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Documenting Free Festivals with Alan Lodge
Interview by Esta Rae | 19.07.24
Alan Lodge travelled with the Free Festival scene on a journey from the Queens backyard to Stonehenge and witnessed a movement rise and be knocked back by state forces. As Lodge asserts the movement was just a moment in the long history of alternative living away from the common alienation that urban livers suffer.
The resulting memories, and photographs, capture a time before tech when our found communities gathered in fields to take up space and had to battle for their right to do so.
Growing up did you choose to identify with a certain subculture?
No, I didn’t, quite a lot escaped me until I was eighteen or nineteen. In the last year of school I went to the Windsor Great Park Festival which was in the Queens back garden so involved a certain amount of politics with the land and so on. That was my first introduction to anything while I was still at school. I wasn’t part of a tribe, Punks hadn’t been invented then, it was a bit fifties and grey before that.
Eighteen is a common age to start evaluating your identity, come to a subculture and want to find your place
Right. I left sixth form in 1970 having a certain worldview from school, peers, family and so on. I finished school in June and by August was at the Windsor Great Park Festival which was certainly an eye opener. People doing what they wanted in the park and this commonality of behaviour and not obeying laws. That festival was repeated until 1974 when 600 Thames Valley police men came over the field. It was a complete shock to me. I was sat down drinking my tea when a police sergeant walked up to me and rather than ask me to move along he whacked me round the side of my head. I have to say i’ve never been the same since, not medically I mean politically.
It was preparing me for what could happen. It was that year that things moved from the Queens back garden to the Stonehenge events. These were my introductions to the tribal nature of humans. Who we hang out with and the commonalities between us all.
So you were there from the early days of the Free Party movement?
Young people nowadays like to think they’ve come along and invented something. It takes us old chaps to say ‘No, you haven’t’ people were doing this and that beforehand and what you’ve done is put your own stamp on it. Good luck to you but you were influenced by folks beforehand. So we didn’t think about sitting in Windsor Grand Park without the knowledge of what was going before, largely in America with Woodstock Festival, global influences got us to think differently and ask why don’t we do this? Seeing other people have similar ideas becomes infectious and it takes somebody to ask well why not? Lots of people get influenced by what happens over time and without personal experience can have no idea how we got to that and what came before. I’m quite an advocate for reading a bit of history.
It’s a big part of what we do here, identifying youth culture history that isn’t taught to young people, and to a lot of people it can come as a shock to hear the revolutionary things their parents were a part of.
Some of the tribes I talk about weren’t just a bunch of 20 year olds hanging out. It was about identifying as being a 20 year old who wanted to hang out with others in a set of circumstances that made people feel connected rather than disconnected. That’s one of the things youth culture does.
Where did the urge to document come from?
About five or six years after leaving school I joined the London Ambulance Service. I was an accident Ambulance Man for six years in West London and saw all sorts of things happen, babies were born, people broke arms, had drug overdoses, car accidents, and the IRA bombing campaign was going on at the time. So I had a fairly full existence and training through all of that. At the same time, I was going to Free Festivals, which was a bit unusual for a chap in a disciplined uniform to be all anarchy on the weekends.
I found that one of the principal criticisms of the Free Festival scene was that you didn’t pay your weight, pay your tax, squatting on somebody’s field and using public services. That was the criticism of an anarchist society that you shouldn’t just take but also give. So with me training I set up an outfit called Festival Welfare Services who worked with charities at festivals to treat people with minor ailments of different sorts. We treated what we could but if it really needed to go to hospital we would talk to the police and ambulance service to get a service delivered. However, over time, more people came to the tent in distress from the policing activity and the way they were treated by uniform. That was my original reason for taking photographs. When I was down the road away from an event in Wales I saw them searching people for cannabis, a principal hobby of theirs, not because they were frightened of cannabis but because it was part of the law that enabled them to interfere with the squat further up the mountain. So my original reason for getting a camera and film was to photograph what I consider to be a fair amount of wrongdoing. As soon as policemen became aware that they were being observed it moderated some of their more extreme behaviours especially pushing people about violently. I can remember one particular instance, because I was with a charity it enabled me to speak to police on a different level from just being a person in a field, a policeman was completely denying what I was telling him his officers had just done so I went back to my truck developed the film and printed some pictures, washed them in a mountain stream and went back to show the superintendent. I can remember his face now. This is before digital photography and what you can do with a mobile phone. The rest of that festival they were all put together, it was amazing.
That’s the power of photography and evidential photography for you right there. I’ve done that for some years afterwards, giving evidence in court, but that was my first reason for taking pictures. Having got a camera I became interested in people doing things that hadn’t occurred before because it was just part of the furniture. It takes an observer's eye to think it’s unusual or different or worthy of note. I’ve kept going for nearly fifty years now.
Subculture movements often thrive in urban environments so what was significant about the time that vast amounts of people were moving to reclaim the greens and commons?
Thatcher’s Britain, urban degradation, communities falling apart, no such thing as a society, Norman Tebbit (former secretary of state for employment) whose father when he was unemployed didn’t cry about it but got on his book and looked for work as the famous quote from about 1982 goes. Well, that’s exactly what these young people did, they got on their bike, didn’t sit around in urban situations where there was no hope. They got together with five or six guys, put in fifty quid each for a three hundred pound bus, not homeless anymore. There’s a history of travelling around the country to provide and exchange skills, where previously this happened on common land that had now been taken from us in the enclosure act, travelling now was a political statement. So DIY folk got described as anarchy. Young people in their teens to thirties were the main protagonists but travellers extended to seventies and eighties and their offspring.
From a psychological point of view many people were damaged by the inner city, urban alienation is the technical term, there’s nine million of you in London but nobody knows their neighbours. That’s a strange way of living, I say that’s not normal, I say that’s extraordinary and needs adjustment. In my opinion we need to extend the health service to dealing with people damaged by inner city alienation, they weren’t very well when they came to play with the hippies, but they got repaired.
If you own property then you’re not going to go out and protest in case you can’t pay the mortgage the following month. It’s a way of chaining the public and it’s what they’re doing to this day. If you put a different model of politics to the public which could engage many then that will be threatening. That was the reason the Tory’s wanted to squash it. The Stonehenge Festival was the epitome of that. We did it for eleven consecutive years up to 1984 and down the road was Glastonbury, another kind of festival, Stonehenge was on for six weeks. A quarter of a million people passed through which was twice the size of Glastonbury at the time and that’s why the government got wobbled about it. In 1984 was the Battle of Orgreave, 40 years ago, they took the tools they had imposed from the miners strikes to remove people from land using police force with much violence and much distress. The 1985 event at Stonehenge was squashed and became known as the Battle of Beanfield and that is the beginning of the end of the experiment.
The distinction between Free Parties and Free Festivals is very important to you but many won’t know the difference.
Before Free Parties we had Free Festivals. Another bunch of young people after a couple of years came along and said ‘what if we don’t reside there? What if we stay up all night and make a racket?’ I say that’s the beginning of the Free Party scene. That’s what a Free Party is. The difference in what we were doing before was living with others for an entire season, in some places for six weeks in a community, a society. A Free Party is something that you do at the weekend, go away before the law cracks in, that’s not society that’s escaping from society. Listening to some music at the weekend and then going home is not as alternative as I would like to see.
Were people planning for the future or just focused on making a community in the present?
Yes. We never got told any history beyond kings and queens and dates. That’s what history is, your capacity to remember answers for an examination, a question about Edward III. That’s so inadequate, I wish they had told me more about the Enclosures Act and the English Civil War. We have roots and proper history and we’re not told about it. With a bit more hindsight you realise you’re part of this continuum and that becomes the way we wish to look forward. Furthermore, because we were families, we had children, you’ve got to think about where you’re going to bring them up and the classroom to move with them. We were sustainable and environmentalist before the words were being used. Leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but photographs. Tread lightly on the land and so on.
If you were to donate one object to the Museum of Youth Culture what would it be and why?
I will say my camera because it’s important. I take pictures to try and show what has come before and to show good practice and show that imagery can change things. I would have more of us running around with mobile phones being aware that we can use them under all sorts of circumstances. I have to say a camera has more authority than a mobile phone, you look more like you know what you’re doing.