MUSIC FESTIVALS

It’s a strangely sunny day in the UK and you’re queueing up under the blazing sun; ticket available with a couple thumbs on your phone. There’s litter on the floor – from colourful and silver wrappers, to cans of cheap beer, and mini glass bottles of all sorts of spirits. When you’re finally in, you stroll through the mud or perhaps the grass. You need to use your hand as a visor, but you don’t care. The sun is out, the drunks are already on the loose, and if you’re lucky you might end up seeing your favourite musicians live; if you’re not, someone may spill a drink on you while you run towards the right stage. Anyway, it’s still early and even though the food smells delicious you try to save yourself for a £15 sloppy kebab or a £20 greasy burger in the evening after waiting in another never-ending queue.

But it’s okay. We’re here for the experience, right? Everything seems fine and dandy until you find yourself in front of an overflowing toilet bowl, holding your breath, and wishing that sticky liquid on the floor is not what you’re thinking. It’s taken you thirty full minutes to finally get in the portaloo, so you might as well make the most of it. Just be careful not to touch anything because the tap is dry and you won’t be able to wash your hands until you get home... if you manage to get a taxi, or after a your fourteenth queue of the day to hop on the train or just drive out the very congested area in the middle of nowhere.

Music festivals are not for the faint-hearted. At least they didn’t use to be. It was a lot of camping in the mud, hearing your tent neighbours doing gymnastics at 3am, waking up to the sound of a drunken gang at 8, or queuing up for a quick and cold shower – if you were extra lucky. They used to be about music and sharing. At some point we added splurging on a flat soft drink or a cold pint and dreading every and each toilet time to the least. At least you could afford it without having to sacrifice any other summer plans. In the last few years, they’ve changed to cater all kinds of audiences, including sit-down restaurants, wellness talks, and VIP experiences that can only be afforded by those who would rather glamp than camp. This inevitably begs the question: has music become secondary?

The first music festival in British soil was Isle of Wight. Inspired by the legendary Woodstock in the United States, a group of young entrepreneurs sought to replicate the communal spirit and musical revelry on this side of the globe. The inaugural Isle of Wight Festival drew an estimated 10,000 attendees – a modest number compared to the behemoth festivals of today. It was new and shiny and grimy and grungy all in one during a short-lived period of three years which saw iconic artists such as Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Joni Mitchell and The Who amongst others joining the line-up. People wanted a place to be themselves and live a few days in a self-made utopia full of music (and sometimes substances). Pictures of the scene show a great muddy field dotted with thousands of tents – a communal haven for newly-born music festival punters. But the idea of sharing peace and love vanished when those who wanted to join for free stormed in and made Mitchell cry on a Sunday as they smashed the fences. It was not until 2002, when music promoter John Giddings seized the opportunity to re-launch it, that it became what we know today: a hodgepodge of music and escapism across the water, with the possibility of paying £110 each for a pre-erected tent.

Marnie and Andy Burden have been in the music festival scene since the Stonehenge Festival in 1984, which Andy describes as “Life-changing anarchy in action”. Besides attending many of the grassroots festivals like Horse Drawn or Surplus as well as larger festivals like Equinox, Bloodstock, or Download, they play across the UK and Europe with bands like The System.

“There is a radical difference between the smaller grassroots festivals and the larger more corporate events. The smaller events that we attend all operate on a more cooperative DIY basis,” they say. “It’s really an extension of the old school free festival scene that was prevalent in the late 70s - early 80s. “You see the same faces at these events. It’s like a family gathering, bands, and punters all camping and mixing together. The old free festival motto of ‘bring whatever you expect to find’ still rings true.” Their son was into the Nu-Metal scene, so Download became their family holiday for a few years in the early-mid 2000s. They would take him and his mates and camp on the live-in vehicle field. “It’s always like a smaller festival within a festival if you know what I mean, making it easy to get away from the crowds if you wanted to.”

Music festivals originate from sharing your taste and spending a few days living in community. But they’ve always had a notorious reputation for the prevalence of drugs and unruly behaviour too. Maybe it all kicked off with the virtual ambush that was the Battle of the Beanfield back in ‘85. But to understand this it’s important to look back a little bit further, to the swinging ‘60s and ‘70s when free festivals such as Windsor Free Festival, Elephant Fayres, Stonehenge Free Festival, and the early Glastonbury Festival emerged. These gatherings saw a whole new movement sprouting up, centred around travelling about and trading.

After a few years, this movement got a name and became known as New Age travellers. Embracing an alternative way of life, they chose to live in vans, lorries, and even buses. But not everyone was keen on what they deemed to be “rebellious ways” and they became social outcasts – some even called them derogatory terms like “crusties” (which many now embrace). They moved in convoys and sometimes got involved in political matters like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which gave some of them

Their political believes and lifestyle put them in the limelight. A night of violence in 80s Stonehenge that wrecked the whole weekend’s experience put the cherry on top for those who were against this freefor-all congregation. On the festival’s Saturday night, after a chilled start, a group of bikers went on a rampage, attacking every punk they could lay hands on. When punk band The Epileptics took the stage, they were automatically greeted with a hail of flourbombs, cans, and bottles. Then the bikers set fire to the band’s banner and attacked the members of anarchist bands Crass and Poison Girls and stopped them from performing from performing. As Penny Rimbaud, a member of the band wrote, “the predominantly hippy gathering, lost in the soft blur of their stoned reality, remained oblivious” of the fate of the event and of what would originate after it.

So, now back to the Battle of the Beanfield. 1985, Wiltshire, England. The scene had already been set a few years before. The year prior, the Department of the Environment had passed management of Stonehenge and the surrounding land to English Heritage after complaints by landowners of the festival damaging archaeological sites, trespassing, drug use, and public nudity in rivers. As a result, a high court injunction was issued, preventing the 1985 Stonehenge Free Festival from taking place. On the day of the festival, 1,300 police officers swooped in and rained on the spirited travellers’ parade. It was like a classic showdown, straight out of the wild west, except this time it was happening on British soil.

“Everyone knew it wasn’t going to be easy this year but everyone hoped it could happen somewhere close if not in the National Trust fields which had been used in previous years. No one expected that ambush to be as brutal as it turned out,” recalls Andy, who had arranged meeting up with some friends for the festival. “I tried to be clever and approach Stonehenge from the West but got stopped and told to turn round or be arrested at the edge of the four-mile exclusion zone put in place, the copper who turned us round told us what was happening at the Beanfield and said ‘The convoy is over, go home, there’s going to be no festival this year’.”

What started with a roadblock took a dramatic turn when the travellers decided to ram their vehicles into the police cars. A window-smashing spree ensued, with police making arrests left, right, and centre followed by a standoff. It was the most brutal police treatment of people, as ITN reported that some people had been clubbed by police.

“What happened at the Beanfield affected a lot of people, some of our friends gave up on the festival circuit after that, we still occasionally see people who were present in the Beanfield that day and you can tell it’s had a long-lasting effect on them, probably PTSD,” tells Andy, who had to wait until the next morning to read what had happened in a local newspaper.

So, the Peace Convoy was met with violence and