Free festivals are a combination of music, arts, and cultural activities, for which often no admission is charged, but involvement is preferred. They are identifiable by being multi-day events connected by a camping community without centralised control. The pioneering free festival movement started in the UK in the 1970s.
History
David Bowie's song "Memory of a Free Festival", recorded in September 1969 and included on the 1969 album David Bowie, mentions the free festival organised by the Beckenham Arts Lab and held on the Croydon Road Recreation Ground on 16 August 1969. He may also have been inspired by an earlier free festival he had recently performed at, one which could lay claim to being the first of its kind in Europe.
Cambridge Midsummer Pop Festival ran from 8-11 June, 1969, offering a heavyweight line-up of psych pop, rock, folk and prog music. As well as Bowie himself (mistakenly given the first name ‘Dave’), the programme listed bands and performers such as King Crimson, Edgar Broughton, Mighty Baby, Roy Harper, Terry Reid, Brian Auger & The Trinity, Family, Strawbs and Marsha Hunt, with John Peel as MC.
The 1972 to 1974 Windsor Free Festival, held in Windsor Great Park, England, was a free festival. The 'organisation' was mostly Ubi Dwyer distributing thousands of leaflets and asking people and bands to bring their own equipment and create their own environment – "bring what you expect to find."Clarke, M. (1982). The Politics of Pop Festivals. London: Junction Books.
"Free festivals are practical demonstrations of what society could be like all the time: miniature utopias of joy and communal awareness rising for a few days from a grey morass of mundane, inhibited, paranoid and repressive everyday existence…The most lively [young people] escape geographically and physically to the ‘Never Never Land’ of a free festival where they become citizens, indeed rulers, in a new reality." Un-authored leaflet from 1980, quoted in George McKay's Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance Since the Sixties (p. 15).McKay, G. (1996). Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance Since the Sixties. London: Verso Books.
Free festivals by year
Historical 1960s
Cambridge Midsummer Pop Festival, June 8-11 1969
Woodstock Festival, 1969 (partly free) Croydon Road Recreation Ground free festival, 1969
1970s Phun City 1970 Glastonbury Free Festival 1971 Windsor Free Festival, 1972–1974 People's Free Festivals at Watchfield 1975, Seasalter 1976 and Caesar's Camp 1978 Trentishoe Whole Earth Fayre 1973–76 Stonehenge Free Festival, 1972–1984 Battle of the Beanfield (1985) Rivington Pike/North Country Fair 1976–78 Deeply Vale Festivals 1976–79 Leamington Spa Peace Festival
1980s Elephant Fayre, 1981–86 Jazz at the Lake: Lake George Jazz Weekend (started as a free festival in upstate New York in 1984)
1990s Torpedo Town - Hampshire, UK Castlemorton Common Festival, 1992 Free Edinburgh Fringe Festival Free Fringe CzechTek Dragon Festival, Orgiva, Spain, 1997–2009 Przystanek Woodstock Davestock - Vancouver Island, BC Heineken Music Festivals, 1990–1995, UK
2000s Barışarock, 2003-2008
2010s Mile of Music - Appleton, Wisconsin Green World Yoga & Sacred Music Festival, SkåneGreen World Yoga & Sacred Music Festival, Skåne 2020s Wisbech Rock Festival - Wisbech, Isle of Ely, UK.
Gallery
See also Free party New age travellers Alternative society Teknival DIY culture
References
External links
The Free Festivals 1969-1990 - ukrockfestivals.com George McKay - Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance Since the Sixties:Free Festivals Battle of the Beanfield - ITV unseen broadcast