The Archive
Formatted for Netscape Navigator at 800 X 600- created Jan 2002.
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1970-1985.
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The
Aroma of a Free Festival
The olfactory senses of the nose can play
a major role in stimulating memories of the past. Just sensing a smell of
a yew tree takes me back to a holiday in Devon where I spent many happy hours
playing, aged five, around a farm yard with the musky perfume of an ancient
yew permeated the area around the hay barn.
The aroma of Free Festival was different
to any other music festival with the main difference being a wholesome lack
of smells related to burger vans, as most free festivals were mainly vegetarian.
This lack of fast food in any quantity meant that there was a lot of communal
self-catering or free food and much of this was cooked on branch wood fires.
The pungent reek of home grown grass or the sweet biting smell of Afgani Black
caught your sensory attention as you moved around the site between the camp
fires surrounded by happy campers.
Personal hygiene amongst festival
goers, if memory serves me right, was of a reasonable standard and many wore
musk oil as much as a fashion habit as to disguise any body odours. The midges
and mozzies got a bit much some evenings and lit joss sticks were positioned
up-wind of the encampment to deter the minute but irritating creatures. The
alien smell of disinfectant greeted you as you approached the toilet trench
as a wash-the- hands-after bucket stood by the flapping modesty screen while
the contents of the trench smelt as they naturally should but no way as bad
as at some paying festivals I attended. The dead thin smoke of diesel exhaust
from the stage generator mingled with the green chlorophyll scent of crushed
grass around the main stage. The fusty smell of stored canvas stretched up
on poles after a winter folded in a damp shed and the attractive hunger alarm
bell aroma of a vegetable curry with smooth scent of a bubbling pot of brown
rice.
I might have not thought about
that period, twenty-five years ago, in many months and then my nose catches
a scent of wood smoke on the calm evening air and I am transported back to
that time and state of mind.
Roger Hutchinson