Free festival

David Bowie's song "Memory of a Free Festival", recorded in September 1969 and included on the 1969 album David Bowie, mentions the free festival organised by the Beckenham Arts Lab and held on the Croydon Road Recreation Ground on 16 August 1969. He may also have been inspired by an earlier free festival he had recently performed at, one which could lay claim to being the first of its kind in Europe.

Cambridge Midsummer Pop Festival ran from 8-11 June, 1969, offering a heavyweight line-up of psych pop, rock, folk and prog music. As well as Bowie himself (mistakenly given the first name ‘Dave’), the programme listed bands and performers such as King Crimson, Edgar Broughton, Mighty Baby, Roy Harper, Terry Reid, Brian Auger & The Trinity, Family, Strawbs and Marsha Hunt, with John Peel as MC.^[1]

The 1972 to 1974 Windsor Free Festival, held in Windsor Great Park, England, was a free festival. The 'organisation' was mostly Ubi Dwyer distributing thousands of leaflets and asking people and bands to bring their own equipment and create their own environment – "bring what you expect to find."^[2]

"Free festivals are practical demonstrations of what society could be like all the time: miniature utopias of joy and communal awareness rising for a few days from a grey morass of mundane, inhibited, paranoid and repressive everyday existence…The most lively [young people] escape geographically and physically to the ‘Never Never Land’ of a free festival where they become citizens, indeed rulers, in a new reality." Un-authored leaflet from 1980, quoted in George McKay's Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance Since the Sixties (p. 15).^[3]

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  Simon and Garfunkel at The Concert in Central Park
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  Cambridge Strawberry Fair 2011
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  Strawberry Fair 2007, Cambridge
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  Parkpop 2006
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  West Fest in San Francisco

• Free party
• New age travellers
• Alternative society
• Teknival
• DIY culture