Free festival

Free festival
Stonehenge Free Festival 1984
General Information
Related genres	Rock (electronic rock, punk rock, psychedelic rock), country music, jam band music, metal music, folk music
Location	Worldwide
Related events	Music festival, rock festival, teknival, technoparade, rave, jam band festival, heavy metal festival, punk rock festival, reggae festival, Christian music festival, concert tour, rock concert

Free festivals are a combination of music, arts and cultural activities, for which often no admission is charged, but involvement is preferred. They are identifiable by being multi-day events connected by a camping community without centralised control. The pioneering free festival movement started in the UK in the 1970s.

History

The first intentionally free festival was the 1972 to 1974 Windsor Free Festival, held in Windsor Great Park, England. The 'organisation' was mostly Ubi Dwyer distributing thousands of leaflets and asking people and bands to bring their own equipment and create their own environment - "bring what you expect to find."^[1]

"Free festivals are practical demonstrations of what society could be like all the time: miniature utopias of joy and communal awareness rising for a few days from a grey morass of mundane, inhibited, paranoid and repressive everyday existence…The most lively [young people] escape geographically and physically to the ‘Never Never Land’ of a free festival where they become citizens, indeed rulers, in a new reality." Un-authored leaflet from 1980, quoted in George McKay’s Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance Since the Sixties (p. 15).^[2]

In recent years, teknivals are a type of free festival, as are many technoparades.

Free festivals by year

Historical

• Woodstock Festival, 1969 (partly free)
• Phun City 1970
• Glastonbury Free Festival 1971
• Windsor Free Festival, 1972 to 1974
  • People's Free Festivals at Watchfield 1975, Seasalter 1976 and Caesar's Camp 1978
• Trentishoe Whole Earth Fayre 1973-76
• Stonehenge Free Festival, 1972 to 1984^[3]
  • Battle of the Beanfield (1985)
• Rivington Pike/North Country Fair 1976-78
• Deeply Vale Festivals 1976-79
• Elephant Fayre, 1981–86
• Castlemorton Common Festival, 1992
• Free Edinburgh Fringe Festival
• Free Fringe

Contemporary

• CzechTek
• Leamington Spa Peace Festival
• Dragon Festival
• Przystanek Woodstock
• Davestock - Vancouver Island, BC
• Green World Yoga & Sacred Music Festival, Skåne (started as a free festival 2015)^[4]
• Mile of Music - Appleton, Wisconsin
• Jazz at the Lake: Lake George Jazz Weekend (started as a free festival in upstate New York in 1984)

Gallery

• 

  Simon and Garfunkel at The Concert in Central Park

• 

  Cambridge Strawberry Fair 2011

• 

  Strawberry Fair 2007, Cambridge

• 

  Parkpop 2006

• 

  West Fest in San Francisco

See also

• Free party
• New age travellers
• Alternative society
• Teknival
• DIY culture

References

1. Clarke, M. (1982). The Politics of Pop Festivals. London: Junction Books.
2. McKay, G. (1996). Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance Since the Sixties. London: Verso Books.
3. Remember the Battle of the Beanfield
4. Green World Yoga & Sacred Music Festival, Skåne (started as a free festival 2015)

External links

• The Free Festivals 1969-1990 - ukrockfestivals.com
• George McKay - Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance Since the Sixties:Free Festivals
• Battle of the Beanfield - ITV unseen broadcast