Naked Hippies in Teepees

33 years on, I still can’t get my head around August 21st, 1976. On the day, it seemed quite simple. Wake up in a tent in a Hertfordshire field, your first night away from home with mates, aged 17. Following a magical evening of camp fires, acoustic guitars, joss sticks, awe and wonder. (One of the Plonker People - as we called the naked hippies in the teepee - sold Corf what turned out to be a soggy cigar butt for 10 pence.) Hoards of hairy, kaftan-wearing youths, all here for one purpose. To see the one and only Rolling Stones headline the Knebworth Festival. Some of us had even paid the extraordinary sum of £4.50 for our ticket – nine houses on my Saturday window-cleaning round. For this was also to be one of the last live performances from 10CC at the time of their biggest hit single, I’m Not In Love. And, little did we know, but this was also one of the last gigs by the complete line-up of Lynyrd Skynyrd, before the crash that killed half the band. Then there was Todd Rundgren and Hot Tuna. And instead of the few tens of thousands expected, over 200,000 more gatecrashed the event. Like ants and locusts, they climbed the fences and overwhelmed the turnstiles. So large was the crowd that those at the back heard reggae, off-beat versions of the bands, as the speaker banks at each corner of the massive event struggled to synchronise. We loved it – Buffalo Johnson, Corf, Pubic and me. We didn’t know it was the end of an era. Or that what was about to change that era was actually happening that very same day at another festival in France, at Mont De Marsan, where Nick Lowe, Pink Fairies, Eddie And The Hot Rods, Tyla Gang, Little Bob Story, Count Bishops, The Boys and The Damned, were featuring at a famous Punk Festival. It was the day where Ray Burns actually got his Captain Sensible moniker. But we were oblivious. We read about these upstarts in the paper the following week. We even saw Eddie And The Hot Rods as the Reading Festival the next weekend. But this was yet another festival from the old school, featuring the likes of Rory Gallagher, Camel, Black Oak Arkansas and Ted Nugent. The change was under way. Some people may well have seen The Sex Pistols perform at Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall in June and July 76 and had their world changed overnight. But this never happened to the majority of the people in the sticks where we came from. So, for us, August 21st, 1976 was a seminal day. And we didn’t even know it. We just enjoyed it for what it was. By the way, I’ve still got the packet of joss sticks I bought the previous evening. I wonder what happened to the Iron Cross I put round my neck. And that red and green, harlequin-patterned Knebworth ticket hanging up on our toilet wall today is fading somewhat now…

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk