AnyBlogDotCom: Weeley Festival

BBC One Show 2019
That's me - the white nerd on the right

Advert which appeared in the music papers
£1.50 for the whole weekend!

Weeley was a UK rock festival organised by the Clacton Round Table which took place in a farmer's field the village of Weeley, just outside Clacton, on the bank holiday weekend of Aug 27-29 in 1971. Intended to just be a charity fund raiser with an audience of about 5,000, it gathered momentum after the announcement that there would be no Isle of White festival, and eventual attendance is estimated to be up to 150,000 - which would make it the third largest music event audience in the UK after the 1970 Isle of White Festival, and Glastonbury festivals post 1993.

The organiser

Colin King, the organiser, gives his account:

Hi, my name is Colin King.

40 years ago I was invited by Clacton Round Table to help them put on a festival on a farm in Weeley, Essex for charity.

I thought that this year, 2011, I would put on a

40th Anniversary Weeley Reunion Festival

and have been investigating how many of the bands were still active.

Amazingly, almost all of them are still going, with the sad exceptions of Marc Bolan, Rory Gallagher, Wooley Woolstenholme and Peter Barden.

There will of course be members of the audience and crew who are also now at that big rock festival in the sky.

Having decided that a reunion was possible I began to look at the logistics. I then realised that not only was I too old to make it happen again but my audience were all now granddads and grannies, like me. All wrinkleys, yuck. Isn’t old age undignified?

So I decided to be in the modern world and put on a Virtual Festival instead.

Ever since I put Weeley Festival on, I’ve been asked by many people how it was that I came to organise such a huge event. I thought it was about time that I told my story...

My father before me used to put on Armed Forces dances during the War. He had a large collection of records which inspired me to collect my own records. Then, I trained as a Theatre Technician with the National Theatre Company, under Laurence Olivier, learning about lighting, sound and stage production. At a party I’d seen a DJ work and thought it would be a good way for me to earn a living. I asked him how to do it and he told me. In those days there were no college courses - you just went and bought the equipment and hoped that your own choices in records would work. I went and bought a mobile discotheque with lighting and started gigging around London and the south; mostly pubs and clubs.

I met Freddie Bannister, who was a local promoter of bands, and started presenting and DJing at some of his gigs. Then, when the 1969 Bath Festival started, he asked me if I would work alongside John Peel as a presenter/DJ. The following year at Bath 1970, I had a similar role, as well as working as stage manager. Early in 1971, the Clacton Round Table, in Essex, had decided that they wanted to liven up their summer fundraising drive by putting on a pop festival. They called Freddie Bannister and he recommended me as being able to help them. I went to Clacton and met with Vic Speck who, as a Lloyds Underwriter, was going to front the money for the whole event. They had already booked Mungo Jerry and wanted me to try to book some other important bands and take care of the production. They in turn would sort out the site. With my contacts it didn’t take me long to put a show together. I’d been given a budget of £12,000! Even in those days it wasn’t very much. Freddie Bannister had paid more than this to Led Zeppelin the year before. However, this event was not to be a purely commercial event because, as a forerunner of Live Aid, the profits were to go to charity. I managed to get most of the bands’ management to keep their prices low.

In June the publicity was begun by putting large ads in all the music papers to sell advanced tickets. The Round Table were expecting in the region of 10,000 to 20,000 attendees. The advanced sales exceeded this figure by the end of June and by the end of July we were getting close to 100,000. I went to Clacton to meet again with Vic Speck and had a meeting with the Chief Constable, John Duke, to talk about the logistics of such a huge number of people arriving in a sleepy little village. It was fortunate that John Duke was very co-operative and saw the whole thing as a learning curve for his Force and a challenge. I have to say that throughout the whole event the police went beyond the call of duty to maintain a good atmosphere. In fact, when the festival finished I discovered that a lot of the backstage crew were plainclothes police; they had worked as hard as everybody else, whilst gathering valuable intelligence.

My position was really to act as a bridge between the developing counter-culture of the hippies and the music scene and the mainstream business culture of the Round Table and the public authorities. When we told the Clacton Round Table members how many we expected to attend they were shocked and some of them were quite angry that they hadn’t been kept up-to-date on what was happening. They were of course compromised and had no choice but to settle down and turn the field into a viable environment, including digging trenches for the toilets, putting up marquees and building a security fence around the arena. Vic and I had decided that because so many advanced tickets had been sold already there was no need to sell anymore at the gate. The cost of the event had been covered and it was agreed that we didn’t need any real security on site to stop people coming in for free. However, we found out later that many people were selling forged tickets at the entrance and putting money in their own pockets.

I arrived on site on the Wednesday to supervise the stage lighting and sound system installation being erected and the backstage area being put together with 20 caravans that had been hired as dressing rooms for the bands. Many people had already arrived from Glastonbury Fair and were helping the local Round Tablers. It was quite amusing to see these red-faced farmers with their sleeves rolled up, starting to use hippy language like “Cool” and “Far out, man.” The whole atmosphere was one of friendliness and co-operation between all parties. Everyone was very excited as the event took shape.

The show kicked off at 9 p.m., Friday night on 27th August 1971 with a couple of local DJs playing records. I arrived on stage to announce the first band on who were called Hackensack. There is not much information about this band on the internet except this. I couldn’t find any video of them but you can listen to them on the audio page which will put you in the mood for the rest of the show.

This was followed by Principal Edwards Magic Theatre Also on my audio page

Next, The Edgar Broughton Band who were one of the most well-known underground bands from London. They were managed by Blackhill Enterprises, originally founded by members of Pink Floyd. This organisation put on the free Hyde Park festivals and the Band would travel around London with all their equipment set up on the back of a lorry and just stop and play.