Festivals Britannia Page #3

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So they eventually got it up with some bloke underneath it

with a couple of cracked ribs or something.

Lord Montague said to me, "Play them the blues to calm them down."

That wasn't going to do any good, but we played them blues.

It didn't make any difference. They were still leaping about the place.

I think you always have to remember that the Brits have always been

very strong on gangs.

One of the things I think festivals provided

was a chance for those people to met, the people in the gang.

It was just young people...

..going through a mild form of protest, basically,

that "We want our world".

# Oh when the saints

# Go marching in... #

While these two jazz tribes skirmished, a more serious political movement was gathering pace

as an increasingly politicised British youth took to the streets

in the early Sixties.

# Ban the bomb! Ban the bomb! Ban the bomb! Ban the bomb! #

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marches, the Ban the Bomb marches, as they became dubbed,

they again were a bunch of kids going out for a weekend,

unsupervised, in the country,

but rather than partying they were saving the world.

We went on those marches because

they were huge social gatherings -

admittedly, all in a long queue.

But they were gatherings of people of the same mind who were

pretty determined that this was not going to go forward.

They were a festival on the march.

We marched from Aldermaston to London.

They were festivals of singing, they were festivals of idea,

they were a march for freedom.

The heady mix of youth, politics and music were

combining to create the rumblings of Britain's first countercultures.

But as the Sixties were revolving, so was a generation's musical taste, and nowhere was this more apparent

than at the National Jazz & Blues Festivals during the mid-Sixties.

It had its own earthy kind of feel, if you like, and the music was from a very broad church.

You had to be semiconscious not to realise that something was

changing, something was afoot.

There was an awful lot going on in the Sixties. I mean,

it was such a time of development, of change.

The jazz and the folk music was getting left behind.

Everything was sort of switching around.

It's interesting to see how you just look at how the bills changed,

you see how they sort of drifted from being jazz into jazz

and blues into being blues and into blues and rock and then into blues and rock and psychedelia.

But it wasn't just the music that was changing.

By 1967, duffel coats were being replaced by beads.

Pipes were out, flowers were in.

This was the Summer of Love, and the birth of the hippy was upon us.

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