ACFM - ACFM Trip 36: Festivals

Episode Date: September 3, 2023

Festivals. The perfect embodiment of the ACFM aesthetic, and even social politics… or are they? As the season comes to a close, Nadia, Jem and Keir ask themselves what festivals are really about. Is it music? Camping? The breakdown of everyday hierachies? Or is it just 20,000 people standing in a field? With help from […]

Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left, and I'm joined by my very dear friends, Nadia Iddle, and I'm joined by my very dear friends, Nadia Idol, Hello. And Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And this episode, this trip, we're discussing the seasonal topic of festivals. So why are we talking about festivals more than just because it's the summer? Well, I think partly because it's the summer. I mean, we're partly talking about festivals because it's the summer,

but also because this is one of the first summers. I mean, maybe, you know, 2022 a little bit, but there's the return of the festivals in terms of people being able to go to them after the pandemic, et cetera. But also there's all these really interesting things about UK festivals like where they sit and the imaginary and how they function and also the kind of people that they make us. So those are some of the very sort of little reasons why I'm interested in festivals. We'll get into some of the big questions later.

Notorious festival hater Jeremy Gilbert. What have you got to say for yourself? Well, it's always a fascinating topic because, clearly on paper the festival, the music festival ought to be the cultural form which expresses the ACFM aesthetic and even its social politics the most perfectly. But as I have commented on the show before, I have severe doubts about the whole sort of format of the modern music festival as to whether it really can deliver what it purports to. And that at least is an interesting topic to explore. And also, there is something unique about the status of music festivals,

really just because of the unique status of Glastonbury in the British cultural imaginary, I think, which is interesting to think about. I mean, other countries have festivals and other countries have all kinds of festivals, and there are festivals that are not music festivals, but nowhere else has something quite like Glastonbury, like that plays the role that it does in our national imaginary for better or worse. So that is an interesting topic in itself to explore, I think, when we get around to it. I mean, also, we did a couple of months ago, recorded an episode about the Great Outdoors. Very good episode it was too.

But then we started talking about festivals and just sort of reminded me anyway of that. There's a really interesting history about festivals and free festivals that runs from like the 50s up to, honestly, to be honest, I'd say like the mid-90s or something. but it's a very interesting history that's not known about and it reminded me how formative trips to free festivals, well, and to Glastonbury, places like that, were when I was a young whippersnapper. So in some ways, it's a little bit of nostalgia for the middle-aged, which is basically what Glastonbury is now, isn't it?

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If you want to support ACFM and the wider work that Novara do, please, please, please, go to Navarra Media slash support and donate. I think they always say an hour's wage, if it's too hard to work out, you can pay what you like. announcements over. Parish notice is done. Let's get back to the topic. Well, first I suppose we have to define what is a festival because obviously when we started thinking about this and when people first hear the phrase, what these days, what they think you mean is indeed a music, a particular type of music festival that really derives from the rock music festivals of the 70s. Whereas, of course, the term festival can have a much wider meaning. I mean, to some

extent etymologically it's it's generally inseparable from just a wider notion of celebration of a collective celebration of some kind that's that's what it means you know historically as we I guess as we all know even most archaeologists and paleoanthropologists presume even prehistoricly the humans have organized time and their experience of the year and the calendar and the lifestyle around these particular events, particular moments when ordinary working activity is suspended in favour of various kinds of celebratory activity and festival can just be, it can just be a term for those, like, religious festivals. One's a lot more conscious of this, I think, if you're in like a Catholic country in Europe,

for example, than if you're in a Protestant country, because you still have all these saint days and the feast of the assumption and will be in a couple of weeks. and mid-August and all this sort of thing. Whereas here, in Britain, you know, the residual equivalent of the old festivals calendar is now the calendar of public holidays,

which in Britain I'll refer to as bank holidays, because what matters in Britain is whether the banks are closed or not. The thing that distinguishes, I think, is that the difference between those kind of religious festivities or those kind of festivals and the modern phenomenon of the music festival in Britain

is that with a music festival, you go away to it. It's not something that happens in your town, and I think that's significant. Yeah, it is. That'll probably be one of the things I think is wrong with it. I can assure you now that will be one of the things I think is wrong with it. I think it is useful to situate music festivals amongst what is a longer tradition, and it's hard to untangle that tradition of festivals and festivities,

because they were sort of overlaid by Christian holidays and Christian. festivals, weren't they, which then get overlaid by like bank holidays and these sorts of official days off. But like, yeah, festivals, there's something around them about them being at the time where there's an excess of food, basically, you know, so it's like a suspension

of the normal time in which you indulge in, well, not always an excessive behaviour, but even something like Harvest festivals, which are celebrated in Sea of E, I think, is it's, I don't know, I'm not really a churchy man. you hardly ever go I hardly ever go anymore

I've skipped even song a couple of times just to special occasions just especially when you say C of E just for like the non brought up as a Christian person here and any listeners is this is Church of England

right it is Church of England I do have to stop and think when people say that no well you're right which for American or Canadian listeners would mean Episcopadian but that being the established church

of this country still, technically. Yeah. But with the idea that, you know, of all religions, it's probably the least religious one. They don't like to mention things like, you know, belief and so forth. We should do a whole episode about Anglicanism one day. It's such a weird phenomenon. So one of the, like this stonehenge, so this big megalith stone circle in Wiltshire. Is it in Wiltshire? Yeah, it is. Yeah. But, you know, as far as archaeologists can work out, Stonehenge was some sort of festival,

probably religious festival. You know, it definitely is linked to the summer solstice because the signs, the stones line up, there's a line. You mean it was the site of a festival? It was the site of festivities, they think, because of all of the, like, the animal bones that are discovered there and so forth. And, yeah, it seemed to be of a size in which it would seem to play a particularly big role in holding together particular social structure.

The symbolic structure of all of that is gone. It's rotted away, but that's what we can make out from. The mineral remains. Yeah, so there is a long history of festivals of that sort, but there are also other sorts of festivals such as like arts festivals, like the Edinburgh Festival and particularly the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I think technically one refers to it as the Festival Fringe. Yes, I can say it.

Oh, I see. Sorry. It is the fringe of the official festival, which one goes to attend. That mention of Anglicism is, it's making a bit loose in my diction. Like the conference fring, there's two things that have a fringe, and that is the Edinburgh Festival and Labour Party Conference. Right. Okay. So, but what brings, what all of these have in common so far is what we're talking, we're mostly talking about the summer. And this point really interests me because of this idea that it's very much linked to the climate, the kind of temperate, it's wet and unpredictable, but more or less a temperate climate that we live in with four seasons, right? And then the summer is when you get the festivals. Obviously, in other places in the world, this is not necessarily the case, because people relate to the summer and the climate differently. Obviously, in very hot countries, the summer is when you go indoors and you don't celebrate things like that. But it seems.

to be that in Britain, even, you know, whether it's Edinburgh or whether it's, you know, Hay on Y or, you know, going back all the way to Stonehenge, etc. This is stuff that happens in the summer. Of course, there are winter festivities, but they're not thought of, I think, in the modern imaginary, the same way as a festival, and therefore in the lineage that brings us all the way up to Glastonbury and the modern music festivals. And I find that really interesting, because it's very much linked to place. that's true and the place where i always think of as having much more of that kind of festival

is france i was saying this when we were preparing notes for this show like in in france over the whole summer really the whole of july and august like all over the country every every place or every whatever side will be having things they call festivals happening nearly every weekend and it can mean anything from like basically a poetry reading to a massive rock festival, to a sort of walking tour, to an art exhibition, to a Soné Lumiere, like a light show with music, to a firework display, can sort of mean anything. And it does, it does just sort of mean a sort of a sort of collective thing that you do outdoors. That's all it sort of means. But that is also, it's a good point about climate actually, because it's sort of probably, it's like too hot by the time

you get to southern Spain to do a lot of that sort of thing in the mid-afternoon. But France is probably the country as a country where you can pretty much rely on the fact that it's probably going to be dry and warm for most for nearly all of july and august so that's what it ends up meaning in that context and i i sort of feel like britain has been going in that direction a little bit i feel like there definitely has been an expanded concept of the festival and the dissemination of the idea of the festival you've got those things like when the light gets in that supposedly a sort of philosophy festival yeah and hay on why yeah which is hay on wide literary festival is a lot older, but even the world transformed, calling itself a festival.

That's an interesting thing for us to think about. What does it mean that the world transformed with which we've been associated since its inception to some extent? Because I always sort of laugh at it calling itself a festival. Whenever I have to explain to anyone who doesn't go to the world transform what it is, I say it's basically it's a conference with a lot of parties. It's what it is. If a walking tour in the summer in a village in France is a festival, then surely the world transformed or Plan C's political festivals can be festivals, except I guess when we were doing Plan C's festivals, they were out in the countryside. So that's the excuse there. I mean, it's kind of one of those things is like, where do you draw the line? I guess it's

about whether it feels like a festival. Like, if the world transformed feels a bit more like Glastonbury than it does than the inside of the Labour Party conference, I think that's what they're going for. It's about what you're giving off, what the signals you're giving off, of what you're associating yourself with. It's about collective joy, isn't it? It's some notion that what the quality, affective quality, which this event is aspiring towards, is one of collective joy.

Whether it's the collective joy of everybody sitting around listening to, you know, listening to Kazuru Isuguro answer questions about his new novel, or whether it's the collective joy of, you know, raving at a party, three in the morning after the world transformed, whatever, it's that, it is, I think that's an interesting,

way of thinking about it, actually, that, you know, I'm always wanting to do, I'm always wanting to assert to people, though when we talk about collective joy, we're not just talking about raves, because people think, that's, often thinking that's what I mean when I'm talking about collective joy. And actually, in a way, one way of thinking about the, and expand the conception of collective joys, it can encompass all of these activities, which some people turn into festivals that can become forms and object of festivity. You know, she'd give a shout out to Devon transformed, which is coming up in September. I can't remember when, I think I'm away.

It's the third weekend in September. Third weekend in September, because they're running it as a, you know, with camping and outdoors basically, which definitely seems to turn it into a festival in my mind. Does it have camping? This is what I was going to say. I feel like if we have our own sort of charge or something of like, is it or is it not a festival, I definitely think if there's camping, then it gets closer to a festival. doesn't it?

So people camp at Hay and Why? Yes, I camp at Hay on Y. Most people camp. Most people camp. And what's the campsite like? Is it like massive rave up? Is there like firepits and stuff like that? It's not a massive rave up, but it's more of a festival vibe with caravans and everything than you'd think.

Yeah. And they've got, you know, then you've got the guy that does amazing sausage sandwiches in the morning. Really, really good toilet block. It's a hay on why for anyone who doesn't know is a literary festival. And like after Edinburgh Theatre Festival and its fringe, it is sort of an iconic symbol of British kind of middle class literate culture. I mean, I absolutely love it. Like all of the things, I'm a regular, well, this is the interesting thing that I want

to take apart. I'm not posh. And when you go to Hay on Y, like for me as like a not entirely like white and definitely not culturally middle class person. I find all of the things that I find really impenetrable about a certain kind of English whiteness that I find quite difficult to interact with, not there at Hay on Why. And I'm not sure if it's because the vast majority of people there are actually either Welsh or from the West Country, but everyone, it's the friendliest festival. Like, everyone talks to everyone.

It's, like, I feel more at home there than I have, like, I do at Glastonbury as well. And obviously, I've worked there for 12 years, but in the Green Futures field. But at Hay-on-White, I feel so, like, I feel so at home. And it's a very white festival, but people are so, so, so friendly. The Hay Festival itself is actually just across the border in Wales, but the camping is in England. Oh, I can't wait for Welsh independence. get you get my border post between the cancer

but the hay festival is supported by lots of Welsh government initiatives so there's a whole Welsh language programme and there's a whole Welsh culture part of it and there's like

walks and there's all sort of things so both in terms of literary science initiatives like children everything the whole programme has a whole Welsh section to it but what goes on there at the same time. Stays there.

But God's and Hay stays and Hay. No, so there's also how the light gets in, which is a philosophy festival which takes place every other year. And it's a very, very strange actually festival situation because both festivals, they're literally like 15 minutes walk from each other, the festival sites, and they both pretend

that each other don't exist. So everyone goes and gets wristbands for like both and goes to both, but each festival doesn't recognise the existence of the other one. I was asked to go and speak at the very first one of when the light gets in, and they wanted me to be on a panel about whether the Enlightenment was a good thing or a bad thing. And they wanted me to be on the side of saying it was a bad thing. And I wrote them a page about how this is an idiotic way of framing a debate, that none of the philosophers they assumed were somehow anti-enlightenment

were in any meaningful sense anti-enlightenment. And this does not mean that, Other people from the ACFM universe would say no to being asked to speak at how the light gets in. If anybody listening to this show wants to invite us, just saying. I'll badmouth any period in history. So go back to our topic. Like, are these festivals, well, they're not music festivals. They're not what will come to mind if I was thinking about, you know, the phenomenon of the British festival.

But it's not that far off. Well, we have, we have joked. And some of those jokes have gone into. serious pondering about doing an ACFM festival. We've joked about doing one and charging oligarchs thousands and thousands of pounds to come. That would be a retreat. That's a retreat. Why are you giving away our retreat idea?

The ACFM retreat is obviously going to make of our millions. They're different to the festival where I want to DJ the 2am 90s throwback set, but we need funding for that. So if anybody wants to fund the festival, that's different. Yeah, who's got money? Oligarchs. We need to get oligarchs in a yurt, in a sweat lodge, get them doing hot yoga while we pump episode after episode of ACFM at the 40 hours. Okay, uncharacteristically for me,

I am choosing a Britpop classic pulp sorted for ease and whiz. Because it contains the immortal line, is this the way they say the future is meant to feel, or does 20,000 people? standing in a field, which is very much the question we're asking in this episode. Oh, is this the way they say the future's meant to feel are just 20,000 people standing in a field.

And I don't quite understand just what this feeling is. That's okay, because we're all sorted out for reason why it's. And tell me when the spaceship lands, because all this has to Paul Polo had to make something in the middle of the night Paul Polo had a sort of breakthrough moment in 1995 when they played the Primaries stage and that was when it was starting to be televised as well.

Bits of Glasibu were televised. They replaced the Stone Roses at last minute, got to play the Pyramid stage, played common people on TV as I remember. And like it sort of pushed. them into a new level of fame. So it's that this long history of festivals predate music, music festivals from the, well, yeah, from the 70s onwards or the 1960s onwards.

And it sort of is interesting. When we're thinking about how you define a festival, you know, it's sort of interesting how people have tried to think about this in the past. Probably the person who comes to mind most is Mikhail Bakhtim, who wrote about carnival, actually, Carnival and Carnivalesque, which is adjacent, but it probably overlaps, I think, with the idea of festival. So Bakhtin was writing post the Russian Revolution, wasn't he? In Russia, post the Russian Revolution.

He's doing like literary studies, particularly had this book, Rabelais, and the world in which he's looking at this Renaissance author, Rabelais, I can't remember his first name. And basically, so he's doing sort of, he's looking, and it's Dostoevsky as well, isn't it? And he's looking at, like, he's trying to work out what the, what the mode of the carnivalesque is and like you can totally apply it to actual carnival and the history of festivals basically these ideas these festivals are these moments in which

social hierarchies break down or they're broken down in a sort of ritualistic sort of fashion so you get this intermingling of people across social hierarchies which would normally not be there if we go back to the sort of middle ages etc and you have this undoing of all of that the dualisms that order the hierarchical world, you know, in the normal way, such as the sacred and the profane get mixed up, you know, the high and the low, et cetera, or get mixed together in all sorts of rituals. You have, you know, the breakdown of social norms, the ability to be able to behave in ways which would normally be unacceptable and become acceptable during these sort of moments, do you know what I mean? There's this sort of like bringing down

of like, of the world of social hierarchy in some sort of way. So the key sort of ritual of a festival or a carnival, carnival in particular, is like you crown the king of the festival and then you decrown them at the end, that sort of thing. Not all of that translates into the idea of festivals, but like bits of it do, I think. You know, that idea that like it's a space outside of normal life where normal rules don't apply so much. I think that still sort of applies to a sort of contemporary sort of glass andry situation. Yeah, I think it does. And maybe this is something that we should come back to later. But this question about whether that therefore functions under late capitalism as a ritual of license by way of saying, okay, you guys go off and do like live an alternative lifestyle for five or six or whatever day so that you're able to come back and function within the capitalist system. So that I think I'm interested in about whether Whether the UK Music Festival is inherently because of the environment it creates and because it's about the congregate, I mean, it's all about a congregation of like random people together, especially in the outside, like doing fun things, whether it's inherently anti-capitalist or even if it's partly co-opted, it can't really be totally co-opted for that reason or has actually capitalism created a space for it.

So it works, it works for the system to have those festivals for people to let off steam and behave in those ways and then come back and be workers. Yeah, well, those questions are always really fascinating when you were looking at Bactein and trying to parse out what the wider implications of what he's saying really are. I mean, Bactin was quite obscure figure. He lived a fairly obscure life in Soviet Russia. He was only translated into English and became fairly famous, like really towards the end of his life. It was most influential in English in, like, literary film and cultural studies in the 80s. It's mainly based on this book, Rabelais and his world, and Rabelais is this really fascinating French Renaissance writer. He was like a priest, but he's kind of constantly mocking, like mocking the church, and there's all these, you know, fart jokes and sexual innuendos.

Bakhteen writes about him, but he also writes about, indeed, he writes about the great 19th century novelist, like Dostoevsky, and, um, He sort of ties this theory of the carnivalesque part in some of his writing or in some of the interpretations that have been made of his various writings to this idea that the novel as a cultural form is characterised by its polyvocal character. So as in the carnival, in a great novel, you've got many voices, many things going on at the same time. There's just a aesthetic of multiplicity. And this sort of lack of real hierarchy as even the voice of the narrator

often loses its authority. in a really complex novel. So he seems to have this whole conception, this whole aesthetic, which celebrates cultural forms, which are anti-hierarchical, which are playful, which celebrate a certain kinds of social complexity,

and it is really, really interesting. It can be really useful for thinking about lots of different kinds of cultural forms. And the word that gets taken and borrowed from Bakhteen a lot is this term the carnivalesque, which various critics have wanted to celebrate, things like carry-on films as carnivalesque or raves as carnivalesque or almost anything you can think of as carnivalesque at different times. But it's very unclear in Bakhtin. It's not quite clear

really if he is even making claims about the social function of carnival. I mean, it's partly because he's really, he's a literary theorist, really. It's not really his job to make a sort of sociopolitical claim about whether actual carnival is revolutionary or is inherently conservative because of the way actually carnivals are rituals that actually help to structure and reproduce social structures rather than actually challenging them. It's one of the really contentious questions when thinking about that history. When I was writing my first book with Ewan Pearson about Rave, we were thinking about Bactean a lot and thinking about what to make of all this. Because we were really thinking about the question of all how do you how do you recognize both that rave clearly had a certain

kind of radical potential but also it was very clear by the end of the 90s that radical potential had not been realized in any meaningful way and we did really have to sort of confront the fact that well if you look at actual history like carnivals did not turn into peasant revolts very often if ever you know carnivals didn't like and demonstrate a great deal of revolutionary potential In fact, the age of revolutions is the early modern period when people have stopped just having these, they stopped living these agricultural lives and having carnivots and they've started living, started to live these more regimented commercial and proto-industrial lives. And under those circumstances, once people come out in the streets, it's not for a party, it's for a fucking riot and that can turn into a revolution. And I would say if you look at the weight of historical evidence, like it's quite not really, there isn't a lot to go on. if you want to make a claim that, like, having a festival is really radical and subversive activity in itself.

Like, you might say that it can link up with radical and subversive activities. And I think once we get into thinking about the history of music festivals in Britain, I think we'll probably want to say, well, there have been moments when it looked like the kind of empowering collectivist, multiplicitous, aesthetic of the carnivalesque being expressed at things like music festivals and raves seem to have a kind of radical potential. It seemed to be empowering for people. It seemed to be threatening to authority. And there did seem to be some potential for it to link up with more organised and substantial political movements. And those are the moments when the state kind of sweeps in and says, no, you're just not going to do that. That is

not going to be allowed to happen. But on the other hand, it's very difficult. It's quite difficult to sustain the claim that it's radical and subversive in itself, like just to have a up, just have a weekend where you live a really different kind of life and everything is turned on its head. Because as long as everybody knows that you can do that, because everything is going to go back to normal on a Monday, then it is a way of making it intolerable for people that everything will be back to normal on a Monday. You know, the other person that comes to mind it, when we're talking about whether this sort of, these sorts of festivals or this moment of excess is radical, whether it's just a letting off of steam which allows society

to continue as it is, is somebody like George Bataille. We've wanted to talk about George Bataille for a long time. We probably shouldn't go into much now. We have talked about Bittai. Have we? Oh, good. Let's talk a bit more. No, I was just going to say,

because that's one of the things he grapples with, and he doesn't really seem to know which way around to fall on, whether these moments, he sort of talks about transgression and these sort of, like, excessive acts and moments and rituals and so forth, whether these are just, you know, ways in which a society can maintain itself or whether they contain the seeds of a whole new sort of form of society. But I suppose you have a way to get into this is, you know, that is something that people

basically grappled with through the history of festivals and then free festivals. You know, they were trying to work it out. But it's not just excesses. It's also abundance, which is substantially different. So I would say that one of the things that links somewhere, like Glastonbury, the experience of Glastonbury, not the media around Glastonbury, not watching Glastonbury on the telly or I play or whatever,

but the experience of it to, you know, a harvest festival is this sense that there is like an abundance of, going back to Jeremy's point, like collective joy, friendliness, like music, entertainment, it's an abundance. And when you are living through an era which is about austerity and restriction, in terms of like money and time and whatever, That's experientially different.

Yes, that's a very good distinction. That's a great distinction. Yeah, and I think both are important. So I think it's not like, you know, people don't go and get completely off their heads and whatever. But in terms of the affect and how you feel day to day, I mean, maybe if you're going to a festival for a couple of days, but, you know, because I've worked at Glastonbury, I'm there for nine days. And it feels like I'm living in a different universe. And that's because everyone says hello to everyone. Everyone talks to everyone.

And you just don't get that in modern Britain, definitely not in the south. Maybe you do places in the north, but you definitely don't in the south. You know what I mean? And both of those things coexist, the abundance and the excess. Well, I think that's a great distinction. Like, our care, these are terms which have been very closely associated with the activities of our care at certain times, aren't there? Because you were involved with that group, the Free Association, which was writing about

moments of excess a few years ago. which I never much liked as a framing. And now you've got this organisation called Abundance, which is like a think tank trying to promote common private part, you know, common private, common, public, public comments. See, I'm not the only one who can't pronounce it. No, it's public common partnerships. No, no, but abundance, see, because excess, it's like,

it's a licanian concept. The excess is a concept that assumes there is a limit. The limit is there. Exactly. The limit can be transgress. but by transgressing it, all you do is ultimately re-inscribe it. But abundance doesn't have a limit point. You're not pointing to a threshold or a border,

which delimits the realm of the possible. Abundance is a spinosist concept instead. Good, but also like the excess, there's a sense of a pejorative to it, like that the excess is an excess. You know, there's an assumed limit, not like you were saying, I guess. There's an assumed like balance there, whereas if you think of something like joy within the framing of collective joy, it's an abundance. Or love, you know, it's an abundance. There isn't a point at which you go, there's too much of this and it makes you ill. Yeah, no, you're right. Yeah, you're completely right. I mean, to be fair, for Batai, his concept of his test, it's partly tied up with this very profound attempt to analyze the nature of capitalism and the role of surplus, economic surplus. In, in, in. the accumulation of capital. It's tied to this idea that societies have to decide one way or

another, how much surplus are they going to bother having? Because basically every minute that somebody has to work, whether that work is just picking berries or something, more than they need just there for everybody to stay alive, is a minute devoted to surplus that could be devoted to something else. And societies have to decide what they're going to do with surplus. And sort of what characterizes the capitalist societies is the only kind of society. It's the only kind of society in history or prehistory, where people have said, fuck it, we're not having any limits on surplus. And in fact, we're going to organise things so that people are obliged whether they want to or not to devote as much of their labour as humanly possible to the accumulation of massive

surpluses, which are then going to be put at the disposal, probably of corporations, or maybe at the disposal of state institutions under some circumstances. And then the notion of excess is tied to the notion of surplus in complicated ways. But also with that, I mean, what the definition of capital is that the surplus is reinvested as capital to produce more. So that's the sort of, that's the sort of runaway dynamic that we're experiencing the ecological consequences of now. Just in defence of my own history, there is a bit tying part to that, where excess is not transgression where you go across a boundary and whatever, but excess is

you know, there's an experience that you're beyond your normal life. The things are different to normal life. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, but abundance is a better term for that. It is a better term. When we use the word abundance, though, for our public common partnership,

very easy phrase to say. When we use that, like that's coming from a sort of degrowth framing, you know, so it's like, you know, what we can have abundance of is not luxury goods, basically. You know, we have to have an abundance or something else. We have to reframe what abundance is because there are natural boundaries. Technology can alter those boundaries to some degree, but they're there, and a hard, hard, hard limits, do you know what I mean? Which means that, like, the capitalist

version of excess and surplus is unsustainable, but you can have, you can, you can change it in some sort of way. I still think that all of the, like, the logic, like when you're talking about resources, it, you know, it becomes a different discussion. But if you're talking about like the experience or the environmental, I don't know, like this, like how human beings situate themselves in groups and like what is the overall feeling and what makes the experience of this place or this event different to normal life, talking about abundance and collective joy and those sort of terms are useful because I find the discussion around excesses or like behaving excessively, like very much coming from a kind of Protestant thinking background. This idea of

like the treat and that, you know, the festival or the event is something that, you know, you restrict over here and then you go and you behave excessively and that's fun. And excess comes from fun, but then you have to restrict yourself back. That kind of falls within a certain logic. And my experience of festivals is actually they sit outside that logic. Is that even though that might be how people think about it. Actually, the reason why the British Music Festival, the contemporary British Music Festival is so powerful, is regardless of how it is communicated and regardless of how it's talked about, the experience of while you're there is like it elevates part of your humanity in a way

that is not just about, you know, getting totally shit-faced. Well, this is also really relevant to the history of music festivals and they're becoming mainstream in the 90s and subsequently to an extent because like in the 80s, if you're a cultural theorist and you're writing about music festivals in the 80s, for example, or up into the mid-90s, then the claim you're going to want to make probably to get your paper or book published and to get a bit of attention. The claim you're going to want to make is these things are good because they are in some sense subversive of something. They are transgressive. And one of the words you're probably going to be using a lot is transgression.

And that vocabulary of transgression, which came a bit from Fouca, did come a bit from people reading Batai, people like that. It was very, very popular, but it was always, to me, it always seemed really problematic, because it's basically saying, oh, this stuff is good, cool because it's naughty. This stuff is cool because it's like, because it's, because it's breaking a rule, as if, as if what it is, as if like that, I mean, it's like an adolescent kind of political aesthetic, really. Well, yeah, exactly. Well, look where transgressions coming from now. It's coming from the right. Transgressing liberal norms. Well, it's inherent, but also it's an inherently liberal politics.

It's a liberal politics. It's a kind of radical liberalism, which what it's opposed to isn't like individualism, inequality and deprivation. What it's opposed to is all forms of normativity. It's opposed to mummy and daddy telling you what to do and what time you can go to bed at night, rather than being opposed to, you know, like capital. exploitation and deprivation. And so abundance is a really,

I like abundance as a term as a concept, partly because it's a really, it's actually, it is a way of getting at some of the same things, of pointing at some of the same things, some of the things that are cool about practices, which might have been characterised as transgressive or subversive, but pointing out what is actually good about them

from a socialist point of view. I think you can apply that to lots of things, I mean, an example of a cultural practice that people have theorised in that way is like, is things like, you know, people have wanted to say, like, skateboarding and graffiti are cool because they're subversive of urban space, as if being subversive of urban space is inherently good, which is a problematic formulation, because you could also say that bloody property developments are subversive of urban space. But what's cool about, like, skateboarding and graffiti

or things like that, is that they sort of add something without taking anything away necessarily. So that concept of abundance as being something that is additive, it's expansive. And that's what makes it feel empowering and sort of beautiful. I think it is potentially really, really useful, actually. Greater than the sum of its parts. Yeah, exactly. That's always greater than some of its parts. I think the other way that this idea, this concept of abundance

that we've been throwing up over last few festivals is, well, one, there are socio-economic conditions around this history of festivals which we're going to get to in a moment, and that is not quite abundance, but, you know, a dole you could live on, put it that way, right? And what did that give you? It gave you basically an abundance of free time. And that's sort of what people experience. I think at Glastonbury, that suspension from the sort of stresses of everyday life

is a suspension from all of those demands on your free time. Do you know what I mean? And so you have enough time to just wander about, like, discover something, come across something, you know. Oh, look, this looks interesting, et cetera, et cetera. That's why when I go to festivals and I haven't been to a festival for a few years, you know, I would never really be bothered about seeing any bands. I'd want to wander around, you know, see what turns up, you know what I mean?

I wouldn't want to be on the clock and have to go and see Osric Tentacles at half-past ten. But also, I have to say, I think free time in the way that we're thinking about it, and maybe we should do a whole episode about this, is quite 20th century. I think free time is sort of like what is free and what is labor when you're, you know, when you're a precarious worker is like when you're working when you're not, is quite different these days. So I'm not sure how that's related to by a subject who, by somebody who's subjected to this, like, when they go to the festival.

It's an interesting point. I mean, yeah, perhaps these days there's people probably like checking their emails on their phones at Glastonbury and all that sort of stuff, aren't they? But that's not what I used to do. Okay, I think we should play Seize the Day, which are quintessentially West Country Band that I came across in Glastonbury in 1998, and they play kind of like pretty anti-capitalist songs and we should play with my hammer. With my hammer I break the chain I will not remain in silence.

I will stand and I will defend my right to fight against fires. No prison can say the freedom that we gain when we move through fear here. The other thing we need to sort of think about in terms of festivals is that there's just a huge amount of conflict that they produce. Sometimes that conflict is like internal, but most of the time it's, you know, an external. It's conflict with straight society, something like that. And that goes right back to like their birth of music festivals in the UK.

Did you see, just like my transition there? Yeah. Nice, and it's smooth? Seamless, seamless, yeah. Seamless millburn. Seamless millbin. Until I revealed my seams. The sort of canon traces it back to Buelly Jazz Festival,

like the history of music festivals, which is 1956. So Buelly is a stately home, isn't it, I think? Yes. Anyway, it's run by Lord Montague of Buley, except in 19506. But in 1960, like, that got into the... into the news because there was a riot at Buehle a battle between

fans of trad jazz and modern jazz and they I can't remember quite what the thing is but like Ackabilk was playing and like basically fans stormed the stage and you know had a fight basically that's what side would you have been on Jeremy

well that's a very good question I don't know in Britain were you trad or were you modern we need to know this well I don't it's really hot it's incredibly difficult to translate that into that political, social context of Britain in the late 50s, early 60s. I mean, it's the same context that produced the famous incident where somebody at Manchester Free Trade Hall shouts Judas at Bob Dylan because he's playing an electric guitar.

That basically the way in which British music fans experienced, like American music, a lot of contemporary American music between the mid-50s or even, say, about 52, 53. And the mid-60s, they experienced it as this, as highly commercial, as this sort of, as the music of capitalism, basically. So, however misconceived it was, like for this whole cohort of young people in the 50s, like being into a form of jazz, which they thought of, I think to some extent correctly, to some extent erroneously, as having been typical of the jazz of the pre-war period, and sort of rejecting what they saw as modern jazz. It was a way of rejecting the culture of contemporary capitalism in the same way as being into acoustic folk music and not into rock and roll was a way of rejecting the culture of commercial capitalism. And this was all encouraged by the Communist Party, for example,

not really being into either modernism as a general aesthetic movement or if you can name it as such, which you can't really, but never mind. But that jazz fandom was linked up to like a political scene, wasn't it, basically? On a cultural scene, in fact. Being into trad jazz was associated with going on the CND, Aldermaster Marches, and that sort of thing. And I do know people, like my dad was a kind of trad jazz guy, and I've known other people who were,

and by the mid-60s, they were all quite embarrassed by it, because they realized, well, actually, once they became cognizant of the fact that modern jazz was turning into free jazz, which was associated with the hard radical edge of black radicalism in America, once they had more real contact with like American culture and black American culture and black American political culture on a daily basis, they realized, of course,

that their reading of it, their perception of modern jazz and even who counted as a modern jazz artist and what modern jazz music meant politically had been had itself been completely distorted by a very low information environment they were working in. But it was the trad jazz fans saw themselves as kind of politicised. And the mods, the term mod

first referred to, modern jazz fans of modern jazz, who then sort of founds for soul music, who again mostly were seen by others and saw themselves as quite apolitical. You know, the mods were aspirational, kind of lower

middle class, young workers, like with more money to spend than anyone like that had ever had before and they were interested in spending it on cool suits and cool music, But despite the fact, like, most of the music they were into was being made by African Americans, they were not really interested in civil rights, for example, didn't know that much about it. So it took on this completely different set of meanings in that British context, which that had all changed by the late 60s,

because I just think apart from anything else, there was much more exchange between America and Britain. So people understood a lot more what the political stakes were for some of those cultural forms. But, yeah, it is really interesting moment. And yeah, there was this riot, which I think my dad, I don't think he'd participated in the riot, but I think he was there. I think he was there. He started it, didn't he. For the Boney Jazz Festival. And those jazz festivals, it's really interesting to think about that.

They were the first music festivals. And contrary to the mythology, a lot of people might have in their heads, like the first music festivals in Britain were not these radical, countercultural, utopian things. They were commercial operations. I would want to say they're not really. capitalistic, because these are not big corporations trying to accumulate vast profits. They are entrepreneurial profit-seeking exercises. And it is really interesting in the British context that I don't think Bailey was the only one. In several cases, they were happening in stately homes. So part of the context for this, of course, was the massive expropriation of the

aristocracy that took place in the 40s and 50s, like through inheritance tax, that was forcing them into these entrepreneurial activities like opening safari parks and inventing the modern music festival. So that was part of the context for that emergence. The music festivals don't really take on a radical political character until the end of the 60s, but the next episode worth mentioning, I suppose, is the wave of free concerts. They weren't really festivals, but there were the free concerts in places like Hyde Park in the late 60s. I think the first one was actually played by Pink Floyd, but the one that was really famous was the one where the Rolling Stones played in 1969, like hundreds of thousands of people. It's a free concert. They were inspired

by the free contents in Golden Gate Park, which were coming out of the Hayt Asprey scene. But I've never really understood what the kind of actual institutional or commercial context like was. Like how could anyone just rock up and to the, you know, to Westminster Council and say, well, I want to put on a rock concert in high part next week. I don't know how that works. They were big as well. Those high part concerts in the late 60s, they were like they were seen as part of the hippie movement, you know, the scene, isn't it? Well, they were, but what was interesting, and this is something that comes out of the history, if you look at the history of music festivals in Britain, is there was a largely benign attitude on the part of the authorities

towards putting on these sort of big public free music events until the early 80s. And we'll get to the early 80s and why there's tension. But there wasn't, it wasn't, there wasn't like an immediate reaction. And even sort of patrician Tories, to a certain extent, sort of patrician liberal Tories were largely sympathetic. I mean, the attitude was, well, if, if some people want to provide a public service by putting on a free music event for the public, there's no really good reason why you shouldn't allow that to happen. It was seen as part of the counterculture. But, of course, the British context of the counterculture, as we have said before on the show, it's quite different. I mean, really, to put it crudely, British hippie culture didn't really see itself

as necessarily in direct antagonism to the state and sort of may, even mainstream culture broadly concede in the same way that the American counterculture did until, really until the end of the 70s. You just think about the cultural fact of, the Beatles, in 1968, 69, like when they're doing their free concert on the roof, they're doing that concert on the roof of Abbey Road and everything. The Beatles, at the same time, are seen as these iconic avatars of the counterculture, but they are also just the most popular band in Britain. They're beloved. No politician can say openly they don't like the Beatles, like without being seen as someone on the right wing fringe of the Tory party. You know, Wilson, Harold Wilson's like,

really was always desperate to associate himself with the Beatles, for example. So it's a really interesting moment. And in that context, like the music festivals, they don't have really, they don't even really have this a kind of transgressive quality. They're seeing as part of a kind of emergent culture, which might be going in new directions, but which isn't necessarily oppositional in any meaningful sense. I don't know if that's completely true.

I mean, for instance, there is a crackdown on Windsor Free Festival get to in 1970. then again, that is in Winter Great Park, which is like, you can see Buckingham, see Winter Palace. All right, there might be particular reasons for that. The next sort of one we'd probably want to talk about is the Isle of White Festival. There, I think, you can see a fracture within the counterculture slash hippiedom, etc., where there is a militant minority trying to push this culture in a much more radical direction. And even, like, attitudes towards the Beatles, you know, they change quite substantially.

towards the mid to late 70s. Yeah, well, if we want to be really specific, I would say there is an urban anarchist scene which would have its headquarters in places like Notting Hill in the late 60s, which has a self-consciously anti-capitalist politics and is being influenced by the radicalisation of the counterculture in the States.

And it's represent, I mean, in musical terms, this is where people like Hawkwind are coming from, from the end of the 60s. And then there's a more mainstream sort of hippie culture, which doesn't see itself as being in antagonism to the state because it's because it sees itself as sort of avant-garde. Of course, the key difference with the states is Vietnam. I mean, Vietnam, Britain is not in Vietnam.

So people are protesting against Vietnam in like 68-69, but what they're protesting against is the Americans. You know, there isn't a British government. The British government doesn't give military support to Vietnam. So that's the big difference. So under the circumstances where your government, government has, you know, for pretty much the only time in bloody history, that has declined to actively support an American military intervention. They've got that happening. You've got

a massive expansion of the welfare state. You've got the expansion of the universities. You've got the highest, in 1966, you've got the highest real, real terms wages for all working people in British history and absolutely, and the highest for young people, like by an almost astronomical amount, you know, wages for young people have gone up exponentially since the beginning of the 50s and they're about to start falling for the next 30 years, that's 50 years. But so there isn't really much for people to rebel against to that moment. Yeah. Let's talk about the Isle White because I think that is a, that's sort of like an interesting

example of like this tension that emerges. The Isle White is an island just on the south coast near Southampton for anybody who's not familiar. You have to get a ferry out there basically. And so a couple of entrepreneurs, I think one of them was a lot of, Lord as well actually or some are an aristocrat I can't quite remember they set the isle of white festival in 1969 and it's sort of like quite big and sort of a success Bob Dylan plays in it but it's like the 1970 Isle of White Festival is like the iconic festival because there's like loads of people

there 600,000 or something like that people turn up but my auntie joy hitched to the island of white festival and so it's a festival it's got like fences around it except you have to get a ticket to to get in, but lots more people turn up than you can have tickets for the big pop stars of the day play, etc. There's a really famous Jimmy Hendrix performance that perhaps you could dig out, play a little bit of. But like it's really famous. Jimi Hendrix and the band of gypsies after you dissolve the Jimmy Hendris experience. Right. And so there's basically a huge fence and then loads more people turn up who can't get in.

And there's a big hill where you can see the big. bands from outside the fence and all this sort of stuff. And then this big sort of shanty town builds up, which gets called Desolation Row. Which is a 1966 Dylan song. Yeah, and after a couple of days, there's people like this, there's his character, Mick Farran, who was in a load of bands and then became a music journalist, and he was organising a little group called The White Panthers. So this is coming out of that London squatting, very political sort of scene.

And apparently it was some French anarchists as well, who were fresh from the May days, in 1968, they started giving out leaflets, let's pull down the fence, and they pulled down the fences, you know, loads of people pulled down the fences, and then the last day was declared a free festival. It's like that paradigmatic thing. There's sort of like these two, there's this commercial culture going on, which is sort of tolerated, and then there's this, there's much more countercultural, much more explicitly like left wing, quite often explicitly sort of anarchist sort of trend, which basically wants to go beyond that. You know, and you can see into the 70s that those two movements sort of split off from each other to some degree.

And in fact, the latter starts to become like the really, really big thing right up until sort of like 1980s, basically. Hawkwind, we've played before. We really should play them a lot. I'm always quite guilty for not really knowing that much about their Ewera. Because they are arguably the band of the British counterculture to this day. Let's play their classic anthem from 1970. Silver Machine I'm

a car I've got a machine I've got a silver machine I've got a silver machine I've got a sewer machine I'm a thing

Well, the assumption, I mean, the effect of those events in 1970, which did sort of parallel what happens with Woodstock in the States, which also is supposed to be a commercial festival, but just so many people turn up, they can't police it. The effect of that was that it became sort of conventional wisdom in the live entertainment industry, that the music festival was just too big and chaotic for it to be possible, really, to make money from it, predictably, and to be able to organise and police the crowds. Because that's the context in which in the states to a greater extent, and also to an extent in Britain, the stadium concert becomes the alternative format

because a stadium is built to contain and regulate the physical disposition of huge crowds. You know, in Foucaudian terms, you know, it's a space of surveillance as well as a space within which the crowd can be surveilled, as well as the, in which everybody can see the performers all at one time of course you know eventually like Pink Floyd who play the first free concert in Hyde Park

who then become a big stadium band and their most famous album and performance the war is about their sense of alienation produced by this format of the stadium concerts but the reason that's happening is because the festival

which you might think after Woodstock and Iron of White in 69 is going to be like the format of the 70s. It's just widely seen as being un-polisable. You can't be sure basically that you won't get so many people turning up that they pull down the fence and then you won't make any money from it. And so it comes to be associated with

the counterculture and with a kind of anarchist politics, partly because they seem to be the only people who've actually got the organisational capacity to make that kind of event happen. Of course, Glastonbury, when does Glastonbury start? Is it in 1970? There's a very small one in 1970 and then there's a free festival in 1971 which is it's only free because basically a couple

of aristocrats pay for it yeah pay for everything but glastery evolves and glastory right from the beginning though is in this sort of third space it's like the third sector of the festivals isn't it because it's a ticketed festival but the profits all go to cn d for years and years and years until they start going to greenpeace after the end of the Cold War basically so it's a ticketed festival like it's stewarded, but stewarding Glastonbury, like right from the mid-70s onwards, is seen as like a political thing. You go and you work as a steward at Glastonbury because Glastonbury is raising money for CND. So you're basically working for the peace movement by stewarding at Glastonbury. You're not just like doing a job. So it's ticketed and it's also the practice at

Glastonbury up until the end of the 80s really is to turn a blind eye to anybody to people who turn up without tickets and want to come in for free. And there's no advertising. until now. Yeah. Like it's only the, it's only the three charities. So it isn't, so it isn't a commodified space in that sense. Yeah, that's right. Exactly.

Yeah. Right from the beginning, really, it's trying to have this kind of slightly different model, which is not just, it's not completely anarchistic, that it's connected to organized politics. And, and part, I think partly the way it works, actually, is that there's enough people who are willing to buy tickets because they know the money is all going to go to CND. There's enough people who are willing to buy tickets to make it commercial.

viable and to make it viable to just allow the people who don't want. And it's also small enough. It's non-famous enough that only a certain number of people are going to turn up wanting to come in for free. So those numbers remain fairly manageable until the end of the 80s. Well, actually, I think it's the mid-80s. Because there's a strange sort of interaction between Glastonbury and the Free Festival, particularly Stonehenge Free Festival. And it's when Stonehenge Free Festival gets forbidden and smashed up or the convoy gets smashed up before they get there

that Glastonbury doubles in size the next year because anyway we're skipping ahead I think let's describe that the birth for like the free festival movement well I mean like yeah

the second Glastonbury was a free festival but that's because somebody paid for it which is not quite the same thing so it's like Windsor Free Festival is the event that people point to already mentioned it which only runs from like 72 to 75 And that directly comes out of this movement, this sort of like urban, hippie, but anarchist, very militant sort of movement from London.

So the Windsor Free Festival is organised by a couple of characters. A guy called Ubi Dwyer, who was like this real acid anarchist, as in, you know, he was involved in like the anarchist papers such as Freedom, which is this anarchist paper and bookshop has been going since, I don't know, the late 1890s, I think. I'm quite sure. He's involved in that, but also, like, he's giving out acid. Like, he thinks that, like, you know, getting lots and lots of cheap acid and giving it away is, like, a political sort of political move. So it was him and this guy called Sid Rawl, who was known in the tabloids as the King of the Hippies. So basically, you would all know him, listeners, if you're alive at that time and you lived in Britain. You know, he was a famous character.

He was famous because he led this squatting of a 144 Piccadilly, so it's a really big building. which got took over by a group that called themselves a London Street commune. And if you like Google it, you can see it's a huge, it was like a really big event, this big, this big squat. They had a sort of homemade drawbridge, you can see on the pictures, which they would let down to let like the press in or something and then close it back. Now that gets, that gets evicted by the police, etc. And so Sid Rawl is seen as the spokesperson of that.

And so it's him and this guy, Ubi Dwight, organized the Windsor Free Festival in 1972. to, and they call it or they promote it as the rent strike, the people's free festivals. So, like, you can see it's coming out of that squatter millier, basically. Windsor Free Festival is in, Windsor Great Park. If you look at the pictures of the festival, you can see Windsor Palace in the back, which is the Queen's principal residence, is it? I think it is, actually. I think it's where, oh, she doesn't live, she's not alive anymore.

She used to live there. And so the first one is fairly small, but the one in 1974 gets really, really big. and it's like it's supposed to go on for like 10 days and like so it's a free festival people just turn up and they can't people bring stages alone band sort of play it's supposed to go on for 10 days and then on the on the morning of the 5th day the police launch a dawn raid when at when everyone's in their tents they basically come along quite savage they basically beat people up in their tents smash the tents down like you know it's basically a really really violent eviction of the of the site basically it's so violent in fact that like if it comes a national scandal there's

questions asked in a house of commons and this sort of stuff and it's such a national scandal that this is a weird one in 1975 the government provides an air base for the free festival to go ahead on the air base in a sort of more official sort of monitored sort of fashion watchfield air base in 1975 although ubi dwyer and sid roll were jailed that year because they refused to go to that watchfield festival and they tried to organize a new windsor festival and they were sent the jail for three months So there's the sort of the two hands of how the state was trying to work out this sort of emerging thing in the 1970s. Providing a space for a free festival is pretty unusual, I think, you know, pretty pretty permissive. Well, in this country, I mean, post-mid-80s Britain it is, yeah.

I mean, it was normal then, and it's still normal, for example, in France, where it's just considered an inherent part of the right to free association. if enough people want to have a big party in a field like it is a responsibility of the government to find somewhere for them to do it but they won't bother anyone instead of just telling them there are no such places you can't do it or you must have a license and pay loads of money so that is which is a big deal it's a really really big deal like if you think about it like i think for most people to envisage the fact that you're allowed to do that in you know in a lot of places in the UK it's a it's a massive leaf of them i It is. It is. And this is just, I'm just stressing. People still do it. Definitely away from the home counties, you know, but it's a big thing to think that, you know, you can just do this. Yeah. And you're not restricted in that way. Yeah. And there's been a massive constriction. I mean, we're going to talk about this in the history. But from the mid-80s onwards, there's a massive constriction of the right to free association in this country, which is, you know, it's not, it wasn't weird in the seven. People didn't think it was weird that the government was giving them an air base to do it.

There's enough people want to do it. There's obviously limits, i don't do it in Windsor Park, are you going to get your head smashed in? Or you're going to get three months in jail? That is, there's something to do with the Queen there, isn't there? So we can sort of see those limits

in terms of Britain's weird relationship to the royal family, etc. So then they start to develop, after Winding, the second half of the 70s, they'll start to develop small local free festivals like organised on a range of different principles, actually. Like in some cases, indeed, they are just being held on land, owned by sympathetic landowners.

In some places, they're in areas that are not really owned by anybody. They're far away from any urban areas and the authorities largely turn a blind eye. In some places, there are actual arrangements with local authorities to make it possible for them to happen. But they really become a phenomenon of the 1980s. but they're starting to emerge in the late 70s. But the biggest one, the one that becomes the iconic event of the Free Festival calendar

by the early 80s is Stonehenge Free Festival, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, that's another one. So that starts in 1974, but like once again, you get one of these weird characters, a guy called Wally Hope. That's not his real name. I think his real name is like Phil Russell. So Penny Rimbaud, who's from the punk band, Kras, wrote a little pamphlet about, Wally Hope and this sort of story. Is that a woman? Penny Rimbo. Penny Rambo. Rambo.

Rambo. Sorry. I'm waiting for a female organiser of something, but I don't think I'm going to get one. Well, we're still in the 70s. Give it time. Right, okay. Right. I see. Okay. I thought the 70s was a time for women's liberation. Yeah, go on, carry on. There are several women in crass, but they didn't write this little pamphler. So this guy is like, Wollie Hope is a, he's like one of these, these sort of hippies. sort of like slightly linked to this urban sort of this scene, but like he's from, I think he's from a rich background actually, much more esoteric really than a hardened politico. And he dreams up this idea of Stonehenge with this idea that like, because at the time, Stonehenge was really

very much a sort of like an acknowledged national monument. It wasn't really part of national consciousness at all. And he had this idea that like basically we had to, we had, it was a place of festivities and we had to go and work out what Stonehenge was for by going and living there for a prolonged period. And so the first 1974 Stonehenge was like not that many people starts at like a summer solstice, but like a group of people stay on. Well, in fact, they get evicted. They get evicted in a big national press story called the eviction of the Wollies because they have to be named on the eviction. The local council tries to evict them. You have to name individuals on an eviction order at that point, even from land, and they all give their second

names as Wally, basically. And that became a sort of, you know, a news story where you would have read it in the newspapers, etc. Because it was a new story, the festival next year actually became quite big and became bigger and bigger. Unfortunately, Wally Hope or Phil Russell, this is the story in Penny Rimbaud's book. He basically gets arrested in a surprise raid on a squat that he's just passing through, has got a little bit of LSD on him, and he gets sectioned, given a loads of Largactyl and basically has a psychological breakdown and then kills himself the next year basically. It's a sort of tragic, tragic sort of storm.

But like the Stonehenge Free Festival, that sort of starts to get bigger and bigger and bigger until it's like really, really quite big by the end of the 1970s, sort of early 1980s. Like we ought to set the wider scene, which is that the happy days of post-war social democracy are starting to break up in the 1970s. you know we have IMF intervention in 1976 the first introduction of like what we would later come to understand as neoliberal policies

introduced by Labour government originally before Margaret Thatcher and you get the emergence the reflection of this sort of thing in popular music with punk and that sort of stuff so by the late 1970s early 1980s Stonehenge is this scene in which lots of different scenes

are intermingling and there's a conscious effort by sum in the sort of punk and hippie scenes to make us some sort of convergence. Mark Perry, who was in the band A-TV, for instance, and then this hippie band, here and now, who were very much a festival band, did a sort of joint song together. Perhaps we won't play that.

I don't think it's very good. But there is this, it becomes this, like, this thing which is like huge, basically, with lots of different people. And one of the big stories is that in 1980, a gang of bikers decided that they didn't like this, and they were going to push the punks out and went around beating,

up any punk that they could find, basically, because these places were completely lawless or self-organised. And so the early ones were self-organized, by the time you just get like young kids from like Burnley hitching down there with nothing but perhaps a tent, perhaps nothing, you know, it was turning to something which was probably unmanageable, I think. Yeah, it was pretty wild, wasn't it? Because I remember, because as a kid, I was really fascinated by Stonehenge and UFOs and ancient mysteries and all that stuff and I had a big poster of Stonehenge at

the solstice and I really wanted to go and I remember saying to my dad, I can you take me? I want to go to Stonehenge and see the sunrise on the solstice and he said well no we can't go to Stone Ranch at the solstice it's just the place is just full of people off their heads so my dad

my dad is like an anarchist my dad was a card carrying anarchist who like you know was wrote for freedom like all his life so he He wasn't one of the straights, but this would have been 83, 84, and he was like, but you can't take kids there. Yeah, by 1984, there's sort of like 30, 40,000 people camping there. Yeah. You know, loads of different stages, people turn out with different stages, etc.

Loads of people sort of selling drugs. Other people saying to police that, so like crews would go around and push out any heroin dealers and burn their cars out and stuff like that. but like a chaotic sort of place which sort of work and sort of didn't work because of its huge size basically and lack of any organisation at all. Yeah, well this would, and this would come to be,

this has come to be a big theme in the history of the festivals and public festivals. So the question of, well, okay, who is going to make it somewhere relatively safe? Who is going to make it somewhere that maybe people with kids, but maybe more importantly,

somewhere that like young women, for example, might actually feel safe to go. And that is a question. which is going to end up becoming very difficult to answer with regard to a lot of these sorts of events over the course of that history. It's what's going to really redefine the character of Glastonbury

is what we'll eventually do for the Pride Festival as well in London. But of course, by all accounts, I mean, I was too young to have gone to Glastonbury, to have gone to Stonehenge, but I remember being told about it by going to have older friends. Yeah, I was too young for it, but Alice went. She's got some stories of going at like this young kid from. from Burnley and like, I think your story is she dropped acid and then basically couldn't find her tent

for two days or something. Because there's no organisation of the camping. It's just chaos everywhere. Do you know what I mean? And everybody's sort of, like she says it was fucking great fun. But I mean, this is the thing that starts to happen

is also happening over the course of the 80s, which would be the sort of point of contact between that culture and people like me, to some extent, at that time, was that, I mean, by the mid-80s, by the 185, people who sold drugs on council estates, like what in America would be called housing projects,

had become aware that a very good place to go and score drugs at competitive prices was free festivals. There were people who were not hippies at all, who were like local drug dealers in places like Merseysburg, around Liverpool, and, you know, other parts of the north-western towns and cities who would drive out to these festivals with the express purpose of buying buy hash and acid

mainly and speed, like really cheap to the set that they could then go and sell at home. My understanding is that it was cheap because there would be multiple dealers on site competing with each other. The free market works. Yeah, exactly. It was the free market. So, one of the things that would eventually

attract the interest of the authorities that it wasn't just a self-contained middle, sort of, it wasn't a self-contained middle-class culture as it probably mostly was, say, in the mid-70s, that it had become a scene which involved sort of militant anarchists from the cities,

they were motivated by cultural ideological trends like a narco-punk, and it was also, it was increasingly kind of connecting up with just a sort of criminal culture of areas of really high unemployment in places like the northwest of England. This is acid man. The other thing we should talk about is a development, element of like the new age traveller movement and that because that also overlaps with that story I think. Yeah. The story of that is sort of the fact that there were loads of these free

festivals popping up around the late 70s, early 80s. In fact, you could go to one every weekend if you wanted to. And in fact, that's what people started to do. They started to spend their whole summers traveling from one festival to another. And then there became a sort of a practice of converting different vehicles to living vehicles. So you could move from one festival. to another, buses, sometimes double-decker buses or lute and vans, these sorts of, these sorts of things, basically it turned into a scene in which people would live in those vehicles all year round, and they would, you know, spend the summer traveling between festivals, mainly free festivals, and that, you know, selling some sort of stuff or doing some sort of service

to top up their money, etc. I imagine most of them were signing on claiming the unemployment benefit at the same time. I never knew anyone who wasn't. Yeah, I mean, there were no conditions and unemployment benefit of that. Well, you had to go home every two weeks. That was the sign on. You had to sign on it. You had to be back. You had to have a home address.

You could go back to every two weeks. And it could be on a, so it could be on a registered traveller's site. And by traveller sites, we mean sites that are set aside for the use of people who are actually designated by the authorities travellers, meaning they're either of Romani descent or they belong, members of the Irish traveller community. The people who were actually like nomadic people who had lived in the British. child and followed a nomadic lifestyle for centuries. That did cause tensions in some places. So you had people who were basically punks or hippies from the towns and cities who were trying

to adopt this nomadic lifestyle that revolved around the festivals in the summer and just sort of getting by in the winter. It did cause some tension because then a lot of people did just live in squats in a city in the winter. But then a lot of other people just wanted to stay living, they got a taste for a nomadic life or their bus was comfortable enough to live in and they wanted to be in the countryside or wherever. So they were trying to settle on traveller sites. And of course, the traveller sites were not really set up for those kind of numbers. The traveller sites were set aside for the use of these very, very small communities who are basically self-contained ethnic groups and had been for a long time. So there was a degree of tension

in some places around the fact that these sites, which had been set aside for the use of a few does, a handful of families in most cases at a time from the Irish or Romanian traveller communities were also now accommodating people with Mohicans from Bradford. And it made that scene difficult to sustain. I mean, the other thing that was going on at the time were peace camps, protest camps outside bases, basically. The US Air Force bases in particular. The US all voices that were based in Britain. Yeah. In fact, that's where the peace convoy title comes from. It's because So basically people were travelling between sites and then they'd form up into convoys, etc.

One of these convoys started visiting the peace camps. In fact, Sid Rawl, King of the Hippies, comes back in the story. He was instrumental in like constructing this convoy, the peace convoy and giving it this sort of like character of aligned with the peace camps and the peace movement. So how many people are in these convoys? I'm trying to imagine the experience of like arriving at these festivals

because it's like this is not a march, it's a series of vehicles of sorts and they're aligning themselves or are arriving to these festivals. So this is a kind of phenomenon that is not a modern day phenomenon or I mean like is not something that I think has been seen in the 21st century.

So like could you describe like what's happening and over how much time and do we know how many people there were and kind of what's the setup for this scene? Well, I think at a typical free festival or just at a weekend at one of the peace camps like Greenham Common or Burtonwood, you're talking about like a few dozen

to a few hundred vehicles maybe turning up over the course of like a Friday and a Saturday morning. But Stonehenge was on a totally different scale. That was the trouble. Stonehenge, you're talking about thousands of vehicles. Yeah, more than 30,000 people and huge basically. You're talking about only for a couple of years, really.

You're talking about 84, 85. In 84 and 85, probably. You're talking about thousands. Well, no, it's 83, 84, because 84 is the last one. Well, what seems to be it was the beanfield? 85. Yeah, well, that's, there was a massive convoy. They smashed up.

Well, there was a massive convoy, but there wasn't no festival. I know, I know, by I'm talking about. No spoilers, we haven't gone there. But it was in those years that it would have been, that it got big. And that was the singular thing that attracted the attention of the authorities to really clamp down on it was, was exactly the, It was exactly the issue you raised nowadays. It was the sheer size of the convoy converting on stonehains.

To set the scene, though, that so Stonehenge in that early 80s period was bigger than Glastonbury. Yeah. Bigger than Glastonbury in size and as a sort of cultural phenomenon. Do you know what I mean? A band who we would very much associate

with the free festival scene at its high moment of the 1980s is the now fairly obscure British band, The Magic Mushroom Band playing a kind of music that you might almost describe as a specific genre of British festival music of the period

combining jam band aesthetics with post-punk, reggae, avant-garde noise, scar, dub and even bits of sort of pop punk whether that mixture ever really cohered into anything specific is sort of beside the point

it was a really ambitious attempt to create this sort of universal countercultural sound. And so let's play the Mosaic Mushroom Band track Revolution from 1986. Well, the festival in 1984 at Stonehenge is huge. More than 30,000 people, almost impossible to sort of judge how many people there is, but that's the sort of figure that's bandied about. and basically the local council imagine it goes higher up than that

basically decided that they were going to smash this phenomenon basically well I think the Thatcher government decided it was going to smash that phenomenon the phenomenon of travellers and free festivals and local council got an injunction or facilitated in fact it was English Heritage and National Trust who ran their site they got the injunction

that there would be no free festivals there and then basically a military operation was organized although by the police. The police acted in a military way in order to set an ambush basically. And so police were drafted in from all around the country, etc. There's this famous story actually. So this is going on just after the minor strike of 84-85

in which the police behaved in a military fashion, went into mining villages, beat people up, you know, really, really conflictual moment. And there's this famous bit in 1984 where the peace convoy gets passed by a big line of police fans carrying

police men. It was a coat. There were so many cops being bust around the country. They had coaches full of them. Yeah. Going up to the mining areas and and the police basically hold up a big sign saying, you're next

to the peace convoy. Yeah, this was a year before the Battle of the Beanfield, and I've heard it speculated that the promise of being allowed to go and batter hippies was one of the laws which, you know, the kind of compensations which was offered to police in order to get them to participate in this quasi-military oppression of the mining communities, which a lot of them were very uncomfortable with. I've been come from working-class communities themselves. Whether that's true, I don't know.

And so what was the political moment in which this is situated? Okay, that's a really good question. I think let's just be clear about what happens is the Battle of the Bit. It's called the Battle of the Beanfield because eventually the Police Convoy is effectively cornered and ambushed in a beanfield. Is it in Wiltshire or is it in Wiltshire? And there is an absolutely brutal attack. The police get absolutely ballistic on the Peace Convoy. They just start smashing up people's vehicles.

without giving them any chance to peacefully surrender or move on, knowing full well that these are often people's homes. They're smashing up. There is video footage, which you can now find. You can go find it on YouTube, I think, of police, for example, dragging pregnant women out of these buses and hitting them with truncheons. That footage was notoriously suppressed by broadcasters at the time. It was only began to be publicly seen two or three years after the events.

In fact, there's a BBC film crew there, and the violence was so bad from the police that the film crew stopped filming to go and say, look, boy, you've got to stop, they're going to kill someone. They got arrested at that point. It was basically a police riot completely out control. It was completely crazy. And, yeah, I've done lectures for students, like many times, actually,

on the history of Britain in the 80s, in the first half of the 80s. And I think now, from a historical vantage point, it is really useful to think about this. the Battle of the Beanfield, as the culmination of this sequence, which begins with the urban so-called riots of 1981, when the police are really in violent confrontation with the urban black communities in Britain, in Brixton, Toxteth, Moss Side, Bristol. And I think now I would say, I think it's pretty clear that what's going on from the absolute beginning of the first Thacker government in 79 through into the mid-80s is there's a very deliberate attempt to provoke confrontation

with a series of different sections of British society. The first is the black community at the moment, the historical moment of their highest level of radicalisation and political organisation. Then it is the big enemy, the trade union movement, the labour movement, both in the public sector and in the private sector, and culminating with the minor strike of 1984. And then finally, it's the legatees of the counterculture in the form of the peace convoy. And in all of those cases, basically, the police are turned into this quasi-military force in the way they never had been before, but historically in Britain. You know, in the Great General Strike in 26, it was the actual army that had done this work.

But this is the police. All of these communities are just violently suppressed. And at the time, it's a point I might have made on the show before. it's a point I made loads of times before when talking about that history. It's really interesting to me to reflect that, well, at the time, what it looked like was happening to people was this growth of this really awful new kind of authoritarianism. So this is the moment when Alan Moore writes V for Vendetta,

the comics V for Vendetta, which get made into a film like decades later. But Alan Moore's V for Vendetta is a really good example of how people were understanding what was going on at the time because people thought what this was obviously leading to It was effectively some new kind of fascism. It was also associated with the militarism and the kind of imperial nostalgia of the Falklands War.

But actually what happens after that moment, after 1985, is there's a little bit more social authoritarianism from Thatcher in the form of the attempts to sort of recriminalise or socially stigmatize gay people, but that's a pretty half-hearted effort that doesn't go that far. But then what's really from the late 80s onwards, That authoritarian and socially conservative element of the That's Right project starts to retreat, it starts to be wound down. The police, who've had loads of money spent on them in the first half of the 80s, start to see the spending on them cut a bit because it's really been cut on all other parts of the public sector.

And then it's clear by kind of 87, 88, really clear by 86, I think, that why has all this happened? All this has happened because the factory government, no, they have to discipline and clear out of, of the way, these key social constituencies. Why? Because what is it they want to do? What they want to do is deregulate the financial sector. What they want to do is achieve their final goal. Their final goal is to remove the constraints on the financial sector, financial speculation and landlords that had been in place in some cases since the 30s, in other cases since the 40s and 50s. And what you have to do is get rid of all of the political, is neutralised the political

communities and constituencies who would have provided the most significant political opposition to that project. So it's really interesting. It's this savage authoritarianism, and it's always a question from students, like, well, why did they even bother? Why, why bother, like, engaging in this level of sadism against

a bunch of hippies? They posed no real, like, cultural or political threat to anybody, honestly. They weren't organized. They were all well-fell. dependent, you could just take away their benefits, I mean, which they, of course, they did start to take away people's benefits in the following years. But why do it? And I think to me it does indicate that, well, at least in the imaginary of the people doing Thatcherism, you know, the counterculture in its legacies, it wasn't the most important thing, but it was something

you had to deal with. It was something you had to, you had to smash in order to make the world safe for neoliberalism. I like that. I like that argument around a release of finance capital and real estate capital because in a way that sets up the piece convoy like the new age travellers the free festivals as the most visible bit of a wider squatting scene which you would have to remove if you wanted to unleash real estate capital especially in the capital London because around that same time in the early 80s there were about 30,000 squatters in London some of those are like politically organised most aren't but some of them are but it's also just a material basis from which things such as punk rock can emerge and then like some of the post-punk

subcultures. So we can see the smashing of the convoy as the smashing of the most visible bit of that wider scene and then later you're changing the law in order to undermine the rest of it sort of thing to clear it out of the way. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, exactly, yeah. Because the other thing that undoes that, of course, is because, well, conditionsalities get added to benefits towards the end of the 80s. But the other thing is, of course, is that like opportunities for jobs improved quite significantly from that period onwards

in the late 80s, etc. Which undermines a sort of material basis for that sort of scene. So that's a Battle of the Beamfield. And that is really, that is like a turning point in the history of festival culture, isn't it? So there is no more Stonehenge Tree Festival within a few years Stonehenge

becomes fenced off. You can't go, you can't just wander around it. Like you used to be able to. and that's also the moment when, as you said, Keog, Glastonbury starts to become a much bigger deal. There is a story in that as well because the beanfield, the famous beanfield upon which there was a supposed battle, in fact, it was just a police riot,

was owned by the Earl of Cardigan, just to bring up that weird aristocratic phenomenon in the UK. And he witnessed this attack on those people and he was utterly appalled and he was like interviewed on the TV, etc. But then he gave the remnants of the New Age travellers of peace convoy. He said, right, you come onto this wood. And then the police said, look, we want to go in and finish the job. And he said, no, you can't do it, etc.

It's a very interesting interviews of him. You know, this is something outside of his experience completely. And then that, the remnants of the peace convoy eventually find their way down to Glastonbury and Michael Evis makes a room for them. And then the next year he makes room for the peace convoy. And so, yeah, Glastonbury doubles in size, It's partly because all of that scene moves, locates itself to Glastonbury.

That period in the late 80s, there's still lots of free festivals, lots of them are quite small. But there are also, there is this sort of, the phenomenon in which you'd have commercial festivals with a free festival outside, which is what Glassenbury was for a number of years,

the late 1980s. I went to quite a few free festivals in the late 1980s, well, perhaps like seven or eight. It's quite a few, I don't know. It's enough. It's enough. Fucking more than enough, mate. But what I want to just briefly mention this festival through Woggy Festival in 1989,

which was this festival in Cornwall. They specifically, consciously had this free festival outside and a paid-for festival inside. I had a really good time. But basically, it was a bit of a disaster and, like, the security firm we'd been hired to police the inside. They basically robbed all the money.

They went up to the farmhouse and robbed all the money. And so they declared it of whole. of free festival and then had to go around with buckets to try and pay the band. That sort of model didn't work for some reason, basically, just because of their lawlessness of a free festival just didn't fit with the... No, well, it didn't work, and this is also, this was the problem for Glastonbury. The problem that Glastonbury found themselves in by the beginning of the 90s was that with the best one in the world,

they seemed to have wanted to retain the character of the festival, but there were too many people turning up wanting to get in without tickets, to make it sustainable, like to have those people, they couldn't really provide facilities for that number of people on site without somebody paying for those facilities. And the cops were saying, you know, not totally unreasonably,

that the security measures were going to have to be put in place and the police themselves are going to have to be paid for sort of policing the general area, which was happening these like tens of thousands of people driving into it when it wasn't really set up for that. And the question of, well, how do you fund that? How do you do that? How do you regulate that? How do you fund the security and the facilities that are required to make this thing work at all?

It was just sort of irresolvable. That's how you end up. That's how you get from there to the situation we're in today, where it costs like hundreds of quid to go to Glastonbury. And it's a question which is just sort of turns out to be not solvable, I think, absent a situation where you do indeed have a general acceptance of the idea that the state has some duty to make sure this, kind of thing can happen, provided enough people actually wanted. When I was going to three festivals in the late 1980s, there were always two bands that were playing, or at least you had been told that they were going to play in a minute. I'm not sure

if I actually got to see them, because things would not run to a schedule at these events. There were two bands, Osric Tentacles and Culture Shock. So Osric Tensicals actually formed at Stonehenge in 1983. They formed out of a jam at Stonehenge in 1983, which is basically epitomizes the sort of the, it's a great origin myth for a festival band, basically. They put out four cassette albums, albums only on cassette, and they put out their first proper album called Pungent,

a Pungent, effligent, effligent. effulgent. Thank you. Goodness. They put up their first album, Pulgent, effulgent in 1989, first final album, that is. I'm not sure there there are any distinctions between the songs on the, I'm not sure a song would start and end on that album, let's play the first track of that album. And then the second band that you'd always see at these festivals of Bangkok Culture Shop.

who were a sort of punk scar band. They formed out of the remnants of a punk band called Subhumans and Dick Lucas is the singer of both of them and then went on to form a band called Citizen Fish. They were subhumans were a sort of Wiltshire band so they would always play Stonehenge and Culture Shock would always play Stonehenge and in fact they have a song called Stonehenge

so we should play that. and our own pace and on our own sound all the papers print the boom there's no proof because they're playing to run us on into the play to run us on to the show before

that is really striking that's happening in the early 90s is this convergence between the emerging urban rave sea and the free festival circuit. You know, there are people who are coming out of the raves scene, but they're also part of the squat scene. They're putting on party, free parties and raves in squats in places like London. Then they're taking their sound systems out to these free festivals, which in some cases is really, really annoying, like the hippies who've been going there for years and don't like all this loud, noisy techno music. You know, to be fair,

outside the West Country in the East Midlands, the music they're actually playing is usually the most rebarbative and musically, some unmusical forms of hardcore techno, I often think it would have been different if they'd have been playing a nice bit of deep house, like DIY we're in Nottingham and some of the West Country crews. If you are going to turn up

and make hippies listen or to 180 BPM proto-gabber techno all night, you can expect some complaints. Not all night. Five nights on a row, about break. So, that's

And all this all culminates in the Castle Morton Free, so-called Castle Morton Free Fest, and the convergence on it of a lot of, of a number of the most prominent free rave crews, people like Spiral Tribe from London, DIY from Nottingham, etc. And the fact that it got loads of publicity in the press, like turned it into this massive event, this huge event that ended up going on for days.

So just to put it in the, like there would be updates on the daily news about what's going on at Castle Morton, basically. Obviously, kids seeing that are going, right, let's jump in the car and get down there. So what kind of updates? So what, on the news? Yeah, it was just on the news. They made it look really good. I remember like I was sitting, being my friends, we were all home from university for the summer in Southport,

like sitting there on the news, watching it on the news. I remember we were saying to each other, we were on the verge of driving down, but I think my parents were away for the week and say, we had the run of the house and the large garden. My parents had in Southport, we decided just to stay home and drop acid in the sunshine, instead of driving all the way down to Castle Morton for a festival that might well be over by the time we got there.

One of my big regrets not going to Castle. Yeah, I do really regret it, although we did have a fantastic week, to be honest. I got told about it. I was going to lots of free parties around Bristol at that point, because my friend Tev lived down in. Teff, I was going to go, this is going to be the big one.

And I was going, Tev, I haven't got any money. I'm not going. I quite regret that. Well, that was always one of the problems with that scene, actually. I was always remember, I was very dubious about that whole M-25 scene and a lot of the free party

and even free festival scene because you had to have a car. If you didn't have a car, you couldn't go to any of this stuff. And I was very down on that. And it's kind of interesting because anti-car culture would become part of the,

that scene, like once it became connected to the and to the road protests in the mid-90s. Anyway, Castle Morton is widely seen as being the event that provoked the next big legislative attack on all this stuff, which was the notorious 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, still remembered as the Criminal Justice Act or CGA, which basically criminalised or placed very heavy restrictions on, a set of activities that included hunt sabotage. which is a popular form of protest activity for people at that time, sabotaging foxhunts before they got criminalised by the Labour government, squatting and raves.

The rave being notoriously defined in law as an event where 10 or more people gather to listen to amplify music characterised by a series of repetitive beats. At the time, you know, people like me who were kind of part of that rave cohort were very conscious, well we thought that what was happening, was a big attack on rave culture and the rave scene. But really, I would say, I've subsequently come to the conclusion

that it wasn't really rave, which was ever really under attack, because almost simultaneous with the Criminal Justice Act being passed, you saw a significant relaxation of licensing laws in London and a lot of other places. So it became a lot easier to legally go out dancing until like six in the morning. But also, a lot of the free party crews

found that they didn't really get in. interfered with as long as they only tried to do small events that had no connection with the free festival scene like within a year or so the CJA being passed and I think now in retrospect we have to say that the criminal justice act in 1994 was really the conclusion of the series of attacks on the free festival movement that arguably started with Windsor in 74 that really or maybe really started with the Battle of the Beanfield in 85 that it was really it was the free festival scene the free festival concept which the Criminal Justice Act was really designed to attack. That was what it was really, it was suppressing, more than it was suppressing rave as such.

And in terms of the history of festivals, I think it's really, really interesting. It's really significant that it's immediately in the wake of the Criminal Justice Act that you start to get the emergence of the now very familiar, recognisable, commercial music festivals seen in Britain. There had been a few commercial music festivals. Donington, there was Redding, you know, often associated with heavy rock. There was a few like just what we recognise now as commercial music festivals. But they completely exploded in the mid-90s, in the second half in the 90s. And they completely exploded really in the,

really what was happening. I would say what was happening was my conceptual analysis of this whole sequence is festivals start off as a kind of commercial and innovation. but one which isn't really capitalist in character, as it's not really connected to circuits of large-scale accumulation. Then it becomes unsustainable, because the entrepreneurs involved in it just can't handle the numbers. Then they become a cultural social form, which is associated with the counterculture,

because it's only really people with countercultural ideals that have the will and the desire and the organisational imagination to make this new cultural form sustainable and happen. Then once it gets past a certain critical mass in size, the state comes along and crushes it and it crushes it in order to make room for capital to rush into that space

and start accumulating proper capital levels of profits. And so in the second half of the 90s you get the big music promotion companies putting on these big expensive, heavily policed commercial festivals which are all about profit and all about making huge, huge amounts of money. And to a large extent, that is where we're,

still are, basically. I like that history. I agree with it. But I think there is something about, like, there has to be a certain mix for it to be, to look as though it's dangerous, basically. And you get that at like Stonehenge and at Castle Morton, which is that you have these sort of countercultural sort of inspired events,

which can be allowed to go on for a certain level. And then as soon as they start to cross over into like kids off estates, basically, do you know what I mean? I become like really, really big, big part of like, signature culture, that's when it's like, that's the sort of dangerous mix that they don't want. Well, I think it's partly that, but that's also the moment when it becomes apparent that there are opportunities for massive profits there. Well, yeah, okay, yeah, that's the other side of it, yeah, definitely. That's also, it's the kids from the can, and it's an interesting,

the kids on the council states might be threatening because this is the working class coming into contact with the counterculture in a potentially dangerous alliance. But it's also the kids from the councilculture at this stage are just demonstrating there's enough popular appetite for this stuff that breweries and licensed corporate entertainment companies could be making millions out of it. And you've got to kick those hippies out of the way who were giving this stuff away for free to make that viable. Yeah. But I watched that film Beats. There was a film about Free Party, the Free Party scene came out a couple of years ago, I think. And it reminded me that, like, you know, the people who were involved in it and putting

on these sound systems, etc. They were really driven, they weren't driven by money, but They were driven by politics. They saw it as a political thing, do you know what I mean? It reminded me like that not just to like the 1970s countercultural free festivals and not just the sort of stonehenge type free festivals, but like the early 90s sort of free festival, free party scene was an explosion of politics or motivation by politics rather than the money. So in response to the Criminal Justice Act and then Bill of 1984, 1994,

the band Orteca put out a sort of protest EP called Anti-EP, and one of the songs on it is called Flutter. They deliberately engineered this song with something like 60 different beats on it so that it wouldn't be music characterized by repetitive beats. And so the EP also carried a warning on it advising DJs to have a lawyer and a musicologist present at all times to confirm the non-repetitive nature of the music in the event of police harassment, a nice bit of musical history then.

Okay, so with that expansive history of festivals, like taking us to the 90s, like now that we're in the 21st century, I think the question is, like, how has festivals changed with the entrenchment of neoliberalism? And, like, what does that history tell us about, like, the position of the British music festival in society? society and in the imaginary. So maybe we should have a little bit of think around those questions now. Well, for me, they illustrate something quite interesting just about the relationship between sites of creativity, collective creativity and capital in general, that, you know, those signs of collective creativity will often be allowed to grow to a certain extent, but then

they will be heavily policed and commodified. And I think in broad terms, that's what I would say happened over the course of that history. But it's very easy for someone like me who sort of, I didn't really live through that history. I lived through the tail end of it. I live through a significant section of it. It's very easy for me to just be dismissive now actually. Just say, well, festivals from the mid-90s onwards really are just a kind of commercial or form of commercial entertainment, which I've got no more or less interest than any other form of commercial entertainment. And I don't want to, I don't want to just be dismissive in that sense. I mean, Nadia, you're the one who's actually been to Glastonbury like 12 times since, since

that moment of the mid-90s. Like the last time I went to Glastonbury was 1992. I mean, I did go to Glastonbury in 1998 as a 17-year-old and had, you know, encamped on the top of like the pyramid stage field or whatever, which is a very, very different experience to like, you know, working there for 12 years. I mean, I would say that like despite all of that history, which all makes sense, like I still think the experience of a festival like Glastonbury, I mean, I've been to lots of them. You know, I'd been to like secret garden party. Like, I've been to like wilderness, which is a kind of a strange festival which can talk about. And all of these, I've either gone as like a worker or a performer. So I can't really speak about the specific, uh, experience of, you know,

just, just like being, you know, a punter and getting a ticket and going. But I think definitely like going to Glastonbury and like basically living in the Green Futures field for like eight days. I mean, something like Glastonbury, the thing that I find really striking is the difference in like the coverage of it compared to the experience of it. Like it looks, okay, like it could look like magical, incredible, you know, the bands and all the rest of it, like when it's broadcast on, and people are watching it. But that doesn't really tell you much about what it's like to live there. And when you're living there, and I'm using the word living like deliberately. It's like you're basically in a series of different hamlets. There's 250,000 people

there. It's the biggest town in the West Country when it's set up. And each one of these fields has its different culture. And there are people who stay in their field. And there are people who transverse different fields. And it's quite a kind of interesting experience to have. And I think, you know, like some of the themes that I brought up earlier are really kind of the things that I think make those spaces special such as there are no borders between these different

fields in a sense like there are kind of like culturally and artistically but you can move from one to another so I mean I guess in some way there are like Glastonbury Postcode wars but like I think I didn't experience them in

in that sense but I think like it's just the general affect of that being kind of where you live and what you're doing for eight days is kind of special because it changes how you interact with people, you know, and like what your morning looks like and what your afternoon looks like and what your evening looks like and, you know, where you go out at night. And I think the interesting thing as a woman is I can go out to three o'clock in the morning and walk home and not really worry. Like I'm not saying that, you know, there are like terrible assaults that happen at festivals

I'm sure there are and I'm sure there are many but it's not an experience that I have in the city of being able to go out till three, four o'clock in the morning and walk home back to my tent in the Green Future Fields that only plays acoustic music so it is a very very special experience for me definitely and

yeah I'm very very pro-Glastonbury I mean last time I went to Glasgow was I think 2004 or something and like I hadn't been to Glastonbury for like a decade before that, probably something like that. And I remember getting there thinking, Christ, this is really like commercial. You know, it's a very, very different experience. Why? So tell me, to tell me why commercial specifically?

Oh, well, no, no, no. I'm going to go on and say that like basically then, once you're there for a bit and you wander around, you realize there are areas which are much, have carried much more, there are areas that carry a little bit of that free festival sort of scenes, you know what I mean? And the best bits are the bits which, where you're wandering around just come across people who set something up and that you know they do some you know they set this little bar up or something like that you know what I mean that I could see the elements the sort of legacies but like going to like free festivals when I was 16 17 actually probably like 17 18 um I went to I think I went

to glass from me when I was 16 but like yes free festivals I was 17 18 like they were absolutely like mind blowing for me because I was just like a little lad from up the valleys you know what mean, it was like a glimpse of a different world. Like, I read it politically at that time. I thought like, this proves that the world could all be run on a different way. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, but it's all, like, it's all, it's all like totally relative. So like me coming from Egypt and from quite a restrictive society and then like, you know, starting to get involved in the left and like working at left wing charities and then like spending, you know, like the budget that we, the small budget that we had at the time to be able, like, to build a supermarket

trolley on pneumonic wheels for like an anti-supermarket campaign and like with massive flags and spend like eight days going around Glastonbury and getting signing people up to a campaign. Like, it was very creative and very fun to be involved in Glastonbury stuff. And it was like a complete, complete world away from like how it was brought up. I mean, like, I thought I was going to say was like, I wonder if people still have that, that experience at, like, different festivals where they think, God, yeah, this, this is something, this is something that's run under a completely different logic to what I'm normally like. I'm not sure, because I, that's not my experience. Well, I think there is, like, random, what I will call random mad shit. So, like, I love the chaos,

like, the random shit that happens. And, like, sure, like, part of it can be, like, thought about within the catchment of creativity. But, like, you know, my, one of my favorite festival, moments that I'm never going to forget is like being like watching blur with like two of my friends and like right in the middle at the pyramid stage and just as like the guitars come in for like Blur's song too someone sets off like this massive flare in the middle of the audience which is obviously like extremely dangerous that up into the air and it was just like and obviously like the security are trying to get to this person but it was like incredibly well-timed completely ridiculous and very, very funny. And this sort of stuff happens all of the time. Like, it

happens, it still happens all the time. I mean, I've not been to Custonbury for a few years, but it's that kind of like the unpredictability and the chaos, I think, which is attractive. There isn't about the chaos and the sort of wildness that is polyphonic, we might even call it, in fact, to have a little cold. Which, which there's still, you know, which brings me to the something that we haven't talked about yet, which I think retained some of that like mad shit chaos, which I really enjoy, which is the local, you know, often council-sponsored festivals that, you know, ran all through like the 2000s, definitely, in London, and I'm sure around other cities, like there were lots and lots and lots of small festivals in local

parks that would take place. And they were always free and it was usually for the day. you'd have like charity stalls, food stores, like small, you know, like music stages, etc. And I remember that being one of the big things that got lost during the cuts of the 2010s, etc. And suddenly all of these small local festivals closed down. Now, you've had experience of these as well, Jeremy, haven't you? And they were like, great. And I'm really happy to hear, yeah, go on. Yeah, my experience of festival culture in the 90s was,

really just going to those municipal London festivals and really enjoying it in a way I did not enjoy Glastonbury at all and I didn't enjoy Secret Garden Party and I didn't enjoy Womad. And I think it's, it is sort of interesting for me to think about why, like, why I didn't, I did really enjoy them. And partly it's just laziness because they don't feel like a massive effort, like to get there, to get home, like to get around the site. I mean, my one experience of Glastonbury in 92, when I was stewarding, which is work, but in many ways it makes it easier to be there because you get a privileged tent, you know, camping facilities and stuff. I was just, I just found, I found glass to be to be a huge amount of work. I found it to be, I couldn't really understand why we

all had to schlep to bloody, like, you know, to Somerset, to Field and Somerset, if we wanted to see like the levelers and the fall and television, you were the Bandar University didn't see that. It can, because you could do all that in London. There's something about this kind of complex relationship between urban and rural space that goes on with festivals. I mean, I'm not totally defending this position, but my response to it when I first went to Glastrobury, my early 20s and came back from it, quite exhausted and really having just felt quite bored, like nearly all the time. My response to it was that was like a quintessentially suburban phenomenon. Like it was neither one thing nor the other.

It was neither the beauty and peace of the countryside, nor was it like a properly, was it really the kind of urban experience of like really being surrounded by many people from many different backgrounds and really, you know, actually most people there were from very homogenous backgrounds. There were sort of different ages, but it was nearly all white people from a fairly narrow range of middle class backgrounds. So, you know, I sort of think, like I don't really like music festivals, partly because I feel like there's, there's something quintessalienable. essentially pointless about if what you want to do is listen to a load of bands like well why don't you do in inner city like i've really why not have an event where you go to you have loads of bands playing in venues in in a city where there's already space for them like why do you have to spend like burn loads of carbon like schlepping everybody out into the into the countryside to do it and spoil the beauty of the countryside but of course i was talking about this to joe and

we were saying well i get that for the people who really love doing it the thing that people really seem to love is this sense of it's sort of a holiday it's a collective holiday it's something that people do with groups of friends and it's something about the sustained nature of it as well especially for people who go to things like glastonbury for for more than a week so there i can and i can really understand that i can i can completely understand that i can see how if it's over a slightly longer period or you're with a big group of friends who aren't going to meet in any other way or if you do get loads of that random stuff which i've just i've never really had in any of those contexts if I'm honest.

But can we come back to the 21st century? No. Leave us in the 80s and 90s. We're happy there. I mean, I think that's partly why I like the local fettles because they're an urban phenomenon. Because they're probably, they're an urban, they're using the space that's already available in the city. And they're creating that sense of pleasure and collectivity

and even potential randomness in a place where the facilities are sort of all already there. Like it hasn't all had to be contrived. And also I do, I like really small events, like I like going to, like, I like going to like a rave or a concert, like out in the countryside, even where everybody's camping and everything. Because I like, and everybody's kind of sharing the same experience, because the thing for me about this is always my experience of music festivals is always that there's this, you know, you sort of, you sort of never quite in a moment at any given moment, because there's always these multiple, there's these multiple, um, sensory inputs all the time. So you can never really concentrate on one thing. You're never really doing just one thing. And I understand it's not like that for lots of people who really enjoy it. But for me, they're more like, they're more like the 3D equivalent of scrowning your phone

than they are like being at a really good party or being at a really, or being at a really good concert. You know, they're more like that. There's this, it's more this aesthetics of distraction than it is actually an aesthetics of immersion or contact or like real, you know, real things happening. So, and I understand, I get that there have been many attempts, including things like Burning Man, to kind of create something which doesn't feel like that, which is more kind of immersive in its randomness or whatever.

But yeah, for me, that's the thing I don't like about them, is they very easily turn into a kind of 3D equivalent of the equivalent of scrolling your phone, just casually moving from one thing to another without ever really settling or ever really doing anything. I never feel like that at those local festivals. The local festivals, for one thing, in my experience, there's a much more real mixture of communities,

like there really are people from all different sections of the community coming together at the festival. You really do get a more surprising mixture of music at them. And because there's fewer things going on, it's easier to kind of really get into, like, a concert performance for a few hours or a rave for a few hours or something. So there's something about those, and there's something about them being located in the cities in particular that to me,

you know, it feels really good. It feels like a kind of, it feels like producing collective joy in a space where it's usually just noise and pollution. But what do you feel about the local festivals? With the local festivals. So I thought, I was really saddened by the fact that a lot of them seem to be shutting down after the cuts in the 2010s. But then I realized that this year

there's actually still quite a few that are on. So some of my favourite ones are not there anymore. But this year I went to Califest in Caledonian Road in London. So shout out to the organizers of that because that was one of like the best days of my summer so far. So I was like meeting up with a friend and we didn't know what to do.

And it's basically I'd not been before. It's in a very short stretch of the road on Caledonian Road, you know, where there's like, an Iceland and a corner shop and a betting shop and you know all the usual stuff you find on the high street and and it just was like an amazing like experience they had like five small stages like lots of stalls lots of food and like all the local mad people were out and like the pubs were open and it was just like everybody's spilling outside and it was just such a good vibe and like the bus stop had

been turned into like a DJ set doing like I think it was like mostly drum and bass and stuff and it was it was amazing like everybody was dancing there was all sorts of different people there and it was really really really good vibes and really good vibes and it left me feeling really warm and like that with that collective joy experience it was really good and then so I started looking up other others and I noticed that there's quite a few on that are still on London that these are hyper community based you know so it's around the specific road or whatever. And it's just really great. And long may they continue. And I hope more and more of them come back to life. There's one in Leeds over in Hyde Park called Unity Day.

And it fits that point you were making, Jim, about like, different communities coming together. But it only lasts one day. So there's no camping. It doesn't have that sort of festival feel for me. It's much more of a sort of, you know, an event in the park for the day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So probably the Hayday, you know, some ways of festival culture as a specific culture in Britain was the early 90s. This is when the free festival scene, even though it was really in decline already after the Battle of the Beanfield, had acquired a sufficient level of public visibility and there was not that much else going on in the culture such that it became something quite widely of interest to certain

kinds of young people. This was when I was an undergraduate student. When in London, for example, called club nights like the Mega Dog, which had its roots in a smaller night called Club Dog, and Megatripolis made a very explicit effort to bring the culture of the free festivals together with urban rave culture in an urban context. So there are a few musical artists associated with that scene at the time. In some ways, one of the most ubiquitous was a band called Back to the Planet. But an artist that was really fond of at the time was sort of contemporaries of the orb and part of that ambient dub scene as it was called at the time which also overlap quite a lot with that festival scene that festival culture scene

groups at higher intelligence agency as well it was this group uh well this artist who recorded under the name banco de gaia this guy toby marks i think he's still around i think but banko de gaia like osric tentacles mostly just released cassette albums up until 1994 and then Like a lot of artists at that time, actually, they had to stop doing what they had been doing on these early cassette albums, which was using loads and loads of samples. This was something that was also happening in hip-hop, that there was this crackdown on sampling. But you can now hear some of their early cassette album work just on YouTube. So I see, you can hear all of their 1992 cassette album Deep Live on YouTube.

So maybe we can just pull something from the first few minutes of a, that Banco de Gaia deep live. We could sort of come back and end on, like, thinking about the questions we started with, which was, you know, are these experiences, are they, are they about, like, has been able to cope with society? Are they about, like, letting off the steam of it? Do they have more radical potential? Like, when I was younger, I did think they had more radical potential. But there was a wider countercultural sort of scene around that, which was saying that they did have.

But it was also my experience as well of that. When I've tried to think about what was that experience of going to a free festival, why was it such a mind-blowing one? Frederick Jameson talks about this idea of enclaves. He's actually writing about it, in fact, in terms of science fiction and stuff like that, about spaces or moments which are governed by a different logic to the society around it, that sort of idea. And that is how I experienced those sort of early free festivals.

basically. It seemed as though they were running by a logic, and that logic could be reproduced as a logic upon which society could be formed. Looking back at it now, I'm not actually sure if that was true, basically. Obviously, you know, the material basis for that was it was in the sort of welfare state, the post-welfare state, and as it disappeared in the 1980s into the 1990s. I mean, you're talking there about the logic of prefiguration, aren't you? Is the idea of the festival or any other cultural event as a prefigurative experience? Yeah, perhaps I am. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's also that, I think it's also that thing of like in the 1980s, the Cold War was still going on. So the world was split between two different spheres. And like, you know, the idea of being able to imagine that things could be run in a different way were much more prevalent. And I think like that is also that. It's not just the idea that this would be the form which would which would prefigure a society to come. But it's just, oh, things can happen under different logics for different purposes than just like commercial law. Do you know what I mean? It helps you get out of the capitalist realism, even, if you want to put it that way.

Well, yeah, but on that point, I've got a kind of slightly different reading of the possibilities there, which is quite similar to my analysis of, you know, what happened in the Egyptian uprising and the revolution in Tehrir, which is that it's kind of like these experiences of spending a few days, like living in a different way. you know, I'm talking here about the camping level of, you know, music festivals is like, it's almost like Silocybin, like it shows you another way. Now, you might be so, you know, wrapped up with your everyday life that you are unable to tap into that experience in a way and thread it through the way that you live your daily life. But you, nothing can take that experience away from you. And there can be then moments in your future and potentially in a collective future

where that experience of how you were and how you existed in a festival can be tapped into. And I think that has potential, you know, revolutionary potential when it happens at scale. Whoa, that's too far out.