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Last update September 2007.

Krumlin, Barkisland ,Yorkshire.

"The view from the Mud "

Eyewitness reports from those who attended the Krumlin festival

Garry Bodenham

    Krumlin started it all for me (and nearly finished me off too), being near to my hometown of Huddersfield. Going with my older cousin, I set off as a fresh faced 16 year old with my RAF greatcoat, my 30 bob ticket, and not much else. My favourite band The Who were billed, along with Pink Floyd, and The Groundhogs. Friday was sunny, but the music low key, until Elton John, (yes really) who with just drums and bass played a stormer, and was the hit of the festival. Atomic Rooster followed - I thought the bassist was hiding until I realised that Vincent Crane was playing bass on his foot- pedals whilst playing incendiary Hammond. A very drunken Pretty Things finished off the evening.

Saturday continued with folk music,much to my disdain, but the storm clouds were gathering in more ways than one. None of the major acts materialised, but there were wild rumours that Ginger Baker was on his way from London with a very special guest guitarist - Hendrix or maybe Peter Green. (Oh how naive we were...) The Groundhogs injected much needed bluesy rock as the temperature dropped, the best I've ever seen them. The photos for the Split album cover were taken here. At this point my memory hazes over, due to a large container of cheap cider doing the rounds. Black clouds scudded over the site and we bought plastic sheets to ward of the inevitable (see press photo).

    Determined to stick it out, I glugged more cider as the rain sheeted down. At some point a stream of water trickled into my plastic bag and was gradually soaked up by my greatcoat. By midnight I was a shivering drunken wreck, aware only of the sound of the rain on plastic and Sandy Denny's beautiful voice echoing around the moors as Fotheringay bravely battled with the elements. I realised I had to move or I would die. I staggered to our tent, to the fantastic news that there was a spare DRY sleeping bag. Discarding my wet clothes and getting into the sleeping bag was like sinking into warm cotton wool, and I slept the sleep of angels.

    In the morning we woke to devastation, it was all over, and apparently fans were being treated for exposure. As I walked up the road home with a muddy blanket over my shoulders I felt like a survivor from the Somme. But did it put me off? No! For the next six years I revelled in the delights of English rock festivals - a mixture of togetherness and triumph over adversity.

Lovely. (My wife thinks I am mad.)
Garry

Tony McPhee lead guitarist of the Groundhogs, contacted us and had this to say about Krumlin

    I remember the Krumlin festival very well, firstly because of the location of it and the fact that, as I recount on a new EMI re-mastered 'Split' one of the organisers came up to us straight away and said we should have been there the day BEFORE (Friday) but he said he would fit us in if he could.
We went to the back-stage area to be met by Joanne Kelly, who told us about the forged tickets and the local Yorkshire Mafia demanding 'protection' money from the food kiosks etc.(I don't know if that was true) she also said
nobody was going on stage because they wouldn't get paid.

    I looked out on the soaked audience and, as we have always disliked the playing pop-star' politics that goes on at festivals,we went on not really bothering if we got paid (£100.00!!!) because it is so unfair on people who have paid for their tickets,forged or not, especially in those conditions, to stare at a stage with nothing going on.
In the end, we were rewarded with the pictures that were taken there becoming such an integral part of the 'Split' album and for their part in it's success.
Thanks for the site.it's great!!

Tony McPhee

www.thegroundhogs.co.uk

Tony is currently working with a writer to produce a book on the history of the Groundhogs, if you have any recollections or photos of the band please contact Tony

Richard Thompson , former guitarist of Fairport Convention had this to say about Krumlin ( taken from a transcript of a conversation during a live show )

   We were talking about a festival we did, , Danny ( Thompson ) used to be in the P Angle ( Pentangle ) and we were all doing a festival in Britain . Someone had the great idea of doing a festival on the Yorkshire moors !. Youv'e read Emily Bronte " Heathcliffe . Heathcliffe ( makes thunder sounds )" Cathy, Cathy ". Buckets of rain you know, festival was in July . Midsummer festival. what a great idea ! , lets do an outdoor festival on the Yorkshire moors !. They were carting the audience away with exposure, everyone was dressed in those bin liner things . It was geat fun .

    For some reason or other everyone was totally legless backstage. We all got very silly. Fairport were doing their set and we noticed Simon Nicol our rhythm guitar player. We were doing a very sensitive old Irish ballad. ' A Bonnie Bunch Of Roses" . Charming ballad. Simon was playing an Indian Raga in a different key. Very strange, that's funny Simon . He was in his own world , he was sitting cross legged in front of his amp in another world . So we had to sort of kick him and unplug him. Simons still playing those ragas ( with Fairport )

Richard Thompson

http://www.richardthompson-music.com/

( comments on stage Fox Theatre Boulder 3-17-94 )

Mick Haigh

    Thousands of fake tickets bought through an advertisement in the music press, as well as dreadful weather made this a memorable washout. The headliner Saturday band Pink Floyd and others never showed. Those that did turn up did extensive sets: Elton John , Fairport Convention , Pretty Things , Ralph McTell and Alexis Korner I remember, and Billy Connolly's band The Humblebums were there too.

    A collectors item for the next few concert seasons was the orange Krumlin plastic bag, a bag the size of a half pig, which  gave away its original purpose, sold by a local entrepreneur to those who stayed over Saturday. That bag saved hundreds from exposure. Sunday never happened.

    The massive Scamanden Dam and the cross Pennine hills M62 motorway were being built nearby at that time and any visitor to those miserably exposed sites could have told organizers that a concert on the Yorkshire Pennines was not a good idea.

Thanks for the memory.
Mick

Geoff Dibb's account gives the impression that quite a good part of the festival had resonable weather ....

    We (4? 6? of us) turned up at the festival on Friday afternoon or early evening. I only had a ticket for one night (Sunday, I thought) which I had bought because I wanted to see Pink Floyd. Looking at the programme (see the scans of the front and back cover), Pink Floyd are advertised as appearing on Saturday night. However, by the time I bought a ticket they must have been rescheduled for Sunday night. Anyway, faced with the fence etc. and a desire to see all the bands, I exchanged my ticket for a full weekend one. The scan shows it in all its glorious crumpledness (it got a bit wet!)

Friday night:

    I have vivid recollections of Elton John playing (seems a bit bizarre, now) and Atomic Rooster. The best band was Pretty Things: I remember them doing "Old Man Going" from "SF Sorrow" and Twink walking into the crowd holding a cymbal on its stand in one hand and bashing it with a drumstick in the other.

Saturday:

    A nice afternoon (weatherwise) as I remember it. The afternoon was very folky and I remember Fairport Convention, Ralph McTell and Pentangle playing. The abiding impression of Saturday was the frequent tannoy announcements that "Pink Floyd are fogbound in Paris" which didn’t bode too well. (This makes me wonder if they were due to play Saturday and I am mistaken about Sunday). I also remember Groundhogs playing in the afternoon and watching Tony McPhee – "Thank Christ For The Bomb" period, I think, which I had just heard that week. During the evening the music was all electric and I remember Alexis Korner, Juicy Lucy ("Who Do You Love") and Graham Bond (which we hated and it went on and on). I think it was during this act that the rain started. My Dad (bless him) had given me a big sheet of thick polythene "in case it got wet" on the ground and we huddled together holding this above us. At some stage the whole thing must have ground to a halt and some of us went back to the tent whilst at least 2 of us got into the polythene bags which appeared and stayed on site. All the time, people were coming round checking you hadn’t asphyxiated!

Sunday morning

    we woke: my feet were in the bottom of the tent where there was a puddle which had soaked up my sleeping bag. However, 2 of our friends were still on the hillside! We drove home, passing a massive line of bedraggled teenagers walking back to Halifax…..presumably Pink Floyd were still fogbound in Paris.

Geoff

Bill Brooks

    The festival was notable for a few events, it poured with rain for most of the festival and ruined the organiser, said to be last seen walking off to oblivion on the rain soaked spectacular Dales. Another notable incident was the arrest of the festival DJ. for slagging off a police DS officer repeatedly 'on the air' - there was a lot of records being played because it was so wet that the bands couldn't play. He disappeared for a while and then came back to make what I remember as a pretty grovelling apology - probably an agreed form of words - to stave off chokey.
The very early Elton John played up a storm (the bastard, he should have kept it dry) on Friday night, in my mind doing an number of really rocking Stones' covers.
Then it rained...
...and rained...
...and rained...
...and rained...
And about 5 on Saturday Fairport came on - Simon Nichol came up to the microphone and said " 'ello, 'ello we've been in the beer tent since 2 and they said your on in half an hour so we thought we'd better get them in and then they said your on in half an hour so we thought we'd better get them in then they said your on in half an hour' then someone pulled him away from the mike and put his guitar on and then stormed it with Walk awhile and some outrageous jigs from Swarb - the I think Richard Thompson was in the band still. I'm sure it wasn't just the sun coming out or the fact thatat Fairport's had agreed to play on the promise of being paid rather than actually being paid (bet they lost out on that one) because no one had put any money through the gate because of rumours the festival had been cancelled because of the weather and because the fence was down somewhere.
I can only recall that it seemed to rain after the Fairport's.
I left when the festival was eventually cancelled at 6 am. on Sunday.
All the best.
Bill

Dave Pegg from Fairport Convention , from an interview posted to me recently

   If I could be remembered for one thing - Well I did have a nasty accident at the Krumlin Festival in the 70's when I was wearing a pair of white trousers. I had rather too much to drink and when I got on stage I actually shat myself which was very embarrassing as the back of my white trousers changed colour very quickly. Behind me were all the other acts that were on, including Elton John who wasn't very famous at the time and The Move who were people that we knew from Birmingham. I was a laughing stock. It was incredibly embarrassing and I couldn’t turn around to adjust the volume on my amp because the audience would have seen the brown mass that was attached to my arse and would have know for sure what had happened.

Folkmaster - So they never knew?
   The audience never knew. In fact the Festival was a complete disaster, it all went terribly wrong for us. Dave Swarbrick didn't actually shit himself on stage but was desperate for a tiddle and there was this hole in the canvas on the stage. He went over to the side of the stage, stuck his chopper through the hole and had a waz. Unfortunately the press area was on the other side of the hole and consequently we’ve never been popular with the Melody Maker since 1970, which I think was the last time they gave us a review.

Stewart Wainfor


    As I said my memories are a little hazy but I can remember setting off with my mate, Tony, now sadly no longer with us, by bus to Halifax town centre and another bus over to the festival site. I seem to remember that at this time - early afternoon - the weather was warm and sunny. This was good because all we had were sleeping bags - no tent. We paid - yes, we actually paid - for our tickets at an entrance £5, a fortune in 1970 for a 17 year old and went down into the main arena. The site itself seemed the ideal location, a natural bowl shape, for a music festival.
    After a few beers it seemed even better. I think Ralph McTell did a set and a couple of other folky bands, Pentangle maybe. Not my cup of tea but we were enjoying the whole scene. We moved around the site and saw a few friends who we decided to stay with - they had a tent. This proved to be a very shrewd move.
    The Groundhogs, who were a headlining band at that time, played a great set as the weather threatened during the early evening. Incidentally, does anyone know if the picture on the rear of the Split albumwas taken at Krumlin?
    Due to the mixture of alcohol and stuff, I don't really recall much until I woke with my head outside the tent, which was flapping madly in the wind, with only one pole standing. After extracting myself from the remains of the tent and my sleeping bag and try to stand up in a Force 10 gale, I looked at the scene of total destruction - it looked like the corporation rubbish tip.
    Luckily, we were all in one piece and the friends we had met up with had come in a car and gave us a lift all the way home. On the way home I was offered a lift to the next week's Isle of Wight festival which because of Krumlin I had to refuse - I had spent too much of my limited resources. I'll regret that decision till I die - Jimi's last official performance.
Regards
Stewart

Michael Hobson

    Thanks for your web-site. I was at Krumlin as a 20 year old student. I got there from home on the Friday abt 30 miles away on a Honda 50.
Never took my crash helmet off all weekend (weather!). Bandmemories : Sandy Denny (Fotheringay by then?) looking out from the stage and saying "God, it`s really pissing down out there isn't it?" and other band member telling her to "sit down, Sandy. You're pissed"
I think The Johnstones (Irish folk trio) were on. Autumn 1970 I was in the bog at Leeds Polytechnic next to Paul Brady? of the aforementioned (they were doing a college gig) and asked him if they had been paid for Krumlin. He said they were one of the lucky ones who had got their money up front. Were the Maynard Ferguson Jazz Band on? I saw them somewhere at a festival at that time and they were great.
Also that autumn, I went to see Woodstock at the Hyde Park Cinema in Leeds (terrific, small old-fashioned place and still there) and the entire row of people in front of me had all been at Krumlin. So we had the festival we missed right there in the cinema.
I remember the Rochdale civil aid coming round on the Sunday morning. I was very annoyed at them at the time for waking me up - (I was just in a plastic bag - no sleeping bag or tent) but maybe they saved my life! After a ride home (bike was fine despite it having fallen over) boy did I sleep
Best wishes,

Michael Hobson.

Peter Nickson
Hi
     I was there as one of the stage crew for the whole weekend but I don't remember any of the bands listed as appearing on the Sunday. Was the whole day rained off? (yes ! - the Archive ed )
I still have my 'official' stage crew badge. Main memories are Fairports, Groundhogs, Graham Bond and Elton John (well Nigel Olsen with the heads so slack on his Premier kit that the dampers showed through).

I've just been reviewing my 'archives' (small tin box) and have found 3 items from the Krumlin festival. Two of them are staff 'passes' printed on card with the festival logo at the top. One is blue and says 'Staff' the other is pink and says 'Steward'. The third item is a cicular red badge with a yellow star in the middle upon which I have written Pete, Stage Crew.
Security was a top priority.
Me and my mates were 'employed' to assist the bands in getting their gear from their vans, parked below the stage at the rear, up onto the stage. As I remember everything had to come up on a small electric hoist. Looking at the pictures of the bands on stage I must be one of the people standing at the back.
Before the start of the festival we made shutters out of sheets of polythene and pieces of 2x1 batten which were rolled up and attached to the PA scaffolding to be unfurled 'in case the weather turned'. Somebody must have seen a weather forecast!
Regards
Pete

Hi
I have in my possession a packet of Festival Memorabilia for Krumlin Festival. Including tickets, pass-outs, programme and press cuttings. There is also a forged ticket, (I worked at a printers where some were put together).On closer looking at the so called forged ticket, I find there is an advanced weekend pass and a weekend pass, these are priced at £2.10s for the advanced and £1.10s for the normal weekend pass, which seems a bit strange. The forged tickets were reputedly £3.00. I also have a pass out ticket. I cannot scan the cuttings because the scanner is bust.
When the festival was on I only lived down the road, and we used to go up to the site the days before it was due to start. There was a lot of jammin with the roadies and odd musician who had arrived early.
I also remember the corporation charging the poor fans more than the normal fare from Halifax to the site, on the special buses. You could have used the usual service for less. My mates all worked on the turnstyles so all the locals could get in for nothing.
regards

Paul

It was definitely the worst of times. I'd never been Up North before, what with being a Londoner. So we got out of the train station at night to discover that it site was a ten mile hike. Luckily we got a lift some locals that had been recruited to work the concert. The entrance was guarded by a tough crew that were shaking down the week end hippies for an extra charge. One of the bouncers was mocking the folkie crap acts and preaching the merits of jazz. So I managed to make friends after saying that I''d seen Ornette Coleman at the Royal Albert Hall and that Trio were a better band than Cream. It was a terrible week end. The port a sans were set up on a hill, and they were toppled and rolled at some point. The site was evacuated each night to a muddy camping field. A fine Yorkshire gale swept through on the Saturday and the police came through Sunday morning shouting through bull horns to leave immediately. I hardly remember the bands; Jeff Dexter trying to keep things going, rumors that the band vans could not get to the stage area, Juicy Lucy, Pentangle, the Groundhogs. It was a line up of the second stringers and they looked cold, wet and miserable just like the audience. Looking at the photos and recollections confirmed my memories of this grim week end .

Euge Gannon

I was prompted to look for info on the Krumlin Festival after despatching my daughter to a very wet Reading Festival.
 
I don't think anything will match Krumlin again!! It's difficult to do justice to the weather. I was 18 and it was my first festival. I went with two mates and we had two kids tents only fit for the back garden. My dad drove us over from Leeds and I remember him saying that there was dodgy weather on the way.
 
The whole site was on a west facing slope, which meant that the view was great, but we were very exposed to the elements!  I think you are about 1000ft above sea level up there.
We could see and hear them constructing the M62 in the distance.

We abandoned our tents on the Saturday night as we couldn't keep them pegged down. The wind and rain were absolutely ferocious - you could hardly stand up. We went into one of the big marquees. I remember it was full of steam from all the wet bodies.
I believe the other big marquee fell down in the middle of the night and people were injured as a result of this.
 
Sunday morning the place looked like a bomb site. We had to call my dad, who came and picked us up. One of my mates was suffering from exposure and was half delirious.
 
The organisation was abysmal. I think most of the organisers were local journalists who just wanted a festival in Yorkshire. Like many, I heard the rumour about one of them walking off into the night.
I also heard that many years later, he invented Trivial Pusuits - and is now very rich!!
 
Pete

KRUMLIN – 1970.      Were you there? Do you wish you hadn’t been? I bought the tickets at HMV on Oxford Street having seen an advert in NME. The name should have put me off, I suppose – "Yorkshire Festival of Jazz, Folk & Blues"– but then again I was a Fairport fan and the prospect of seeing them and Fotheringay on the same bill was enough to tempt me.     There were five of us – festival virgins – we didn’t even know how we were going to get there. In the end my girlfriend’s parents conveniently went on holiday and we stole their Ford Anglia and set off across the Pennines to Halifax. By the time we arrived at Krumlin, the festival site, the wind was blowing up nicely across the moors and the stream of back-packed enthusiasts were beginning to regret shorts and T-shirts. We were one of the first cars directed into a farm gate to park.

Courtesy David Lawrie

      We pitched a small tent in the lea of a dry-stone wall.As we had our tickets clipped we were given a pass-out. I was surprised at the lack of organisation. We had planned to eat on arrival but there were no food stalls open and the toilets were still being set up. Still, this was what it was all about – wasn’t it ?

     The day wore on and we managed a burger and a couple of pints before deciding we couldn’t be arsed queuing again – still no music but a "high-tech" electronic message board above the stage announcing the impending acts and that a "Headline Band" was yet to be announced – the whisper was "Floyd! "

      The lights now confirmed the rumour – "Pink Floyd "– top of the bill! And then another plus - Elton John performed a set (Tumbleweed Connection stuff plus a rockin’ cover of Honky Tonk Women.)
By this time there were fires burning all over the hillside and fences, pallets and anything that could be found was put to use in keeping us warm. No more music!

      The remaining three of us decided to sleep in the car – engine running heater on – still no food. It was a long, stormy and largely sleepless night. We were finally awoken by a succession of ambulances removing the stoned, the drunk and those suffering from exposure. The sight that met us was like Armageddon on a bad day. Streams of people clutching their clothing to themselves, soaked and freezing, trudged from the field.

I was at there as a 16 year old, hitched down from Glasgow. My mate and I slept in the marquee, we woke up on Sunday morning with the thing pressing down on us, weird feeling. We slipped out from under the tent and I lost my jacket with 10/- and my smokes to the force 10 gale.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned by anyone on your site, and it is engrained in my memory, is DJ Jerry Floyd playing a song over and over, Hard Meat, "The Ballad of Marmalade Emma and Teddy Grimes". I have never heard it on the radio since.

Cheers

Mike

Having droned on the my son about this festival it was quite a plus when I found your site on the net today. It brought back some memories I can tell you! I had thought that The Incredible String Band had played on the friday evening, but perhaps that memory is mixed up with others. What I do remember is going to the festival site by car with my dad to see what the place was like, and sitting in the comfort of the car and listening to the music in the distance.
On the saturday I arrived late afternoon courtesy of a lift from dad, armed with a bag of food and a sleeping bag- no tent!! Dad provided the huge sheet of thick plastic from his work which was a life saver later.

With my friend in tow we spent the evening listening to several bands and then enduring the awful rain. Not having a tent meant trying to bed down in one of three I think, big communal tents which were rather rickety and were all full of wet and cold festival goers. We abandoned any attempt to sleep but sat in sleeping bags getting colder and colder. Then disaster as the tent we were in blew down and away across the fields. What next? The huge sheet of plastic became our saviour as we sheltered against a dry ish stone wall and made a makeshift shelter with the plastic, holding on to it against the howling gale that swept across the site that night. Daft place to hold any event really up in the high Pennines even in August!!

The following morning was a scene of devastation with this huge crowd of refugees in front of us, a strong blowing wind and driving horizontal rain. Enough we decided so at about 6-30am we headed of to walk back to our village of Marsden. How we made it I dont know as we were wet through cold and hungry. The whole event promised so much and delivered nothing but misery and disappointment. I do recall seeing Ginger Baker on sat night with I think the Graham Bond Organisation;
his parting words were, Back tomorrow with the Airforce. Of course he didnt as the event was abandoned! No Floyd either. What an experience though. The folk music was memorable with the Fairports and Fotheringay plus other sundry drunken performers, but time dims the memory.

I will remember the wind and rain for ever though!!
Bob W

ex Marsden, now Staffordshire.

I remember going there with a gang of mates from Sheffield and having a real laugh, I remember the electrics shorting due to the wet, and all the crazy goings on.
But far from the organisers opening up the big tents to let people in, they were throwing us out into the elements, and we were threatened with arrest if we tried to get shelter.
I managed to crawl under the edge of a marquee and get some shelter for a few hours.

When it came light I wandered around and found a few mates and we made our way to Halifax, which at that time was still firmly rooted in the 1950’s.When we arrived in the town, we must have presented a sight to them, a gang of bedraggled, stoned, longhaired hippies, with no idea where we were.

Someone directed us to The George which was like heaven after that night.
A good jukebox and like minded people.
It is still a good pub to this day.

Geoff Horan

Just seen your site! I was there 14 years old, I remeber seeing Elton John on the Friday evening. He roused the crowd offering Cognac in plastic cups FANTASTIC Can he remember the night ?. A fan eversince.

Steve

I only remember Atomic Rooster and Elton John. The event was "policed" by Hell's Angels who were lead bya huge bloke with one leg. He cruised round on a large bike and sidecar (for balance) and wore a german helmet. I remember someone selling large plastic bags, the kind used for covering matresses, to shelter inand someone else selling cans of cold baked beans for
£1 each. When the bloke I was with got exposure, I went to the St. John's Ambulance tent and they gave me 2 aspirin for him!

When we left on the Saturday night, all the cars which were parked in a field miles away,were sinking in the mud. Happy Days!!
Sue Platt

a Krumlin veteran

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