With all the publicity that has been generated recently by the sale of over 4 Billion tickets to this years Glastonbury Festival I was reminded of the first festival that I attended as a callow 16 year old youth back in May 1972.

The festival in question was known nationally as ‘The Great Western Festival’ locally it was just called ‘Bardney.”
Now Bardney or Tupholme Manor as the site was officially known is a small village in the middle of nowhere, about 10 miles east of Lincoln. Some enterprising local had connections in the music industry and convinced people like the actor Stanley Baker and Lord Harlech to front the staging of what was then considered to be the biggest festival in Britain since the Isle of White, where Jimi Hendrix had played to over 100,000 people 2 years before.

I was living with my parents at the time, on one of the many RAF Camps that Lincolnshire spawned due to the vast expanses of flat land available for runway development. My folks were conservative with a small ‘c’ and the thought of their son cavorting in a field with thousands of stoned hippies was a complete anathema to them, whereas I couldn’t wait to get to hear the likes of Rory Gallagher, Stone the Crows, The Faces and Humble Pie amongst many others and set in motion my plan to get to to the Festival.

RAF Cranwell was only 15 miles from Bardney and myself and a couple of mates dreamt up a scam that would convince our parents that we would be going on a school camping trip over the weekend of the festival. We laid it on thick that we were missing out on some of the biggest names in Rock music by taking part in school activities. They all bought our story and all we had to do was find a tent and some doss bags and get ourselves out to the site. This entailed buses and trains to Lincoln then we had a 10 mile walk to the site as there was virtually no public transport, there still isn’t today, but that is another matter altogether.

The long walk to Bardney was akin to being in Alexander the Great's army. There were thousands of strange and weird looking people meandering along the B roads of Lincolnshire much to the amusement of local folk who were used to seeing tractors and trailers, a few lucky folk hitched rides, but back then your average Hippie didn’t have a car so lifts were thin on the ground. I remember getting a glass of water from an elderly lady who was dispensing the stuff from her front garden, she was having a ball playing Mum to all these long hairs and she kept telling everyone to be careful of drug dealers, the fact that she was probably serving a fair few herself, with hindsight was a delicious irony.

Finally arriving at the site in the late afternoon sun with the sound of live music welcoming us, we were in Nirvana.
We had come of age, or so we thought and the prospect of seeing so many bands over the following four days filled us with excitement and expectation. But first we had to get our tent erected so that we had somewhere to sleep that night.
Three people in a two man tent sounded fine in the planning stages of our escapade but the reality was very different. Besides, none of us had ever gone camping on our own before other than sleeping in a tent in your Mum and Dad's back garden with a cooked breakfast to look forward to in the morning. If it got too cold in the night you could always slip off to your own cosy bed. Here, in a field miles from home, with tens of thousands of other revellers we were pushing our comfort parameters to the limit.

The tent we had was an RAF issue canvas job that my mate Mike had brought from his Dad's loft. No fly sheet and a limited number of tent pegs – ( You can see where this is going can’t you! ). But we got it up, stashed our borrowed sleeping bags inside and went to watch Rory Gallagher absolutely blow everyone away with his fearsome slide guitar and ballsy vocals. We spent the rest of the evening in wide eyed wonder at all the beautiful girls that seemed to inhabit the planet, but they all seemed to have some cool freaky guy as a boyfriend and to say we felt out of place and inadequate was the understatement of the year.
None of us smoked cigarettes back then let alone more esoteric substances so we naturally got tired and went back to the tent with an oily hot dog for company. Using the head to toe method of accommodation we managed to squeeze ourselves into our canvas cocoon and laughably tried to get some sleep.