Evicted squatters and those disillusioned with city life took to the road, living in buses and caravans all year round. In the mid-1970s, changes in uk squatting laws had an impact upon urban alternative communities. Similar events sprouted across the country, and those who didn’t wish to return to their city lives started to spend summers travelling from festival-to-festival in a rag-tag train of vehicles that became known as ‘the convoy’. Initially attracting practicing neo-druids alongside the hippies, factions from the anarcho-punk scenes and like- minded underground tribes became drawn to the Stonehenge celebration. Even pop acts such as Dexys Midnight Runners and Thompson Twins played there. Later years saw reggae stars such as Sugar Minott, anarcho punks Crass and post-punk band The Raincoats. His ashes were ceremoniously taken to every Stonehenge Festival after his death.) Early Stonehenge headliners included psychedelic prog rockers Hawkwind and Gong, who emerged from the 1960s Canterbury scene. (Wally Hope was the pseudonym of Philip Russell, who died in mysterious circumstances following an arrest for possession of lsd in 1975.
#THE MIDNIGHT WAVE NEW AGE FREE#
That same summer saw the first Stonehenge Free Festival, initiated by Wally Hope, in fields adjacent to the iconic megaliths and held at summer solstice every year until 1984. Tolerated for the first two years, the festival was shut down by police in 1974 after numbers had grown from an initial 700 to over 8,000. Organizers Ubi Dwyer and Sid Rawle squatted royal land for three consecutive summers, inspired by beliefs about common property forged in London’s alternative communes.
With the motto ‘Bring what you expect to find’, the first of the free festivals was held at Windsor Great Park in 1972. Their origins lie in the squats and free festivals of the 1970s. Dropped from the psychic landscape of British pop, undetected by the radar of retromania: whatever happened to New Age travellers? By the end of the 1990s, much of this had disappeared from sight. I remembered other events and names: the anti-Criminal Justice Bill marches in London in 1994 the Dongas Tribe motorway protesters at Twyford Down ‘Swampy’ the eco-activist who became a household name. The Face ran a photo-essay featuring teepees, grimy buses, sound-systems and white people with matted dreadlocks. On the news: run-ins at Stonehenge between the police and what was called the ‘peace convoy’ 20,000 people descending on Castlemorton Common, Worcestershire, in 1992, for the biggest illegal outdoor rave ever held in Britain. I recalled an encampment of buses close to where I grew up teenagers from school would score weed from the people living up there. This image sparked a line of thought about illegal outdoor ‘free parties’ in Britain during the early 1990s, organized by shadowy collectives with names such as Spiral Tribe, Bedlam and Exodus. I was in the car with my family one summer in the mid-1980s, on holiday in Dorset, driving past a long caravan of hippies in painted buses and mud-splattered vans. Internet technology has enabled full-spectrum access to archival images and sounds of the postwar era, allowing pop’s founding texts to be reprinted ad nauseam.Ī dim memory surfaced recently. Folkies, hippies, skaters, new romantics, teds, club kids, indie kids, b-boys, ska girls, skinheads, casuals, greasers, mods.
Punk, new wave, rockabilly, goth, techno, industrial, hip-hop.
To walk through Bushwick in Brooklyn or Dalston in London, is to walk through a pop culture re-enactment museum, like Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, only with younger staff and artisanal coffee. It’s become axiomatic that every look, sound and pose that pop ever invented has been revived, emptied out and sold back. The hope that any youth subculture of the last 60 years might have escaped the maw of hipster recuperation today seems unlikely. Courtesy: REX/Associated Newspapers photograph: Jenny Goodall. Convoy of vehicles heading to the UK’s biggest illegal outdoor rave, Castlemorton Common, Worcestershire, 1992.
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