The Rise Of Festival Culture
Free"n"Easy - The rise of festival culture
Although festivals of many types, including popular music festivals, had been around since the 1950s, it was in the late 1960s that these developed into a focal point for psychedelic drug use. The first "be in" was in San Francisco, with the "Acid Tests", where LSD was distributed to all comers in "Kool aid" soft drinks by Kesey and his tribe, from which the concept of free festivals was born. Monterey and Woodstock in the states, Hyde Park and the Isle of Wight in the UK were events which crystallized the 60s culture. It was the Isle of Wight in particular, outside the main arena with Hawkwind playing naked to the crowd, where the Free Festival movement was born. The early 1970s saw the Windsor festival crushed by the police, the compromise Watchfield site - a disused military aerodrome - in 1975, and the mother of all festivals, Stonehenge, from 1973 to 1984.
Stonehenge 1984 lasted a whole month, and at the peak around solstice there were 20,000 to 100,000 people present, depending on whose estimates you believe. The heroin dealers had been run out of the site before the main influx, although LSD, cannabis and speed were sold openly (and vociferously) all over the site. Around 500 festivalgoers who were drug users completed questionnaires about their drug usage, and over 70% of these had used LSD and/or Magic Mushrooms, most of these doing so occasionally, and those describing themselves as pagan doing so most of all. Half of the users at Stonehenge intended to use LSD at the festival, at Glastonbury the same year roughly on third intended to do so. The main reasons people went to festivals were the atmosphere and people present, followed by music and drugs.
By 1984, the Free Festival scene had blossomed into a summer-long phenomenon, with festivals every weekend from April to October. A core group of travellers had formed, spending the summer moving between festivals and the winter parked up in small sites all over the U.K. They travelled together between festivals and became known as the Peace Convoy, attracting wild stories from the tabloid press. When there was no festival, the tribe moved to protest camps at Porton Down, the chemical warfare establishment, Greenham Common from which the permanent Wimmins Peace camp developed, and Molesworth, at which the first violent eviction occurred, complete with Michael Heseltine in famous flak-jacket. A further "trashing" of the convoy following a festival at Nostell Priory near Wakefield scattered the tribe into smaller groups.
The late 1980s saw the Free Festival movement attacked by the Thatcher government with a series of new laws aimed at "new age travellers". Chief of these was the Public Order Act 1986, which gave police new powers to restrict assemblies and processions. Each June saw a major police operation to prevent the Stonehenge festival from happening, with violent confrontations, particularly in 1985 (Battle of the Beanfield) and 1988.
Since the demise of Stonehenge and the Free Festivals, Glastonbury has become the focal point of the festival culture. Massive organisation, planning and commercial activity characterise the festival, a far cry from the self-sufficiency and cooperative spontaneity of Stonehenge. Faced with an influx of refugees from the Stonehenge evictions, Michael Eavis, organiser of the festival, allowed the travellers a free field during the late 1980s and early 1990s, until his insurers and the local authority baulked at the prospect of the travellers being on site, since when they have not been officially welcome. Confrontations between the travellers and festival security hardly helped the atmosphere.
