Memories of a Free Festival

Stonehenge, Summer Solstice, 1984.

It was June 1984, and the summer was hot in Toxteth. It was so hot you could fry an egg on the pavement and the police walked around in threes. Moving to Liverpool 8, with its vibrant multicultural community, mass unemployment and brewing unrest had been a culture shock for this Sussex-born girl. I was raised in Sunny Worthing where the elderly folk dozed on the prom, legs akimbo with bloomers on show and the only action was false teeth falling out and landing on ample bosoms or a heart attack in the Denton Lounge Tea Rooms. But if Toxteth had been an eye-opener, what happened over the next five days at Stonehenge Free Festival blew my mind.

Stonehenge Free Festival 1984. Summer Solstice morning

With thumbs out taking our place in the queues on the exit slip roads on motorway service stations (didn’t everyone hitchhike in those days?) we escaped the heat of the city with rucksacks and camping gear on our backs. We hitched a ride down from Liverpool to Wiltshire in stages, the last one being in a Scirocco with an army guy who regaled us with a story of how his platoon in full camo gear had stormed the house of his now ex-missus on the Wiltshire Plain because he suspected she was carrying on with another man in there. Peace and love man, we had arrived at Stonehenge Free Festival.

The guy’s chin dropped to his chest when he dropped us at the gate. ‘Where have all these people come from?’ he asked. In a field, or rather several fields, and spilling into a wood at the side, a city of tents, trucks, teepees, stages and sound systems appeared. I read that there were between 70,000 and 100,000 people there. A city the size of Exeter had grown. At the main entrance pieces of paper fluttered from a fence with messages such as, ‘Sally Ann - Meet you by the main stage at 6 - Dave from Coventry’. these were the days before mobile phones could connect you with friends at festival.

We pitched our tent near the colourful big top of the Tibetan Ukranian Mountain Troupe and spread a blanket on the ground. We’d been making batik designs using candles melted in a slow cooker and Dylon dyes bought from the covered market with our dole money and turned them into trousers and tops using white pocket lining as fabric bought from the fabric warehouses in Manchester and carried back on a long roll on the bus. We made a cardboard sign, as many did who sold handmade wares there, ‘hash or cash.’

My memories are hazy - it was forty years ago, and I may have inhaled, but oh, it was so much fun! I remember the sense of abandonment, of freedom and a way of life that hitherto had been hidden, brought up under grey skies of fundamentalism where secular life was frowned upon. A door had opened, and I stepped through it into a world that was full of colour and music, and I felt free.

Sure, there were drugs. The main drags were like high streets with cafes that sold chai and bean burgers but also offered hot knives and acid. Down at the end, before the gate that went through into the field that housed the main stage, a guy sat cross-legged on top of his painted bus, singing on repeat:

‘mushroom tea, fifty pee, makes you go whee!’

I learnt to juggle at Stonehenge. If you can bear it, and apologies if my family are reading this and it makes you cringe, we juggled naked in the hot sun on the Summer Solstice. Living on the dole in Toxteth, Tim would juggle every morning to Peter Tosh’s Buckingham Palace - a great way to get head and body moving, and here he is with one ball in the air (can you spot it?) outside the Tibetan Ukranian Mountain Troupe’s tent where a guy called Hilaire made me a pair of purple leather sandals after drawing around my feet. We’ve since put this photo on a Facebook group for Stonehenge Free Festival 1984 and folk have come forward to say they recognise themselves from the photo. Happy Days.

Talking of photos, if you scroll back up to the top photo of the page and look at the bottom left, behind the person with the purple scarf on their head, you’ll see a guy in a pink shirt and a girl with short dark hair and a white top, seated on the ground. That’s us! I have Oliver Smith, over on Twitter/X, to thank for sharing this photo and an excellent thread on Stonehenge and its history of Solstice celebrations.

Oh my days, it was such fun! We danced in the stones as the sun hit the heel stone and then lay in damp grass in the morning dew as Hawkwind tried to get it together to play their set. We met up with friends we knew from Liverpool, and made new ones, eating watermelon and generally hanging out in a world of colour, freedom and expression where you could be whoever you wanted to be, do whatever you wanted to do and no one was there to judge or tell you you were bad. The shackles that had bound me came off and I inhaled, I ingested and I had the time of my life.

But Stonehenge Free Festival didn’t last. With 70,000 to 100,000 people gathered, a movement had grown that was powerful and to many, dangerous. It was the days of the New Age Travellers, of the Peace Convoy that threaded its way around the country, living lives that were a real and very strong threat to the establishment and Margaret Thatcher’s government. It was the same era as the riots that happened where we lived in Toxteth and were repeated all around the country. The people were rising and they had to be squashed.

The next year, in 1985, we got wind that there was going to be trouble, and headed instead to Glastonbury. That’s another whole article in itself, so I’ll leave Rose Brash to tell you her story of when families were dragged from their buses and trucks, their homes, and were beaten bloody and senseless by the police in The Battle of The Beanfield in this article from The Guardian, except, as Rose says ‘it wasn’t a battle because we offered no resistance’:

The Battle of the Beanfield

That was forty years ago, and we’ve continued to go to festivals, though much less in recent years. We made friends who unbeknownst to us at the time were also at Stonehenge in 1984. I met our dear friend Bruce for the first time there, who arrived on a chopped A10 motorbike wearing patched leather trousers he’d made himself and who played the squeezebox as we came out of the church at our wedding, and then again at our Silver Wedding Anniversary.

Our kids went to festivals, learning to juggle fire and made their own festival friends. Two of them played in a band that headlined Solfest, a local festival in Cumbria, for several years. We have many dear festival friends, and these days we are happy to pull up a chair with nothing stronger than a pint of cider and listen to music, the goosebumps and tears of happiness still coming from those special festival moments that can be found when good people come together.

A thought came to me at The Green Gathering one year, as I sat on the compost loo one morning, listening from behind the door as Dark Side of the Moon rose from a cafe and the sound of laughter rang out as a laughter yoga workshop started, that being at a festival made me feel that it was okay to be me.

Feeling like an outsider and learning that it really is okay to be different is a theme that pops up often in my writing and is the main theme in my debut novel, the Rewilding of Molly McFlynn. You may recognise some of the details from my tales of festival life in the stories that Nan tells!

I hope you enjoyed your Summer Solstice celebrations and that you were able to let in the light and leave behind what doesn’t serve you any more. I’ll leave you with David Bowie’s song, Memory of a Free Festival, which has become one of ‘our tunes’ and went on the compilation of songs I put together for Tim on our 30th wedding anniversary playlist.