They don't seem to have too much in common, Isle of Wight and rave party. Of course, both are symbols of youthful freedom and the desire to build a different way of being together starting from music. But they are separated by approximately thirty years of profound transformations in British society. Most of the hippie and curious people who on 26 August 1970 crossed the fence of the last edition of the “European Woodstock” (clandestinely immortalized by the writing “Entrance is everywhere”, later removed) would perhaps have considered with concern, decades later, the population of night owls who gathered in fields and abandoned industrial areas to dance until dawn hypnotized by the hardcore techno. Different eras, different musical horizons, even different drugs.
Yet, an unbroken thread links these two generational totems, running through the musical and countercultural history of the United Kingdom. It is a continuity that arises in thatunderground where the boundaries between progressive rock and late psychedelia are more blurred, it explores the possibilities of early electronics, is renewed with the advent of punk and brings it together with the nascent new age. And then he discovers music trance before it has a name, to finally connect to the beat synthetics of that dance of which a radical alternative was once imagined.
Net of the first expressions (Beckenham and Cambridge, 1969; Phun City, July 1970), the history of free festival has a clearly identifiable symbolic debut: 27 August 1970, on the occasion of the third musical gathering on the Isle of Wight. In the tent city outside the fenced area that welcomes the paying public, who came to see famous names of the scene of the time (from Supertramp to Chicago, from Doors and Donovan to Miles Davis, Pentangle and Joni Mitchell), three bands set up a semi-improvised stage, playing for free for those who chose to attend the concerts from afar. These are hot namesunderground of the period: Hawkwind, Pink Fairies, T2. Their performance they cover a much shorter duration than the official five days, and the watts at their disposal do not rival the system that amplifies the music of Jimi Hendrix, Emerson Lake & Palmer and The Who. But the noise produced (however considerable, given the protagonists) is not as disruptive as the idea conveyed: the union between the market and pop music can be broken, even if only for the duration of a festival.
The developments are not long in coming, and this time in style. The Glastonbury festival debuted on 19 September 1970, with a £1 ticket which would then be reset to zero in the following edition. There event is held in a place – the Somerset plain – full of ancient and new mythologies, and the organizers are inspired by cult book “The View Over Atlantis”, released in 1969, to connect the gathering to megalithic rituals, Arthurian legends and mystical geometries obtained by intersecting ley lines. The stage on which the artists perform is a pyramid with clear esoteric references, which over the years will be scaled up and gradually enlarged to host first Kinks, Marc Bolan and Quintessence, then Hawkwind, Traffic, Gong, David Bowie, Peter Gabriel… Up to the present day with Coldplay, Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar (and admission prices completely comparable to other major European festivals).
During the 1970s, the free festival circuit looked beyond the growing hypertrophy of Glastonbury, creating a myriad of smaller festivals and events of national resonance, such as the Windsor Free Festival (held between 1972 and 1974, illegally occupying part of the royal estate in west London) and, from 1972 to 1984, the Stonehenge Free Festival.
The bands that perform at these events are many and varied, but a group of recurring names stands out and ends up defining the expectations with respect to “free festival music”: in addition to the “founders” Hawkwind and Pink Fairies (to which at least Arthur Brown and the Edgar Broughton Band should also be added), among the habitue the most significant ones certainly include Gong, East Of Eden, Quintessence, Third Ear Band. Formations with one foot in what we now call progressive rock (but at the time the term was less identifying) and one in the long tail of psychedelia, in electronic space rock or inunderground louder; sometimes even in a mysticism that combines fascinations ethno to a stable lysergic diet.
Music, however, is not the only soul of these gatherings, nor perhaps it is really the main one. What pushes the nascent festival population to cross Great Britain to reach increasingly rural destinations is above all the community climate that characterizes the events, which on some occasions last for weeks and are accompanied by the birth of small towns of tents and caravans where it is easy to find food, spiritual advice, handicraft products made on site, drugs or help with practical chores.
While the duration and abundance of the festivals increased, the concern of the institutions also increased, and in 1974 the British police raided the almost ten thousand people present on the sixth day of the Windsor gathering, arresting the participants who refused to disperse. The heated public debate pushed the Labor government led by Harold Wilson to identify one the following year location where performances can take place in an authorized manner: the Watchfield People's Free Festival thus took place in 1975, which from 1976 merged with the Stonehenge festival (no longer with government authorization).
The progress of the seventies brought some changes to the music of free festivals and to its audience: just as the sound and the subculture acquire their own identity, economic uncertainty and the punk wave rock the scene. TO hippies And freak of the first hour are added squatters more or less young, animated by an often more impetuous and oppositional spirit. Integration between audiences is not always simple, but interesting musical experiences arise from the contamination, such as the very present Here & Now (somewhere between Canterbury and This Heat) or the ramshackle Astronauts (prog-wave hybrid with something from the Fall, something from Devo and the right amount of Stranglers and Gong).
In the early eighties, that of free festival it can no longer be labeled as fashion: it is to all intents and purposes a transgenerational culture, which is organizing itself into imposing structures and giving life to caravans of vehicles that move from one event to another during the summer season. Gathering over time also people pushed towards a nomadic life by the rising unemployment of the Thatcher era, the groups of travelers took the form of permanent communities: the movement of new age travellerof which music festivals are at this point a simple element of condensation. In telling the story of the phenomenon through testimonies, the BBC documentary from the Timeshift series, broadcast in 2004, identifies the spirit of mutual trust and support as the unifying factor of these partially self-sufficient micro-societies (pejoratively renamed crusties – crusty – come on tabloid).
In the middle of the decade, the proportions reached once again aroused the attention of the government, which once again unleashed its armed wing in the so-called “Battle of the Beanfield”: on June 1, 1985, around six hundred traveller of the Peace Convoy encounter the roadblock of thirteen hundred policemen set up to prevent the establishment of the Stonehenge festival. The ensuing clashes, violently conducted by the police, lead to numerous injuries and the largest mass arrest since the Second World War: 537 people were arrested. The following year, the parliament with a conservative majority promulgated the Public Order Act which expanded the police's power to break up unauthorized “public processions” and remove potential “intruders” (trespasser) in public and private properties. A measure deliberately hostile to free festivals and New Age Travellers, which marks a point of no return for the stability of the movement.
Although the fabric that connects festivals and traveller as it disintegrated throughout the 1980s, the period marked a great musical enrichment for the subculture. The punk-inspired formations acquire centrality, thanks above all to the role of the anarcho-punk Crass and, later, the Celtic punk-rock of the Levellers (inspired by the seventeenth-century proto-socialist movement of the Levellers). The psychedelic imprint remains evident in Cardiacs and bands of the time (Ad Nauseam, Poisoned Electrick Head) as well as in groups like Solstice, which the music and record press try to frame as neoprogressive due to their proximity to Renaissance and Curved Air, and which witnesses of the time nevertheless present as “stoners” (stoners) and “the last of the great hippie bands”.
Above all, however, from melting pot of very late psychedelia, new age electronics, echoes space children of the Hawkwind, spirit do-it-yourself and prog references emerges an emblematic style, of which the jam band of the Ozric Tentacles is the mandatory model. The fulcrum of the new aesthetic are long and trippy instrumental evolutions that combine distortions and sequencerabounding in rhythmic stratifications, odd tempos and exoticisms. A trance rock electronic music that will make handfuls of proselytes: Omnia Opera, Mandragora, Magic Mushroom Band, Webcore, Nukli, Ullulators, Oroonies, Nodens Ictus… And surprisingly it will arrive at the beginning of the Nineties to “pierce” the mainstreamputting the album “Jurassic Shift” (1993) on the charts for four weeks.
It's easy to imagine that these hypnotic sounds and their context of use served as inspiration, along with the nascent one hardcore technofor the new generation of musicians and enthusiasts responsible for the cultural boom in the early nineties rave. Once again, the continuum sprouted at the end of the 1960s and found new life thanks to an unexpected influx of audiences, stimuli and technologies. If i raver they bring with them sounds, drugs and new solutions (is it forbidden to camp outside your own land for a long time? then the events will only last one night!), the experienced traveller can offer a spirit of welcome and a ten-year anniversary expertise. The fluid collective Spiral Tribe is, with its multiple buddings, the soundsystem which more than anyone popularizes cultural syncretism freeteknoand it is also the one that pays the price the most when a new security tightening comes to crush the spread of the movement.
The Castlemorton festival, at the end of May 1992, is the largest free musical gathering since the Stonehenge gatherings and ends with the arrest of thirteen members of the Spiral Tribe. The media trail left by the event will allow the Major government to introduce the Criminal Justice And Public Order Act in 1994, containing the well-known ban on holding gatherings of twenty or more people in which the music includes “sounds wholly or mainly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. The same year, in response, Autechre will release the EP “Anti”, an unpredictable flow of IDM dysrhythmias specifically designed to evade the prohibition. But that's another story and will have to be told another time.
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
