there were tears running down me face.

You know, I was completely amazed by the effects.

And everybody around me had these looks of wonder and joy on their faces as the sun came up.

It came a focus for people who were fairly extreme...

in their views.

People who thought that everything should be free,

and that society should be changed entirely.

The whole basis for society should be looked at.

When you're trying to create an alternative society,

you look back to a time when

maybe society wasn't so structured.

There's always been this sort of...

I suppose people harking back to the old days, or some sort of,

you know, trying to get in touch with their culture, do you know what I mean?

Trying to get in touch with something that's a bit older than

Tescos and whatever else is going around.

And I think there was just this general feeling that Stonehenge stood for something.

The Stonehenge festivals in the mid '70s were as much about community as they were about music.

People didn't go to see rock stars, but rather

to restore a spirit of freedom they couldn't find anywhere else.

The free festival movement had finally arrived.

To watch people arrive at Stonehenge Festival,

and to see them a week after they'd been there, to watch the change in their face, to watch

women just become beautiful - do you know what I mean?

And men just become handsome, all the stress and worry just falls off them

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