The Archive

For information on today's festivals see eFestivals.co.uk

Last update February 2013 .


East Anglia

Rock and Blues Festival

Speedway Stadium

Mildenhall.

Bury St Edmonds

Suffolk .

1981-91.


Bernie Marsden's SOS playing at the 1982 East Anglia Rock festival © Blaine Butler.

The Speedway stadium

© Copyright Bob Jones and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

   A fairly long running , largely forgotten blues rock festival held at the non-picturesque arena of Mildenhall Speedway , that appears to have had the odd year or two off, but which managed to exist intermittently through the 80s . The nearby US air base no doubt provided the event with a large local following as servicemen are more often than not hard rock fans .

   The bands playing at Mildenhall were always at the more pointed end of the rock spectrum , headliners such as Dr Feelgood and Rory Gallagher alternated with the likes of Uriah Heep and Hawkwind . At first, only shots we found of the event showed a fairly small audience watching the Welsh glam rock outfit Tigertailz, who understandably bombed as they were completely out of their element.

   However, early 2013 we began to acquire more images , so now we have expanded the site over several more pages to include galleries of some of the acts at the 1982 and the 1988 shows . There is also video of Rory Gallagher playing at the event in 1989 out there somewhere on the net, we will see if we can find a link to this online and when we do we will post it here.

   There are a fair number of hard rock/metal boots circulating out there ,as well as a couple of official live releases for those of you who are interested in hearing just what this obscure but long lived event sounded like on the day.


The Festivals.

 We are looking for eyewitness accounts, posters ,info and photos of these events - most especially 1987

Please feel free to contact us and contribute towards building pages about each festival by Contacting us . We try to reply to all messages, but sometimes it takes a while .Usually we wait until we have enough new material to warrant a page upgrade , so posts may take quite a while to emerge on the page .


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