Here's a second extract from 'Festivalized: Music, Politics, Alternative Culture', this time dealing with the Convoy...
We all sprayed ‘Peace Convoy’ on our
vehicles.
Jake Stratton-Kent:
I don’t know if anyone really knows where the Convoy came from. It was
connected to the earliest festivals at Stonehenge and to Tepee Valley. You also
had eco-warriors who refused to drive trucks and used handcarts and horse-drawn
carriages.
Nik Turner: People
were more enthusiastic about festivals in the 80s. In the 70s it had started to
become a movement and towards the end of the 70s you had this whole itinerant
crowd developing who were living in run-down vehicles and having trouble
getting around and that’s what became termed the Convoy. Now, a lot of people
that I knew on the Convoy had previously lived at Talley, so the Convoy
absorbed the festival movement which was, to a large degree, perpetuated by
people who lived at Talley and were pyramid dwellers.
Rory Cargill: You
had this village that floated from festival to festival. This is what the
Convoy was. You would have a group of people; Sid Rawle, John Pendragon, Phil
the Biker, and a few others. They were like a core and you’d get to a festival
and they would organise things. The Tepee Circle goes here, the shit pits go
there, the stage is going to go here. The Babylon marquee with all the little
traders is going to go there. You build it up and you mark it out and shepherd
people in and out of the place. It was quite organised in that sense. The
Convoy as such was the equivalent of a travelling circus. The people who were
travelling were sometimes the bands, in other words the circus acts. Most of
the time it was just the worker crew who were setting it up, organizing it,
putting in the groundwork, the spade work at the actual site. Then the punters
would arrive. In come the campers and bands and whatever, and it was a pretty
stable routine. So the Convoy already existed. When I joined the festivals in
‘76 it was largely made up from expatriates from the Tepee colony near Lampeter
which had just closed that spring. The guy who owned the land had decided he
was going to sell up, so everyone had to hit the road. That caused a big
migration from there, before they ended up where they are now at Cwmdu near
Llandeilo; Tepee Valley. That, essentially, became the Convoy and was the only
convoy that existed in ‘76/’77, that crowd of people, led by Sid Rawle who,
shall we say, had been evicted from Lampeter and were on their way to find a
new home. The migration of the Jews led by Moses, going around the country partaking
in many drugs and festivals on the way, as you do! That kicked open a door, the
idea that you could have this alternate circus of sorts travelling around,
setting up festivals.
Keith Bailey: The
first time that Here & Now turned up at Stonehenge with a bus, it was
amazing. A queue of people right around the festival wanted to come on board
and have a look and understand how you did this thing. Lo and behold, by ’77
there’d be a couple of dozen buses appearing at Stonehenge and it really caught
on. All those people began interrelating and building up this thing that became
‘The Convoy.’ That was kind of weird. By the time it’d got to the mid-80s, to
1984 and the last Stonehenge you had a few smack dealers and those sorts of
people involved with the Convoy and the whole influence wasn’t good, I felt.
Self-policing at Stonehenge – smack dealer’s
car burned out
Boris Atha
Glenda
Pescado: It started out as the Peace
Convoy and it was, in 1982, that huge Convoy from Stonehenge to Greenham
Common. We all sprayed ‘Peace Convoy’ on our vehicles. I mean, it was very
definite who the Peace Convoy was at the time. Having said that, some people
weren’t happy about having ‘Peace Convoy’ stencilled on their vehicles so they
had it sprayed on to bin liners and taped them on the side of their vehicles.
That got a lot of press and it changed the scene. People in the cities,
disillusioned people, were reading about that stuff and thinking, ‘Hang on,
that sounds great.’ The Convoy, and the free festival circuit, started
attracting all those people who hadn’t really come into it with the ideology
that had started the whole scene in the first place. They were coming at it
from somewhere else and that changed things.
Martin: It seemed
like the Convoy became an entity. I remember in 1984 being on the London Road
in Bath when the Convoy started coming through, and it came and came and came
and there were loads of people. There was a sort of excitement about it. There
was a guy jumping out and shouting ‘Come on, come with us,’ this raggle-taggle
band of buses and trucks and all sorts of different vehicles. One guy was
parked up in the middle of Bath in a truck, broken down. But there were a lot
of vehicles moving together. Before that, up to the early 80s, there were
disparate bands of travellers, but then it conglomerated into a whole. I worked
with a guy more recently, who used to be a traveller, and he kept away from the
main Convoy because he didn’t want to be a part of it, it wasn’t what he was in
it for. For a lot of people it was the start of the big, greedy, 80s. There was
a lot of money around for some people but others, many others, were
disenfranchised. So it was an opportunity for a lot of people to buy a vehicle,
not necessarily taxed and insured, and get out on the road with a group of
like-minded people. One time, I heard the Convoy was going to be at Bannerdown,
which is just outside Bath on the way to Stonehenge. This was at the time that
there were big conflicts at Stonehenge and [the authorities] were going to
clamp down on it. It was about ’83 and the traveller thing was building up and
they were on the move and might say they were going somewhere but they’d go
somewhere else. I went from Fishponds in Bristol to Bannerdown and there was
nobody to be seen. Perhaps I had in the back of my mind that it was going to be
free and easy and have some mushrooms under the stars and it would all be
great. But there was nobody there and I cycled back to Fishponds again!
The Convoy to Glastonbury reaches Street
Mark Wright
Jake Stratton-Kent:
From fairly early on, people at festivals had trucks; the Tibetan Ukrainian
Mountain Troupe, the cooler, more together types. After a while they’d travel
together in convoys; safety in numbers when you were up against the police. Initially
a lot of it wasn’t hard, they weren’t
bad people; they were the more together, more pleasant types from the scene.
But they were totally demonised by the press. There was this guy in The Daily Mail, ‘The Convoy has been totally
smashed by the police, well done to the boys in blue.’ This was from up North,
and I was living in the South West at the time and there was a lot of sympathy
for the festival movement down there, a lot of the people who’d grown up down
there, the Warminster punk musicians, were very into Stonehenge and we
organised our own Convoy. Just after the Convoy had supposedly been beaten,
they had to announce that it had come back and labelled it the ‘Convoy of Doom’
to make us sinister and demonic from the very beginning, like an even nastier
Convoy had appeared. Sid Rawle appeared in the woods where we were camped up
and congratulated us on starting a new Convoy and getting into the media. Not
my favourite character, but it was good to be appreciated.
Glenda Pescado: In
1982 The Sun had the headline ‘Gun
Convoy Hippies Attack Police.’ That kind of opened our eyes a bit and we
thought, ‘Hang on, we don’t want to be tarred with this brush.’ It started to
drive the Tibetans abroad, because it was in 1982 that we first started
travelling around Europe. So whilst we did come back in the summer to do a few
festivals, it was a big push on us going abroad.
Jeremy Cunningham:
I just ended up on the road… it was like the last refuge of scoundrels, really
[Laughs]. I didn’t have any money so I was living in a squat, I’d done the
squatting thing for a long time and I was just, ‘Jeez, it would be great to get
on the road because then I’ll own my own house and can take it anywhere I want
to go.’ As soon as I managed to scratch together four hundred quid, I bought my
first truck and that was it, really. I got another one after that, about four
years later… a Dodge 450 Crew Carrier, which they used to use on the railways,
a big Renault chassis with a cab at the front and then a big box on the back with
windows… that was really nice to live in. It had a Perkins diesel engine, which
is the best engine in the world, never goes wrong. The electrics used to fall
apart all the time, but the engine… you’d put a blowtorch in it in the winter
to start it, you could take the air filter off and put the blowtorch straight
into the engine and it’d go bang, start first time. I loved that lifestyle, I
couldn’t do it now but in my late teens, early twenties, it was fucking great!
Daryn Manchip: In
the early 80s I hung around with bikers. This form of transport was the
cheapest means of getting around, and coming from a rural area of West Devon
you needed transport. I knew and formed strong friendships with people and
family groups who lived in buses and trucks in the lanes and byways of the West
Devon district. At that time, family groups could park up with little
disturbance from the police. That said it was usually local people who caused
problems for my friends. It wasn’t unusual to hear that friends’ buses and trucks
had been vandalised with windows broken by local rednecks. Our group in the
summer months held parties at remote spots on the western fringes of Dartmoor
such as Blackrock, Belston Common, Spitwich. Many of our traveller friends
would attend and it was always fun.
Jake Stratton-Kent:
There was a young girl getting into one of the trucks when we first set out.
She was a bit nervous about it all but she had been reassured by the fact that
Jake and Kinger were in the lead vehicle. I was really flattered by this
because Kinger was this huge monster of a guy and I was a tiny little bloke but
had a reputation for being militant and standing up for what I believed in.
This Convoy was a good thing, a real buzz moving from one festival to another.
Stonehenge had started off with quite a lot of goodwill from Joe Public and
really did involve quite pleasant people… besides which Philip Russell had
presented them quite well. The Miners’ Strike was at its height and they
weren’t going to dislike the Convoy just because the Tory media told them to.
And there was this nice edge to the Convoy, somewhat romantic, new age gypsies
and all that. The lead vehicle, for a lot of the Convoys, was called the
Unicorn because it had this sign above the cabin… Unicorn. A guy called Spider used to drive that and he was
definitely The Man. But there was
this thing about having to be rough and tough to survive in those days, there
was a lot of unemployed youth who’d decided they’d rather be unemployed in the
countryside than in the cities and they joined the Convoy. Some of the hippie
bikers had also graduated to the Convoy; you had motorcycle outriders going
ahead seeing if there were police roadblocks, and also letting us know if
anyone had broken down and been left behind.
Nik Turner: I don’t
think the Convoy was inherently negative. I think it became rather negative
because of the drugs, through being exploited by drug-dealers who saw it as a
means to make money and who got a lot of the people on the Convoy working for
them. Possibly people started to see it as a way of making a living or
something to identify with that they didn’t previously have, and it became
corrupted by the drugs, a bit of a low-life thing. The essence of it, the
positive side of it became [swamped] by the negative, though I’m not saying
that all the people who were involved with it were drug-dealers or negative
people. A lot were very good people.
Martin: I was on
the fringes of the festival scene with my brother and mates going off to
Stonehenge. A friend of mine at Sixth Form told me how he went off to
Inglestone Common to score and was met by a guy as he arrived simply asking him
‘Hard drugs or soft drugs?’ The festival scene seemed to empty Bristol of the
people who I associated with. It was a pain for me as the people I’d buy dope
from would disappear off to the festivals. This sometimes led me to head down
to the Black and White in Grosvenor Road, St Paul’s to score. Always nerve
wracking and invariably you’d get badly ripped off. My brother was washing up in
Greek restaurants in Redland and Clifton at the time, trying to save some
money. Increasingly, the people we knew were getting into heroin as it became
more and more readily available in Bristol in the early 80s. He wanted to buy a
vehicle to get on the road and out of Bristol. He planned that we’d both go. I
knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do but just didn’t have the heart to tell him.
Eventually, he bought a converted ambulance and joined the convoy. Later, the
travellers squatted some land by a big house in Weston, in Bath, and I went up
to visit my brother. The place didn’t have a good feel about it. It was
January, muddy, cold and the whole place had a bit of a siege mentality about
it. The dream seemed to have gone a bit sour. I didn’t see my brother for a
while but when I did run into him somebody had been messing about on a site
somewhere and had driven his ambulance into a river. That was that, he couldn’t
stay on the road and went home to my parents.
Jake Stratton-Kent:
The Convoy did get rougher, because it was more urban in origin, but it was
totally demonised by the press, and undeservedly to a large extent. Folks like
the TUMT were just gentle hippies. Eventually things got too rough for them and
a lot of them moved to France or Portugal to maintain that lifestyle in a more
congenial climate. Those that were left behind had to get tougher just to
survive. Generally the Convoy would turn up and take a site, and bring the
festival with them. It became a much more spontaneous thing, festivals happening
in places they never happened before just because the Convoy had to have
somewhere to park. Get a stage, get musicians; obviously you got drugs as well
because drug-dealing was going on. But the Brew Crew, what earlier on would
have been called drongos, they spoilt it for a lot of other people; they spoilt
the festivals and they spoilt the Convoy. The Convoy came to be seen as
synonymous with the Brew Crew types. The Home Office didn’t like the movement
and really began to crack down on it at the same time as the Brew Crew arose.
So you had these two separate forces. Things are always more complicated than a
single issue, but the Brew Crew appeared just when we needed all the good-will
that we’d created in the past. It was bad timing, terrible timing. Whilst there
were always tough guys on the Convoy and festival scene, they were nice tough
guys by and large. When we were parked up on the track leading up to
Stonehenge, bunches of yobs used to come and drive their cars at breakneck
speed down that track while there were kids wandering about. So we did things
like building towers out of stage scaffolding, put a line from one tower to the
next… some of these cars coming down would bring down the scaffolding on them.
‘Come down here with our kids wandering about, you’re going to find yourselves
in trouble.’ We were being tough guys, but we weren’t being bad guys; they were
the bad guys coming to pick on the hippies. But the Brew Crew was nothing like
that; whenever there was any trouble, the Brew Crew was nowhere to be seen.
They made things unpleasant for everyone else but they weren’t prepared to take
the flak. That was left to the ordinary people who couldn’t go on holiday
because they didn’t have a job, so they went to Stonehenge instead. That’s who
we were, poor young people, and not so young people, wanting to have some kind
of life, some kind of fun.
Martin: It seemed
to me in the early 80s that the festival scene fused into and became synonymous
with the traveller scene that was coming to a critical mass. The festivals had
been self-policing to some extent but the anarchic, chaotic nature just tipped
over and it just seemed to become totally centred around the drugs. With that
comes inertia, self-interest, greed and paranoia. Things which were probably
always there - drugs are about money after all - but which became dominant and
caused the whole thing to implode.
Glenda Pescado: A
lot of people sat up in 1982, after that initial Convoy, and recognised it was
changing. Up until then there was a lot of dope and a lot of acid, but that all
changed around that time. A lot of harder drugs came in and people were
actively using the festivals to deal. People were coming on site to buy a load
of drugs and then take them away again. So the Peace Convoy thing, that was a
turning point. It wasn’t all bad after that by any means, there were some
fantastic festivals, like the Nenthead Festivals – the Blue Moon, the Green
Moon, the Silver Moon – but it had changed, though that’s the nature of the
universe, isn’t it? Everything changes, nothing is set in stone.
Janet Henbane: In
1982 I helped organise the Blue Moon festival in Cumbria; we had a friend who
had the land and we went for it. We went to the Greenham Common gathering in
February, 1982 to do 'PR' for it, took some flyers. There were about seven core
‘organisers’; we ate, drank, slept and crapped organising the Blue Moon for
three months. Because I knew such a lot of folk on the festival scene it was
like having our own big party; I was able to spread the word and the TUMT came
up here, Thandoy, Nik Turner with his family, and also a band who I’d got to
know, who were part of the free music indie scene, called the Instant
Automatons, and a band from London called Amazulu. When word spread across the
north that a festival was happening we were inundated with bands wanting to
play, it was crazy and because this was our first festival we foolishly said
we'd pay everyone... when it came to paying bands and performers we ran out of
money and the people who really deserved some dosh towards fuel, like the TUMT
got nowt, or virtually nowt, so that was a big mistake because a lot of small
unknown bands will play for just a bit of fuel dosh or for free just to have an
audience. I remember big arguments about what would happen to any money that
was made, some of us in favour of it going to CND and others wanting it to go
to a Guru but we could have saved ourselves all that hassle because it made a
loss! The following two years saw the Green Moon and then the Silver Moon, which
has gone down in the annals because the patrolling coppers were pelted with
tomatoes and eggs. There was quite a heavy police presence because of the Convoy,
but apart from the usual complainers, and sad funless people, most locals and
incomers alike loved the festivals.
Keith Bailey: In
the beginning, the whole free festival feeling was really liberating and quite
wonderful on that level. The police didn’t have a government brief on how to
deal with the festivals or treat the people involved and the government itself
was mostly unprepared for it. So you did
have a strong sense of people working for each other. It was very idealistic
and probably rather naïve but that allowed a whole cultural movement to be born.
By the beginning of the 80s things had changed. I wouldn’t blame it on Maggie
Thatcher entirely, I think it was that whole neo-con movement and the writing
was on the wall that things were not necessarily getting better. That started
to radicalise people already within the culture of the festivals who began to
wake up and think, ‘We can’t help ourselves because they have other things to
say about that.’ Once anything starts to
get radicalised you get these extremist elements and I think that whatever shape
or form that takes is always dangerous. And that’s whether it’s religious or
political or even in cultural terms. Then the infiltration of the Convoy by all
these heavy drug-dealers … the people who’d started it off in their idealistic,
naïve way were powerless to do anything about that. That was because of the
ethos of the way the thing was, well, not run… the ethos of the way it was not
run, if you see what I mean? So they couldn’t do anything about it and of
course a lot of those guys [the infiltrators] saw it as to their advantage that
the police were made less than welcome.
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