Celebrating the astonishing Weeley Festival, which took place 52 years ago…
The poster for 1971’s Weeley Festival, held at Mersea Island, by Clacton-on-Sea in Essex over the weekend 27-29 August, seems like a faked-up replica. I mean, The Faces, T Rex, Status Quo, Rory Gallagher and literally dozens of other top acts, all in one place, for £1.50 (advance) or £2.00 (at the gate)?
But it’s real; the festival actually happened. By some estimates, 250,000 people were there, though official figures sit around 120,000. Only 5000 were expect.
And it wasn’t a disaster. The bands turned up, played, Hell’s Angels were chased off site by an alliance of pie sellers and associated, ah, family connections. You don’t mess with the piemen. The organisers, Clacton Round Table, made some money. More than from their usual donkey derby fundraisers, but less than they might have, had some extensive purloining and forgery not taken place. The huge crowd were forgiving and forbearing when it came to the conditions, which in truth were not in the trenchfoot-and-cholera league of some Glastonbury debacles. But then, expectations in 1971 were not high.
There were no showers, luxury VIP areas, and yurts were something someone may have read about the Children’s Encyclopedia or Knowledge Magazine. The toilets were primitive ’long-drop’ affairs – a trench, scaffolding, a plank with a hole in it – and at least one hapless music lover fell in.
Marc Bolan was bottled after preeningly announcing that the audience should recognise him from Top of the Pops as, well, a wizard and a true star. Ride a White Swan and Hot Love may have catapulted Marc to mass popularity, and shrunk his ‘Tyrannosaurus’’ to a T, but this was a long-haired, loon-panted hippy audience, flocking to Essex’s ‘Golden Coast’ in droves due to the cancellation of the Isle of Wight Festival, and rejoicing in the ‘progressive’ nature of the music. Was Julie Felix counted ‘prog’? Hmm…
(I can’t listen to poor Julie, and it’s not her fault. Our family’s first ever in-car music player was a horrible 8-track affair for which we only ever owned three cartridges: Donovan’s Greatest Hits (the horrible re-recorded version) Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water and a cheap Julie Felix compilation. I am allergic to all of the above to this day.
It’s worth checking out some of the online Weeley footage. There’s an entire segment of the BBC ‘One Show’ dedicated to it:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=396115097667561
Some superb Juicy Lucy:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=155334339230665
and some very-much-of-its-time Van De Graaf Generator:
Plus some excellent amateur Super 8 crowd stuff:
Immersion in those far-off days, when I was a 15-going-on-16-year-old, stranded in Troon, gazing for hours in hopeless yearning at the gig pages of Melody Maker, has made me realise just how fresh and exciting (some) of 1971’s music was. And how small the world of ‘rock’ was at the time. True, Weeley was ostensibly ‘prog’, though that covered a multitude of sins, from Staus Quo to Caravan and back via Tudor Lodge. But a schoolboy in Ayrshire could memorise those lists from the back pages of the music press, read the CBS inner sleeves of and hang around Speed Records or Fairbairns in West Portland Street, and know almost all the recording bands of the moment. The good ones. Or the ones with contracts, anyway.
And it seems most of them were at Clacton-on-Sea during that amazing weekend in 1971. Here’s a selection:
Listen on Mixcloud here:
Playlist:
Tyrannosaurus Rex — Deborah
Al Stewart — Terminal Eyes
Stray — Nature’s Way
Barclay James Harvest — Crazy Over You
Mungo Jerry — Alright, Alright, Alright
Faces — Bad N Ruin
Taste — What’s Going On
Juicy Lucy — Jessica
Mott the Hoople — Sweet Jane (live)
Tir nan Nóg — Lady Ocean
Lindisfarne — Fog on the Tyne
Colloseum — Take Me Back to Doomsday
Status Quo — Most of the Time
Heads, Hands and Feet (Let’s Get This) Show on the Road
Caravan — In the Land of Grey and Pink
(Grateful thanks to Sue Ritter for sparking all this off, and the folk who got in touch and were actually there. Some of them remember everything in great detail. And some…don’t.)
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