Glastonbury Reminds Me of My First Music Festival
Posted July 31, 2007 
Comments(0) With all the publicity that has been generated recently by the sale of
over 4 Billion tickets to this years Glastonbury Festival I was reminded
of the first festival that I attended as a callow 16 year old youth back
in May 1972.
The festival in question was known nationally as ‘The Great Western
Festival’ locally it was just called ‘Bardney.”
Now Bardney or Tupholme Manor as the site was officially known is a
small village in the middle of nowhere, about 10 miles east of Lincoln.
Some enterprising local had connections in the music industry and
convinced people like the actor Stanley Baker and Lord Harlech to front
the staging of what was then considered to be the biggest festival in
Britain since the Isle of White, where Jimi Hendrix had played to over
100,000 people 2 years before.
I was living with my parents at the time, on one of the many RAF Camps
that Lincolnshire spawned due to the vast expanses of flat land
available for runway development. My folks were conservative with a
small ‘c’ and the thought of their son cavorting in a field with
thousands of stoned hippies was a complete anathema to them, whereas I
couldn’t wait to get to hear the likes of Rory Gallagher, Stone the
Crows, The Faces and Humble Pie amongst many others and set in motion my
plan to get to to the Festival.
RAF Cranwell was only 15 miles from Bardney and myself and a couple of
mates dreamt up a scam that would convince our parents that we would be
going on a school camping trip over the weekend of the festival. We laid
it on thick that we were missing out on some of the biggest names in
Rock music by taking part in school activities. They all bought our
story and all we had to do was find a tent and some doss bags and get
ourselves out to the site. This entailed buses and trains to Lincoln
then we had a 10 mile walk to the site as there was virtually no public
transport, there still isn’t today, but that is another matter altogether.
The long walk to Bardney was akin to being in Alexander the Great’s
army. There were thousands of strange and weird looking people
meandering along the B roads of Lincolnshire much to the amusement of
local folk who were used to seeing tractors and trailers, a few lucky
folk hitched rides, but back then your average Hippie didn’t have a car
so lifts were thin on the ground. I remember getting a glass of water
from an elderly lady who was dispensing the stuff from her front garden,
she was having a ball playing Mum to all these long hairs and she kept
telling everyone to be careful of drug dealers, the fact that she was
probably serving a fair few herself, with hindsight was a delicious irony.
Finally arriving at the site in the late afternoon sun with the sound of
live music welcoming us, we were in Nirvana.
We had come of age, or so we thought and the prospect of seeing so many
bands over the following four days filled us with excitement and
expectation. But first we had to get our tent erected so that we had
somewhere to sleep that night.
Three people in a two man tent sounded fine in the planning stages of
our escapade but the reality was very different. Besides, none of us had
ever gone camping on our own before other than sleeping in a tent in
your Mum and Dad’s back garden with a cooked breakfast to look forward
to in the morning. If it got too cold in the night you could always slip
off to your own cosy bed. Here, in a field miles from home, with tens of
thousands of other revellers we were pushing our comfort parameters to
the limit.
The tent we had was an RAF issue canvas job that my mate Mike had
brought from his Dad’s loft. No fly sheet and a limited number of tent
pegs – ( You can see where this is going can’t you! ). But we got it up,
stashed our borrowed sleeping bags inside and went to watch Rory
Gallagher absolutely blow everyone away with his fearsome slide guitar
and ballsy vocals. We spent the rest of the evening in wide eyed wonder
at all the beautiful girls that seemed to inhabit the planet, but they
all seemed to have some cool freaky guy as a boyfriend and to say we
felt out of place and inadequate was the understatement of the year.
None of us smoked cigarettes back then let alone more esoteric
substances so we naturally got tired and went back to the tent with an
oily hot dog for company. Using the head to toe method of accommodation
we managed to squeeze ourselves into our canvas cocoon and laughably
tried to get some sleep.
It appeared to us that we were the only people who were going to try and
sleep that night. Parties raged all around the site with tuneless
guitars being passed to ever more incompetent guitarists while stoned
freaks tripped over the guide ropes of our tent in the search for their
own homes.
It was the that it started to rain!!! And it didn’t stop raining for the
next three days. The site became a bog, the toilets overflowed into the
camp site proper and our tent resembled a triangular piece of swollen
blotting paper containing three very unhappy young boys who needed a hot
bath and some TLC.
As for the rest of my stay in Bardney I vaguely remember seeing Roxy
Music’s debut, Rod Stewart kicking footballs into the crowd, Sha Na Na
doing Doo Wop songs, Joe Cocker being supported by his roadie he was so
out of it, Maggie Bell from Stone the Crows singing as if the world were
about to end and the Monty Python team doing the lumberjack song. The
temperature had dropped dramatically and we just didn’t have enough
clothes with us to get warm – Gortex was just a glint in a designer’s
eye back then and black bin liners were only used in Space – so we
decide to abort on the afternoon of day three, tramp back to Lincoln and
explain to out parents why the school trip had been curtailed and why we
looked so desperate for a good meal.
I tried one more festival many years later in Reading, but like the
taste of cider, which I always associate with being violently ill, I
found the atmosphere contrived and a bit sad, this despite being able to
anaesthetise myself against the hardships.
Now in my early 50’s I play in a band for fun and the only camping I do
is on stage.
Author: Paul Kennedy
Baby Boomer Years
