{"id":6170,"date":"2022-05-12T15:35:39","date_gmt":"2022-05-12T15:35:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/?p=6170"},"modified":"2022-05-12T15:35:39","modified_gmt":"2022-05-12T15:35:39","slug":"halcyon-days-at-an-80s-summer-solstice-festival-huck-magazine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/archives\/6170","title":{"rendered":"Halcyon days at an \u201980s Summer Solstice Festival, Huck Magazine"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Halcyon days at an \u201980s Summer Solstice Festival The wild bunch<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Photographer Alan Lodge remembers shooting the mini utopia that was the Stonehenge Free Festival, an event held in the fields surrounding the legendary prehistoric monument.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Free Festival Movement of the 1970s took the UK by storm, offering a m\u00e9lange of music, arts, and cultural activities at no cost. Beginning with Woodstock<\/a> in 1969, the possibility of creating a mini utopia became a dream come true \u2013 that was until they became too popular, and the state got involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c\u2019Free Festivals\u2019\u00a0developed from people being fed up with the exploitation, rules, squalor and overall rip-off that so many events had become. They discovered something\u2026 a powerful vision,\u201d says\u00a0British photographer\u00a0Alan Lodge<\/a>, author of the new book\u00a0Stonehenge<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(Caf\u00e9 Royal Books).\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPeople lived together: a community sharing possessions, listening to great music, making do, living with the environment, consuming their needs and little else.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLife on the road in an old \u00a3300 1960s bus, truck or trailer seemed like a bloody good option, weighed against the prospect of life on the dole in some grotty city under the Tory Government.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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By the late 1970s, a Free Festival summer circuit was established with stops in May Hill, Horseshoe Pass, Stonehenge, Ashton Court, Inglestone Common, Cantlin Stone, Deeply Vale, Meigan Fair, East Anglia, and the Psilocybin Fair. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs the habit of travelling in convoys caught on, larger groups of performers were established. They were joined by a wide variety of traders of different kinds, and the New Traveller culture was born. It was all about building communities, tribes, and societies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From 1974 to 1984, the Stonehenge Free Festival \u2013 later renamed the People\u2019s Free Festival \u2013 was held in the fields surrounding the legendary prehistoric monument during the summer solstice. It quickly became the<\/em> place for hippies, punks, anarchists, bikers, and travellers to gather every year, with numbers eventually reaching hundreds of thousands by the 1980s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Along with the New Age Travellers, the festival drew countercultural groups including the Peace Convoy, the Wallys, and Circus Normal. Musicians including Joe Strummer, Jimmy Page, The Damned, The Selecter and The Raincoats performed live.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cStonehenge has long held a fascination for the mystically inclined,\u201d Lodge explains. \u201cWhen the music was right, the people acted in unison, and that rare communal shared pleasure came to pass \u2013 if only fleetingly. Festivals could conjure up a heightened awareness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the festivals became more popular, policing became more aggressive and the mainstream media stoked moral panic. \u201cThe papers were full of shock-horror. The News of the World<\/em> contributed [the headline]: \u2018The Wild Bunch: Sex-mad junkie outlaws make the Hell\u2019s Angels look like little Noddy.\u2019 These were read by millions and made \u2018folk-devils\u2019 out of peaceful people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Things came to a head with the \u201cBattle of the Beanfield\u201d on June 1, 1985, in nearby Hampshire. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t a battle. It was an ambush \u2013 1,600 police officers attacked,\u201d Lodge says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPolicemen were running down the convoy ahead of me smashing windscreens without warning, arresting and assaulting the occupants, dragging them out through the windscreens broken glass.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was no enquiry. Things would never be the same again. But for one shining moment, radicals and revolutionaries found their own halcyon corner of utopia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stonehenge<\/a><\/em>\u00a0by Alan Lodge is out now on Caf\u00e9 Royal Books.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Follow Miss Rosen on\u00a0Twitter<\/a><\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.huckmag.com\/art-and-culture\/photography-2\/stonehenge-80s-summer-solstice-festival-alan-lodge<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Halcyon days at an \u201980s Summer Solstice Festival The wild bunch Photographer Alan Lodge remembers shooting the mini utopia that was the Stonehenge Free Festival, an event held in the fields surrounding the legendary prehistoric monument. The Free Festival Movement … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[192,1254,1330,185,1331,95,695],"class_list":["post-6170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1","tag-festival","tag-freefestival","tag-huck","tag-law","tag-missrosen","tag-police","tag-stonehenge-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6170"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6171,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6170\/revisions\/6171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}