The annual Glastonbury Festival has become a unique British cultural institution. Each year, in June, on the weekend nearest the summer solstice, hundreds of thousands of people flock to Worthy Farm in the Somerset village of Pilton to camp for three days. They are there to experience the dizzying kaleidoscope of music, theatre and arts on offer on numerous stages.
The festival caters for all ages, cultures and socio-economic backgrounds. It is often referred to by cynics as a holiday camp for middle-class hippies. Yet the origins of this quintessentially British event are rooted deep in the counter-culture and entwined with LSD and other psychedelics. Had it not been for the psychedelic focus of the first major Glastonbury event, the festival would not have developed into the kaleidoscopic, multi-media event it now is.
But why and how did Glastonbury become the spiritual birthplace of the free festival movement? The growing awareness among young people that the LSD experience itself was not the destination, but a catalyst to a spiritual journey, led to an explosion of interest in a variety of belief systems during the Sixties. Psychedelic seekers often chose to explore Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions. Others found themselves drawn to the Western Mystery Tradition, Arthurian legend, magic and/or shamanism, wanting to discover at first hand the legacy of spiritual traditions and beliefs of the British Isles. And where better to do this than at Glastonbury?
The Glastonbury area is steeped in myth and legend. It has been claimed that Jesus visited Glastonbury Abbey; UFOs have been sighted over the Tor; ley-lines criss-cross the area, sending serpent power through the West Country; a terrestrial Zodiac can be discerned in landscape features surrounding the Tor, and so on. In the mid-1960s these and many other legends had recently been re-vivified and re-tooled for the counterculture by author John Michell in his books The Flying Saucer Vision and The View over Atlantis.
Michell wrote: ‘It was, I think, in 1966 that I first went to Glastonbury, in the company of Harry Fainlight… We had no very definite reason for going there, but it had something to do with … strange lights in the sky, new music, and our conviction that the world was about to flip over on its axis so that heresy would become orthodoxy and an entirely new world-order would shortly be revealed’.
Michell was the counter-culture’s resident philosopher, their Merlin; an Eton and Cambridge educated polymath who had taken the side of the hippies and was educating them about their indigenous spiritual heritage. Michell lived in the hippie enclave of Notting Hill Gate, equally as comfortable at counterculture events as he was hanging out with the Rolling Stones or minor aristocracy. His books were key spiritual guides for the British counterculture and could be found in every thinking hippie’s pad, offering a source of discussion and speculation during those timeless LSD trips toward the dawn.
He showed there was no need to take the hippie trail to the East when the West Country was just down the M4. And the visual imagery of Glastonbury was everywhere in the underground press. One very good example is the cover of issue one of the Underground magazine, Albion, edited by Steve Penk. Dragons and UFOs teem in the skies over Glastonbury Tor, stylized as a woman’s breast, whilst swords, serpents and geomantic imagery are visible as part of the body of the Earth below. Hippie travellers in search of enlightenment had settled in the area from the mid-Sixties onwards, fuelled by Michell’s exposition of Glastonbury as a sacred place.
It was against this backdrop that the Glastonbury festivals would develop.
The first festival at Glastonbury in 1970 was a low-key, commercial event attended by a few hundred people. Organised by Pilton farmer Michael Eavis, the festival was a financial disaster. To recoup his losses, Eavis left the organization of the 1971 event, Glastonbury Fayre, to a rather unlikely group of people.
Andrew Kerr first met Arabella Churchill, Winston’s granddaughter, while working on Randolph Churchill’s biography of the great political leader. In the late Sixties, like thousands of others, Kerr was taking LSD and enjoying being part of the counterculture. The seed of his idea to hold a free festival at Glastonbury was planted at the 1969 Isle of Wight rock festival. Kerr was outraged that large areas near the stage were cordoned off for the press and privileged few, while the foot soldiers of the psychedelic revolution had to pay to stand at a distance from the stage. On the drive back to London he announced to his fellow passengers: ‘We’ve got to have a proper festival and it’s got to have at least some cosmic significance. Let’s have it at the summer solstice at Stonehenge.’
The pair chatted and a now historic meeting was convened at Worthy Farm. Kerr prepared himself by spending the night before atop Glastonbury Tor on LSD. The meeting was a success. Eavis agreed to the use of his land for a reasonable fee and Kerr, assisted by Arabella Churchill and utilising a small inheritance, formed Solstice Capers to organise the 1971 festival.
Speaking after the event, Kerr acknowledged Glastonbury’s place in the Matter of Britain: ‘It is the very heart of the body of England…What drew these people to Glastonbury was a feeling that from this ancient, sacred place a new spirit is to spread among men. They were here to bear witness to the birth of the new era, The Age of Aquarius.’
Kerr started to plan his festival in earnest, expanding on the philosophy behind Glastonbury Fayre: ‘There seemed to be a need for a truly free festival. All the others had some profit motive behind them-some worthy causes, some for greed, none for love. The bread was made out of the people who least could afford it; it was time they were given a party.’
And the ‘bring what you expect to find’ ethos which permeated all British free festivals really began at Glastonbury Fayre. Another of the core organising group, Thomas Crimble, who had recently stepped down from bass guitar duties with nascent free festival stalwarts Hawkwind, recalled, ‘The ethos was, if there’s a problem, sort it out yourself, don’t expect anyone else to do it, it’s your festival’.
The Observer wrote: ‘Kerr has the intensity of a man with a deep spiritual obsession. He claims he is trying to recreate a prehistoric science, whose huge energies are not recognised by modern society. His ideas are based on the writings of antiquarian John Michell, who in a book called The View Over Atlantis, recently elucidated the spiritual engineering which, he says, was known over the ancient world.’
These ideas were transmuted into the location and design of the stage. Kerr dowsed the site and when he located a blind spring, with Glastonbury Tor in the distance, it was decided to site the stage directly above it. John Michell told him the stage should be built to the sacred proportions of Egypt’s Great Pyramid. This suited Kerr’s intention for the festival, which was to ‘… create an increase in the power of the Universe, a heightening of consciousness and recognition of our place in the function of this our tired and molested planet.’ Or to put it more psychedelically; ‘Imagine, we're going to concentrate the celestial fire and pump it into the planet to stimulate growth.’
Bill Harkin, now a respected stage designer, designed and built the stage and a silver pyramid eventually sprang up among the cows, fields and hedges of Worthy Farm.
Jeff Dexter, veteran DJ from London’s UFO club, organised the music, a dizzying line-up consisting of the house bands of the counterculture which included freak favourites Quintessence, Brinsley Schwarz, Hawkwind, Gong, Traffic and Arthur Brown. These bands were open and enthusiastic about their use of LSD and strove to create a musical environment suitable for those under the influence of psychedelic drugs. Dexter tried hard to get the archetypal LSD band, the Grateful Dead, over from America to play but this didn’t come off. They did send a financial donation to support the festival and appeared on the Glastonbury Fayre soundtrack album.
Psychedelics of all kinds, including mescaline, were freely available at Glastonbury, but LSD was by far the most prevalent mind expanding drug on offer. Tim Hargreaves, who was on the road in the early 1970s, eventually ending up in the Free High Church commune on the Isle of Cumbrae, with ex-Learyite Michael Hollingshead, recalls what happened when he and his friends arrived at the gate:
‘As we pulled up at Worthy Farm we were met at the gate by a woman who showed us where to park up and make camp. She asked if we had money, we said we had a bit but were setting off on a trip round the UK to visit all known communes. She said not to worry about tickets but did we have food? Saying yes, she told us to share it and then asked if we were prepared… and then dropped near 50 tabs into our hands.’
Hargreaves believes this could have been Anabella Churchill. It’s possible. Although she denied indulging in psychedelics herself she was aware ‘… there was a lot of acid, because this man came up with a large briefcase and said: “This is full of acid, man. I was going to sell it but everyone’s doing everything for free so here, give it to everybody.” I put it under a bed and I can’t remember what happened to it in the end.’
For many festival goers, Glastonbury Fayre was their first experience of the burgeoning counterculture. The festival made a huge impact on Croatian actress Hanja Kochansky who wrote this fecund account of the event, noting the many different mind-altering substances that were available as well as the strong sense of community which underpinned the free festivals:
Thai sticks, Moroccan hash, magic mushrooms, Mexican mescaline and Timothy Leary acid rained like manna from the blue skies. Celestial sounds echoed through the valleys in this psychedelic wonderland, where streams of extravagant humanity had come from everywhere to celebrate life. Flutes, guitars, drums, harmonicas; happy naked babies like butterflies; goats, a calf, horse-driven gypsy caravans. As our eyes met, reflecting open smiles and free love, we sang, danced, embraced, experienced ecstasy.
A drove of timESPace travellers with coats of many colours dwelled in vans, trailers, trucks, limousines and pantechnicons, with their Tarot cards, tattoos, muesli, brown rice, books on mysticism, magic cats, bubbling cauldrons, unleavened bread and video-cameras.
In this microcosmos, where goodwill flowed as naked bodies soaked in the sun I met the scarlet haired Rainbow Gypsies from California who taught me to henna my hair; took LSD with the poet George Andrews; was charmed by Pan-like Heathcote Williams playing his flute to woo his girlfriend, top-model Jean Shrimpton.
Oh how happy was the gypsy in me: washing in limpid streams; cooking on an open fire; joining in musical choirs that went on till it was time to salute the sun with Yoga asanas. As I watched the smoke from chillums sneaking up towards the sky, I wanted to remain in this sweet life, this dolce vita, forever: in this link between me and the Divine.
When the event came to an end we shared our last chillum round the last of the fires with heavy heart. In the morning we packed our tents, cramped our few clothes in baskets and carpet bags and headed back to the city to resume our daily lives. But we were never the same again. We had glimpsed Paradise on Earth and from now on we were to take the road directed towards Eden; the road less travelled.
Author Williams Bloom’s impression of Glastonbury was that ‘…nearly everyone was tripping at one stage or another. Sometimes it was being given away… The festivals would not have been what they were without hallucinogens.’ And, ‘The mixture of very good LSD and very bad scrumpy. Impromtu processions. The frenzy of the underground press to produce newssheets. The good vibe. Bowie waking the crowd playing a foot-pumped organ.’
For his part, David Bowie recalled being under the influence of magic mushrooms as he took to the stage at five in the morning: ‘By the time I was due to perform I was flying and could hardly see my little electric keyboard or my guitar.’ Bowie’s recollection is intriguing, not least for the fact that it is one of the earliest instances of ‘magic mushrooms’ being used at a festival.
Not only was there a great deal of LSD around, there were many different varieties too, including ‘Several thousand so-called ‘Sarsaparilla’ (sic) pills (each derived from 50 litres of the distilled, concentrated flavouring, along with a touch of LSD and amphetamine) had been shipped to the Festival as “vitamins”’, remembers wandering hippie, Nick Butts. ‘They made people feel as though they were walking on air, and were an extreme aphrodisiac. They provoked an outbreak of uninhibited coupling all around the site, and throughout the festival cries of “Are we sassed yet?” rippled through the crowd.’
Many clergymen also visited the 1971 Glastonbury festival, attracted by this radical youth movement and their alternative brand of spirituality. Among them was a diocesan youth chaplain from Swindon, who took some LSD (whether voluntarily or not is unclear). The confused clergyman ended up rushing headlong down the festival hillside, his cloak flaring like a giant bat behind him. However, his Christian faith wasn’t enough to help him navigate the multiverse he experienced under the onslaught of LSD, and he had to retire to the bad trip tent organised by Release where he was gently talked back down to earth.
Though the majority of LSD experiences at Glastonbury were positive there were, as at every festival, some drug casualties. Bad trip tents were to become a feature of the free festival scene, often full of seriously confused teenagers who had been attracted to LSD by peer pressure and expectation, but who were unprepared for the effects of the drug.
On one hand these tents were perhaps the downside of the free festival experience, but on the other they demonstrate that free festival goers were prepared to care for those who had overindulged. Quintessence guitarist Allan Mostert remembers: ‘A rather shattering experience I had at Glastonbury was while wandering through the audience before our set, I took a look inside the so called 'bad trip tent', where they took the people who had dropped LSD and gone on bad trips. This experience strengthened the idea in me of what we were actually trying to do with our music and 'message'.’
Arthur Brown’s performance at the festival was also too much for some of those trippers who were focussed solely on love and peace when they were under the influence of powerful psychedelics. His doom laden show which featured band members dressed as monks, flaming crucifixes and Arthur himself with a fiery headdress, was an overwhelming audio-visual experience.
In one recounting: ‘Arthur Brown fucked the festival up that night. He caught a lot of people stoned on acid, and he freaked a lot of people out, and they left the stage area. I think they went back to their tents or hid in the woods, ‘cos Arthur Brown appeared on stage with a bloody crucifix—on fire—and it was like the Ku Klux Klan in your head… he gave out this evil presence, and the whole atmosphere became evil from it, especially for those who were stoned or tripping.’
Brown’s biographer, Polly Marshall, also noted Brown’s Glastonbury appearance: ‘Into this welter of peace, love and LSD, wandered Arthur and Kingdom Come. But what really made their set memorable was their light show, probably dreamt up by Dennis Taylor whilst munching through one of his “small doses” of 500 mics. He set up flaming crosses in front of the stage.’ Dennis Taylor was a member of Brown’s road crew, notorious for his LSD consumption. The section of the Glastonbury Fayre film that features Arthur Brown shows the acid-doused audience’s reaction to Brown’s pseudo-satanic performance and stage set; many were clearly freaked out!
Overall, the preponderance of LSD and other psychedelics at Glastonbury Fayre was positive and a combination of the drugs and the general vibe led one attendee to say, ‘A sort of constant ecstasy seemed to be the mood of the day. People strode around, often with a lovely look in their eyes, as if they had seen visions and other strange miracles, hard to put into words…’.
The mixture of free psychedelics, along with living out the hippie ethos, made the Glastonbury Fair the prototype for subsequent events. LSD and other psychedelics brought people together around the campfires at night, making the already otherworldly experience appear completely divorced from twentieth century Western civilisation. Mick Farren summed it up: ‘We might as well have been in the sixth or even twenty-sixth century as we told tall travellers’ tales of intoxication, of outwitting the law, of the lights in the sky, lost continents, the lies of government, collective triumphs and personal stupidity, while the music of past, present and future roared from the pyramid stage.’
Michael Eavis made a profit on the event but was somewhat concerned. ‘There was a lot of LSD around. People were freaking out, wandering into the village wearing nothing but a top hat, that sort of thing. I was all over the place, looking after the villagers and the cattle that were straying. Once it was over, I decided I didn't want anything to do with it again.’ His concerns soon subsided and although a number of years elapsed before a festival was again on his land, by the early 1980s the Glastonbury Festival was embedded as part of the English cultural landscape.
Following the 1971 Glastonbury free festival the area became a focus for traveling hippies. Small encampments sprang up in the country lanes, or droves as they are known, and there were almost continuous gatherings on the summit of Glastonbury Tor. In the seventies, there were people taking LSD on the Tor every night of the summer. To visit the Tor, take LSD and watch the sunrise over the Somerset levels was considered a hip thing to do, a psychedelic pilgrimage.
At one stage, the tower on the Tor had been broken into and turned into a hippie crash pad. Free festival poster artist Roger Hutchison and friends travelled to the Tor from Essex. He climbed to the summit at 3am, to find the inside of the tower bedecked with cushions and lighted tapers with a group of hippies smoking cannabis and drinking wine. Such was the spirit of community and trust in those times that he was immediately offered LSD in blotter form by a colourfully dressed hippie, and settled down to watch the sunrise, accompanied by chanting and drumming.
This type of shamanic activity was prevalent among the mystically-inclined at free festivals. Drums, chanting and psychedelic drugs have been used together since prehistoric times, each enhancing the effect of the other. This type of group behaviour not only had a strong bonding effect but served to help individuals navigate the LSD experience, either as participants or observers.
Now that the counterculture had experienced just what a summer time multi-day free festival fuelled by psychedelics could be like, it was only a matter of time before other, much larger and more contentious ones would be planned.
Check out some of historian Andy Roberts’ books here.