Friday, May 5, 1972

So I discarded my college clothes and grabbed my boots, jeans and Army greatcoat. Early on Friday morning I gave my shoulder length hair a wash and hitched a freight out of town. Actually my uncle took me in his Morris Minor. It was a cold overcast May morning. The top deck of the ferry from Ryde to Portsmouth braced the soul for a few days sleeping in a wet field. I waited for Terry at the Harbour Station. And waited, and waited.

Eventually, a tattered green Hillman Minx screeched into the taxi bays and out jumped Terry lively as ever. ‘‘This is Dave, he’s taking us to London,’’ he called introducing a short cropped teenager dressed in a tee-shirt and khaki trousers. ‘‘Dave’s in the army, he’s on leave and going up to see friends in town.’’

TO LONDON

Give me a car with a column gear change and I’m like Tom Waits with a ‘58 Buick. Terry perched a Dansette portable on his knees, my kind of laptop, keeping us supplied with some tasty singles. Not one Tony Bluerinse record of the week in sight, just piles of Floyd, Tyrannasaurus Rex, Hendrix and Atomic Rooster.

I had barely turned 18 and here encapsulated in this Hillman Minx was the meaning of life. I was sat in a car with a column gear change, Terry gabbling fourteen to the dozen without the drugs, Syd Barrett warbling ‘See Emily Play’ and the girls. As in all road movies there has to be the girls. As we hurtled around a roundabout near Guildford Terry spied a couple of hitchhikers ahead and the Minx halted on a sixpence. The ladies were students hitching to the same distant field in Lancashire as overselves.

Negotiating London we played beat the clock with the traffic system. The girls were dropped near the North Circular, the Hillman turned towards Shaftsbury Avenue where tickets were collected from the Edwards and Edwards agency. Then Dave turned the revving Hillman around and hurtled towards Camden to catch the coach for Bickershaw. By one o’clock we were deserting the sombre grey of London for the equally colourless route north on the motorway.

COSMIC CHARLIE

Our driver sensed that wallpaper music would not suffice for his passengers that afternoon. Boredom was avoided when the driver allowed the tape system to be commandered. Magna Carta quickly replaced the usual run-of-the-mill James Last blue rinse blandishments. Bedroll hippies, groovers and kafhtan kids from Camden swopped stories, jokes and weed to the roll of acoustic madrigals.

It was the on the coach that we met Charlie, Cosmic Charlie (how do you do), a tangled mass of ginger hair, exaggerated by a head band and pretty much yer standard hippie house stash of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Charlie was gregarious, a real party swinger. Terry had found a soulmate.

BICKERSHAW

Later that afternoon the coach had swung off the motorway and wendled its way into the sleepy suburb of Wigan called Bickershaw. A one horse village greeted us with open arms, especially the local grocery store. Here food, booze and Coronation Street warmth was dispatched via a couple of delighted proprietors. The place was packed. Hardened festival goers well versed in rip-off food territory behind the walls were taking precautions. The last outpost before striking the Klondyke.

Across the road a piece of waste ground doubled as the festival site. Amongst the discarded house bricks and pram wheels stood the arena fenced by a wall of high metal panels. Terry and I entered with a half bottle of Teachers and a couple of pasties. The sight before us resembled a medieval market gathering reminiscent of Robin Hood Men in Tights. A bedraggled army were milling around claiming territory, purchasing merchandise and settling down for that night’s music.

To our right two massive screens perched either side of the stage provided further enhancement for the music. Towards our left stood the ‘dormitory tents’ amongst smaller domestic versions being erected by the punters. Terry and I had already paid our 30p to sleep under the ‘dormitory’ cover. Not that we had needed to. We discovered the tents open to all, the massive flaps swaying in the wind. Between this makeshift campsite and the main stage area was a small piece of grubby marshland. Close to the perimeter fencing were stalls and tents utilised by market traders, first aiders and help groups. Some dealt in food, some trinkets, others in calming bad trips. The candymen were out in force.

Terry reacquainted himself with a motley collection of the South Coast sweetie salesmen all dressed in expensive looking kaftans and skin piercing boots. Various combinations of dolly mixtures were tucked about their persons which passed hands at 50p or £1 a taste. Plentiful quantities of marijuana wrapped in tin foil were on hand. No surprises here. Festivals without dope were as rare as Wimpeys without hamburgers.

SAM APPLE PIE

With Terry fired up and myself hitting liberal doses from the whiskey bottle we ran into Cosmic Charlie again down near the front of the stage. Sitting apiece with Charlie we watched Sam Apple Pie perform. Unheralded and eventually lost in a fever for the Bowie driven, Velvets inspired glam transvestite rock of the early seventies the Pie remained a rabble rousing band gloriously stuck in a 1964 r’n’b time warp. No pretense, what you saw is what you got. Good hard driving rock primed with gutsy guitar workouts. In short, I loved em. So did Charlie, who was now wrapped in a bed cover and testing out his lungs with occasional cries of ‘‘Wally’’

STACKRIDGE

In dramatic contrast Stackridge took the stage. Against the setting sun their blend of Somerset romanticism and Mutter Slater’s lunacy warmed the gathering audience. The band set the controls for the heart of cider country with Purple Spaceships over Yatton and Mutter doubled as ‘Kaiser Bill’s Batman’ whistling Stackridge’s anthem Slark. The song like a return trip to Middle Earth floated over the hushed crowd wrapped in its mythical dragon imagery. Slark’s infectious tune could be whistled to distraction. The following morning off key playbacks screeched from portable cassettes.

HAWKWIND/JONATHON KELLY

Between bands Terry and I wandered amongst the array of merchandising tents and food stalls. The playing order of much of Friday night twenty years on remains hazy, probably due to the half bottle of whiskey I was consuming to dispel the encroaching cold of a Lancashire night. I remember Hawkwinds spirited November the fifth set full of sonic farts and bangs, the lone Irishman Jonathon Kelly’s Cursed Anna’s Stare and other acoustic songs to transform the wet stage into a warm Dublin back bar.

DR. JOHN THE NIGHT TRIPPER

Sometime after midnight Dr. John the Night Tripper took the stage and gave us his medicine tent showman voodoo gris gris show. He walked on gilded splinters showering the audience with mystical mumbo jumbo and lots of good ol jambalaya. Funky as hell and as hot as the Irish stew I was consuming in the company of two lovely Lancashire gals.

When we got back from our stew sortie Terry had made friends with just about everybody in the whole massive dormitory tent. A couple of friendly Camden kaftaned hippies Dave and Maggie were sharing a joint with him then two American girls pitched up to lay their bedrolls down. One of the American girls, a blonde from California (aren’t they all) talked excitedly of a park gig in San Francisco where the ‘‘Grateful Dead’s lead guitarist played a solo that went on and on for about three hours. He’s got a funny Spanish name, can’t remember what he’s called now’’. A bedtime story of Californian sunshine against a rain ridden backdrop.

WISHBONE ASH

Sheltering from the atrocious weather we huddled together at the flap of the massive dormitory tent listening to Wishbone Ash’s early morning set. It was pitch black, across the Lancashire marshland between us and stage came some inspired playing. The biting electric guitar work was driven on the wind in great swathes piercing through the lashing rain. Great chunks of the band’s third album Argus were showcased. Pitched against nature’s way ‘Throw down the sword’, ‘Warrior’ and ‘Leaf and Stream’ began to sound like anthems from another world.

There comes a time at every festival when you cannot or do not want to hear anymore. That point came, for me, as Wishbone Ash rounded off their set. Pacific Gas and Electric may have played later that night but the warmth of sleeping bag beckoned as the rain pounded the canvas high above us. It had been a cracking first night.

Mike Plumbley