Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [52]
Saturday, May 27th
In an attempt to get most of our Python work out of the way before the summer recess at the beginning of June, we worked all yesterday on material for the German show, and this morning there was still no time off, as I had to gather scripts, props, train times, etc for our first foray into mass cabaret – at the Lincoln Pop Festival tomorrow. It is a frustrating business trying to buy simple things like vases to smash. People are so keen to sell you the unbreakable one. I hadn’t the heart to tell the man who sold me on the many virtues of plastic flowers – ‘they can be cleaned when they get dirty’ – that all I wanted them for was to smash them with a wooden mallet.
Sunday, May 28th, Lincoln
Dawned cloudy and grey yet again. But at least the high winds of the past two days have gone. It’s still not good weather for open-air pop festivals, and the Sunday papers are full of reports of mud, and tents blowing down and general bad times from Bardney. We took the 10.15 from King’s Cross to Lincoln and British Rail did little to dispel the gloom of the morning by keeping the buffet car locked, and not even a cup of coffee available for the whole journey. We read the papers and rehearsed.
At about 4.00 we set out for Bardney, about ten miles east of Lincoln, and the Open-air Pop Festival [the first to be staged in England since the Isle of Wight in 1971].
In many ways this festival is being used as a test case. There is a great deal of opposition from property owners and Tories generally to the festivals – which they see as insanitary occasions catering for insanitary people who want to take all kinds of drugs, fornicate en masse in England’s green and pleasant land, and listen to noisy and discordant music. Locals will be terrorised, property laid waste and traditional English rights generally interfered with. So this festival has only been allowed to go on on condition that if there has been unreasonable nuisance caused, its organisers, Stanley Baker1 and Lord Harlech, are liable to prison sentences.
The first evidence of this mighty gathering, estimated at 50,000 people, was a long traffic jam stretching from the village of Bardney. People later confirmed that the jams were caused by sightseers who had come to ‘look at the festival’. Most of the audience clearly couldn’t afford cars, and there to prove it was a constant stream of kids walking beside the road making for the site.
The weather had been really bad for the start of the festival, with gales blowing two marquees down on the Friday night. The marquees could not be salvaged as fans had torn them up and used them as protection from the elements. Real Duke of Edinburgh’s Award stuff.
It was about 9.15 when we eventually got through the village. As we were supposed to be on at 9.55, and traffic was at a standstill, we walked. Terry especially was becoming most agitated, and in the end we asked a policeman if there was any chance of a police escort or a police car to take us the remaining mile or so up to the site. He managed to get us a lift with two plain-clothes CID officers. The first thing they wanted was our autographs, and then they embarked on as vicious a piece of driving as I’ve ever seen. Speeding up the side of the column of cars, they drove maliciously hard at the straggling groups of long-haired pedestrians, blaring their horns and giving ‘V’ signs.
Once at the site we were taken by John Martin, the organiser, to Stanley Baker’s caravan to have a drink and last-minute rehearsal. In Baker’s caravan there was iced champagne, and Mike Love and Al Jardine of the Beach Boys (who were appearing after us) sitting around. Slade were over-running – we weren’t likely to be on until 10.30. I had a second glass of champagne. We seemed to have cleared everyone out of the caravan. Baker looked in occasionally, smiled rather a strained smile, and disappeared