THE KENDAL POP FESTIVAL. Kendal . The Lake District . County Showground , Kendal , Northumberland. August 26th 1973. The Groundhogs,Greenslade , Gallagher and Lyle, Steamhammer, Solution, Bitch, Brewers Droop,Hackensack ,Stars ,England ,Necromandus ,Cosy Mole ,Aqua Vibra, Lol Coxhill.

Walking The Walk

In the early to mid 1970’s, rock or pop festivals reared their multi-faceted heads all over the country. They ranged from the big, high profile events like the Knebworth and Bath Festivals to the small, more intimate, gatherings such as Buxton, and in this particular case, the Kendal Festival in Cumbria. Kendal is a pleasant, well ordered, typically South Lakes town, an hour’s drive up the M6, known mainly for its agricultural background and those sickly white mint cakes.

In 1973, myself and certainly two, possibly three of my friends decided that a visit to Kendal’s Third Pop Festival would be a good and socially interesting way to spend a weekend. Kendal is approximately 60 miles from Fleetwood, our starting point. We did not have the luxury of an available car to reach our festive destination. The options were public transport, a bus or a train, or perhaps even “thumbing it”. In those days the idea of “getting on the road” or “thumbing it” were still considered to be romantic, idealistic things to do in some kind of perverse way. Nowadays, hitchhiking would be considered a very good way to get your throat cut in a hurry. We were not the type of people to follow trends; we just wanted to make social or political statements, even about fairly simple, innocuous things like getting from A to B. Either that, or we were just plain awkward, or even more likely, a mixture of both. So we decided to walk. After all it was only about 60 miles. We reasoned, if Jack Kerouac, Neil Cassidy or the Merry Pranksters (Californian counter-culture icons, and for a time, role models) could do things, seemingly crazy, illogical things, and still manage to get some intangible satisfaction from it, why couldn’t we? We read the books; we talked the talk, now we were trying to walk the walk.

The festival itself was a one-day affair, which was held at the show ground where the agricultural fraternity held their annual shows. Some people, less charitable than myself, might have said, “How appropriate”! We figured that a day “on the road” to reach the site would be more than adequate considering the distance involved. So, on the Saturday before the festival we embarked on the Fleetwood to Knott End ferry for the first stage of our “Tour de Trance”. We disembarked on the Knott End slipway roughly about mid-morning and felt quite “at one” with the universe. It was sunny, we were focussed on “our mission”, and we hit the road in front of us full of enthusiasm and positive thoughts about the weekend ahead. The first hour or so of walking was thoroughly enjoyable, taking in the sunshine, the surrounding rural idyll, and of course the good company. As we moved along the coastal strip and then on to Cockerham Sands, the romantic visions of Jack Kerouac and his nomad associates started to subside into the more realistic problems of sore feet and short tempers (and quite possibly mild depression). The glorious road trip was quickly turning into a drudge and all we really wanted to do was to reach Lancaster and catch an unromantic, totally rational, not psychedelic, ordinary red coloured service bus to Kendal.We eventually reached the ancient City of Lancaster, a place I’ve always had a lot of affection for, and made straight for the bus station. At the bus station there were more alternative types waiting for the slow bus north. The weather earlier in the day had been wonderful, bright and sunny mirroring our mood at that point. Now the sky was grey, the chances of rain were high and the joyous optimism that had lead us into this daft “let’s walk there” frame of mind, started to change to “what are we doing here”?
This event, being over thirty years ago, has over-worked the old memory cells and a lot of what did happen, certainly the minutiae, has long been erased or at least placed somewhere in my memory bank for safe keeping, and now I can’t find it. Life’s like that isn’t it. However, I do seem to recall we arrived at the site on the Saturday night and (to the best of my recollection) we didn’t have a tent, so we just “crashed out” where we could and embraced the morning dew (there’s a song in there somewhere).
On the Sunday morning we surveyed the festival site. Unlike a lot of present day festivals that have multi-stage presentations (some even in marquees), the festival at Kendal was definitely “old school” having a single stage at the front of the showground. The camping area was at the opposite end of the site, facing the stage, and the audience were in the middle of these two entities like a human sandwich. We soon met up with two other friends from the Fylde Coast, Malcolm “Akky” Atkinson and John Caley, who had had a more sedate journey up to Kendal by means of an old motorcycle combination (bike and sidecar). We must have looked like a real motley crew. There was “Akky” and John Caley looking like something out a 60’s biker movie, knackered, stressed old jeans, well- worn leathers, long hair and beards etc. Myself and my fellow travellers, Jake Bywater, and Dex Haslam (see elsewhere in this book for his further adventures) were dressed in a mixture of ex U.S.Army surplus combat jackets, patched up Levi’s, an “altered” Trilby hat and I believe, a German Army tunic from the second world war.
We had noticed, on our reconnaissance missions around the festival site, two quite large groups of parked motorcycles. The first group had relatively clean, shiny looking machines, full of chrome fenders and fuel tanks. These particular bikes belonged to the South Yorkshire Chapter of the Hell’s Angels. There were approximately twelve to fifteen of these gentlemen and their respective machines. They seemed to mostly keep themselves to themselves, not over-friendly but not threatening either. The other group of motorcycles belonged to another chapter of the Hell’s Angels organisation; the Darlington Chapter from County Durham. It was this second group we first came into contact with on that Sunday. In retrospect, thinking about how we looked, how “Akky” and John looked, the old motorcycle combo, finished off sartorially by the WW2 German tunic, they must have thought we were kindred spirits.
A couple of the Darlington Angel’s came across and offered a bottle of Scotch one of them was cradling like a mother cradles her young born. This was about ten o’clock in the morning, but one didn’t want to appear discourteous, so we imbibed a tot. Another one of the Angel’s associates took a “shine” to Dex’s cosmic trilby. We were thinking, “you’ll never see that again”, but he did, albeit with a disappointed glance. The Angel obviously had a code; a code of the road, maybe, maybe not.
We didn’t have any more direct contact with the Darlington Angel’s, but we did witness some rather strange and provocative behaviour from these guys later on that day. To backtrack momentarily, these Darlington Hells Angels looked the part. They were the real thing, authentic, slightly threatening, not in an overt way but subliminally. They wore the traditional Hells Angel uniform in most cases. Several separate pairs of jeans worn over each other, like a Russian Doll type of effect, tattered and filthy and proud of it. Their colours were worn on the back of sawn off jackets that may have been leather, you couldn’t really tell. The emblems emblazoned on the back of their “jackets” were all slightly different which indicated the owners “rank” or position within the group, a bit like the Freemasons really. And in general they just looked wild, and I mean wild. There was one guy who must have been six feet five inches tall, and approximately half that in circumference. He was a man-mountain who resembled the character “Mongo” in Mel Brooke’s classic pastiche of the western movie genre, “Blazing Saddles”. There was another guy who had very long, dirty blonde hair, a long goatee beard and wore an Abraham Lincoln style “stove pipe” hat. They looked, for all the world like support actors in a 1960’s Roger Corman film about “outlaw” bike gangs in California, you know the exploitative films like “The Wild Angels” or the more recent “Surf Nazi’s Must Die”.
The other Hells Angel’s grouping, South Yorkshire Chapter, looked sedate by comparison. It was interesting also that the two groups, supposed “brothers” in the Hells Angel’s organisation, didn’t mix at all socially. The only conclusion you could reasonably draw from this situation was that the Hells Angel’s, just like any other social grouping, had a hierarchy, a social pecking order. It would appear, to me at any rate, that the Darlington Chapter was either an older chapter and more established in the Angel hierarchy and didn’t have to mix with “Johnny come lately’s”, or conversely that the South Yorkshire Chapter was an “unofficial” group, not sanctioned by the central organising chapter of the Hells Angel’s, the Oakland Chapter in California. These are my suppositions not fact.
Anyway, that’s the sociology bit, what about the bands? Frankly, until extremely recently I had forgotten completely about this sociological experiment, but my good friend and fellow archivist, Jake Bywater leant me some research material to aid me in the completion of this book and that’s what brought back my memory (at least partially). One of the bands that appeared were called HACKENSACK, their name derived from a borough of either New York or New Jersey in the United States. They had a recording contract with Polydor Records I believe at the time, and did release a couple of albums, one of which did have a good cover design. As for the music, well I can’t remember a thing about their set. The seventies were a bit like the sixties in as much as the saying goes “If you can remember them (the 60’s/70’s) you weren’t there. This is not strictly true, but is not far off the mark.
Another act that appeared that day was GREENSLADE. They were a keyboard-oriented band like many British bands of that era, but unlike a lot of their contemporaries who had pseudo-classical influences (and pretensions) in their music, Greenslade had a definite jazzy feel to their music, in the same way that later incarnation of the Anglo-French band GONG had in the late 1970’s when Pierre Moelern had control of the band’s output.
The only performance at the festival that I have anything approaching clarity of was the set performed by The GROUNDHOGS. The band has been around since the mid-sixties, and still retains to this day, a core that is dominated by the blues. However, in the early to mid seventies their music took on other dimensions and they flirted with experimental (for its time) guitar based acid-rock blues. One particular song that illustrates this move into other musical areas was “Cherry Red”, which is also the source of the independent record company of the same name. To return to their festival performance, their brand of fractious acid-rock blues had inspired the Darlington Hells Angels to engage in wild fits of exuberant dancing at the front of the stage. There was a strange atmosphere brewing that indicated that someone or something, sooner or later, was going to “kick off”. Earlier in the afternoon the Darlington Angels had held a bizarre procession right through the middle of the largely seated, and substantial, audience. The “Man Mountain”, the six feet five inch Angel who looked like “Mongo” from “Blazing Saddles” I described earlier in this piece led this bizarre and provocative procession. He was at the front of his “comrades” with an old railway sleeper slung over his shoulder that had a World War Two Nazi flag attached to the end of the wooden sleeper.
“Bloody Hell” we thought, this is going to turn out to be like Altamont. For those who don’t know what or where Altamont is, or what significance it has held in the history of rock and roll, and indeed in the contemporary history of the last thirty or so years, here’s the dope. Altamont was a big free concert held in California in 1969. It was the brainchild of the Rolling Stones and the famed San Francisco concert promoter, Bill Graham. It was the event that many social observers feel was the final nail in the coffin of the “Summer of Love” and “the alternative society”. The Stones had hired, as they had done for the Hyde Park free concert earlier that summer, the Hells Angels as “security consultants” for the event, and part of their payment for their services was in the form of a truckload of beer. To cut a long story short, there was an incident that resulted in the death of a concertgoer at the hands of the Hells Angels. The Angels maintained that they were doing their job in protecting the Stones and keeping general order, but to a lot of observers it was just a riot by beer fuelled, lawless bikers.
Fortunately, Kendal didn’t become Altamont part two. Nonetheless as night fell, fires did start to appear from the campsite area. These fires however, were not just confined to campfires themselves, some of the tents that belonged to the festival-goers also went up in smoke and the general atmosphere of impending doom continued to tale its toll. I seem to think that we left the festival site earlier than expected. As Neil, the character from the “Young One’s” would have said, “Bummer”!

Mike Wheeler

Kendal Gathering 1971

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