Gig 011 Reading Festival 1976

Reading Festival
27-28-29 August 1976

Going to a, like, rock festival was hugely exciting, we talked about it for weeks. In 1976 there was really only one weekend-long festival and it was Reading, which fortunately for us was not far away. Preparations were fairly rudimentary, we just took some sleeping bags and, in an act of quite moronic optimism, a big piece of plastic sheeting to sleep under. It folded up quite small, and in any case probably wouldn’t even be necessary since Spring and Summer of that year had seen unbroken weeks of glorious sunshine, the ground was parched, there was a hosepipe ban etc. You already know how this story ends. Hardly anyone had a tent in those days, and if they did it was made of canvas with metal poles, and anyway the idea of any of our parents going camping was just ludicrous, camping was for boy scouts and cranks. Someone had the good idea of taking a sort of flagpole so we could find our turf on the vast campsite. We’d be fine.

Friday morning we made the short train journey to Reading, then joined the biblical migration from station to the festival site, denim, hair, leather as far as the eye could see. Like I say, exciting. There was only one stage (to be exact, two side-by-side, one with the act performing while the next act set up on the other) and while we watched every act, I only remember select fragments. The first act were called Stallion, which is all you need to know. Late afternoon on Friday saw performances by I-Roy and The Mighty Diamonds, with an ace band featuring Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare. As mentioned in the previous post, the Virgin Front Line reggae compilation had been a favourite that summer, but apparently not for much of the Reading crowd. The abuse was foul, thuggish and substantially racist in nature, though racial slurs were such common currency at the time – shows like Love Thy Neighbour were primetime tv – it seemed almost routine in an almost exclusively white and predominantly male audience. There were moments when the sky darkened with flying beer cans. You could hardly hear the music for the abuse, it was poisonous. I would be lying if I said I was a big reggae fan at the time, and my knowledge of race issues was sketchy at best, but this was just out of order and to some degree tainted the whole weekend. The evening concluded with hippy favourites Gong, whom I found agreeable enough in a jazz-fusion way but rather boring. Goons who two hours earlier had been chucking cans and yelling racist abuse nodded along in blissed-out fashion. I went to bed thinking ‘what the feck was that all about?’.

One act I was really looking forward to was Eddie & the Hot Rods who played early on Saturday afternoon. I sank a few cans of cider to get in the mood, consequently I ended up a bit queasy and memory is blurry but I remember thinking they were great, fast, loud, exciting and very different from every other act that weekend. Later that day there was Van der Graaf Generator, who were weird and hugely enjoyable and finished their set with a great tune called Killer, which my friend Angus has more recently observed is written from the point of view of a cod. Phil Manzanera’s 801 were also pretty good. A proto-feminist act, the Sadista Sisters, were predictably not well received. Rory Gallagher headlined on Saturday, the crowd was vast and I watched from a distance, not particularly engaged. It had started to rain a bit. A lot of people were quite drunk and the atmosphere still felt a bit edgy from the previous day, you tried to avoid eye contact. Beer cans had flown and fights broken out from time to time. Not the summer of love, not really.

By Sunday I was tired and getting a little fed up, and it was properly raining. It wasn’t like today’s multi-media festivals – if you didn’t like the act on stage, tough, there was nothing else to do. Maybe buy a hot dog, or some nasty cider or lager. Never let anyone tell you things were better in the old days. Late Sunday afternoon an Australian group called AC/DC performed, and were at least sort of entertaining, a bare-chested singer who sounded like he gargled drain cleaner, and a tiny hyperactive guitarist in a school uniform who could really play that blues-based-rock thing, if that’s what floats your boat. Musically it was basic, cliché’d rocking stuff with pathetic lyrics about chicks and venereal disease. Towards the end of the set the little guitarist got his bum out, which seemed to please the crowd. A bit later Ted Nugent performed. I didn’t much like it and if I’d known what an arsehole he would turn out to be I’d have liked it less. I couldn’t face Black Oak Arkansas, and dread to think what sort of response Anglo-Ghanaian closing act Osibisa got.

Some other recollections:

The can fights were quite scary, if you were hit by a full can of Strongbow you’d know about it. Worse, rather than waste booze some of the cans were relieved of their contents and filled with wee, sketching yellow spirals as they flew through the air. It’s amazing more people weren’t hurt.

John Peel was compere and DJ, and encouraged the crowd to call him very rude names. He seemed fairly unimpressed by most of the acts, though with Peel it could be hard to tell.

Most of the time everyone sat cross-legged on the grass, at least until the evening headline acts. Moving around required a lot of stumbling. At one point a hippy collapsed all over me, all long greasy hair, rank Afghan coat, lionel blairs, rizlas and whorls of rolling tobacco all over the place. He said ‘sorry man’, stumbled on and collapsed all over someone else. Days later I was still finding bits of tobacco.

Anyone else remember when people used to shout ‘Wally!’ at festivals?

The toilet facilities – well, you can imagine.

Most of our gang left early on Sunday evening, got on the wrong train and ended up in Swansea, which was funny for those of us who remained when we found out later. I stayed, got soaking wet and cold, and was very glad to get home and have a bath on Monday.

I remember thinking much of it was a bit rubbish, and with hindsight it seems even worse, certainly compared to today’s festivals. The line-up was largely uninspiring and the atmosphere was boorish at best, threatening at worst. Despite all this, I sort of enjoyed it. At 16 you don’t have much agency in anything, which gives you licence to observe and to some degree relish the crapness around you. A few years later it’s not so easy, since you feel some responsibility for it. I was away unsupervised with my best friends for the first time – how could we not have a blast?