Music festivals: an excuse for 30-year-olds to take MDMA in a tent for three days? Or the last bastions of liberty, equality and fraternity in our cynical capitalist world? Perhaps a sprinkling of both with a disproportionate helping of singed topless men wearing flower crowns.
In July 1973, the pop music festival was a rather different affair. There were only three in the UK, entry was £5 and it was not unheard of for security to be made up of leather-clad Hells Angels.
Our journalist headed off to find out what all the fuss was about. His first observation was highly pragmatic: ‘At most festivals there is remarkably little food on sale. You can buy things like chicken leg and chips on paper plates. There’s some free food – a mixture of porridge, rice and vegetables.’ Not a bad spread for five quid, though.
Festivals aren’t known for their lavatory facilities. I still have nightmares about a particular portable loo at Secret Garden Party 2013, but it seems I got off lightly.
‘At one recent large festival the ladies’ toilet was just a large round tent containing 20 or 30 buckets scattered at random round the floor,’ one festival organiser tells our writer. ‘You should have seen the faces of some of the girls as they came out of the tent.’
Despite these setbacks, our writer is won over by the festival experience, brushing aside reports of debauchery: ‘Of sex, there’s relatively little – pop festivals are not that comfortable or suitable.’
And regarding drink and drugs: ‘There’s less drunkenness than after the Cup final. There is also a small amount of LSD around.’
Glastonbury made a particular impression: ‘People walked around, often with a lovely look in their eyes – as if they had seen visions and other strange miracles, hard to put into words.’
In hindsight, maybe there was more than a small amount of LSD doing the rounds – either that or the attendees were massive fans of chicken leg and chips.
