Albion Dreaming (31 page)

For the government, Timothy Leary’s name had become synonymous with all that was bad about LSD. He had been refused entry to Britain on several previous occasions and it was clear the British political administration saw him as a serious threat to the nation’s youth. In 1973 Leary once again attempted to gain entry to Britain. On this occasion, Federal Agents were escorting Leary back to the USA from Afghanistan after a period on the run following his 1970 escape from a federal prison. When the plane from Afghanistan stopped over at Frankfurt, Joanna, Leary’s wife, phoned her godfather Max Aitken, owner of London’s
Evening Standard
, and told him “Timothy says as soon as we get to Heathrow, he’s demanding political, philosophical, and spiritual asylum.”
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Leary was met from his plane at Heathrow by Mr Greenyer, who had dealt with him on two previous occasions. Greenyer later commented dryly, “During the years since I last met him, Mr. Leary has developed much stronger belief in himself as the ‘Messiah’, though he backs this with highly intelligent, even logical speech. His words, possibly said jokingly, before departure were ‘In this world’s march I am one of the very few in step.’” Despite his voluble requests to immigration officials, yet again, he was refused entry to Britain. Leary, whose US identity card gave his profession as “philosopher”, took the refusal calmly before being flown to Los Angeles in a specially cordoned off area of a Pan Am 747. On this occasion however, Leary did manage to court some publicity; a large photograph of him appeared in
The Times
. Leary and his wife Joanna Harcourt-Smith were pictured on the moving walkway as they left the flight from Kabul, Leary sporting his trademark grin.
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Even though only a small percentage of Britain’s population had actually taken LSD, the drug, or more correctly the
idea
of the drug, was now firmly embedded in popular culture. It was so accepted by the majority of young people that in 1973 the future contender for the 2007 Liberal Democrat Party leadership, Chris Huhne, wrote an article on drugs while at Oxford University. His
position on LSD, which he intimated was actually being made clandestinely at Oxford, summed up the attitude held by most young people of the time, “Acid [LSD] is manufactured in the labs and is the only drug which is getting cheaper ... The considerable number of students at this university who drop acid are well-balanced highly intelligent people ... if one is able to live with oneself ... then acid holds no surprises.”
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As the idea of LSD permeated society, manufacturers and their advertisers employed psychedelic imagery whenever they could. Book covers, LP sleeves, clothes, even food and drink began to be advertised with a psychedelic gloss, the implication being that by buying that particular product you were familiar with or at the very least aligning yourself with the LSD experience. Hippie clothes styles, such as the Indian kaftan, were being sold in high street chain stores. The LSD counter culture was becoming commodified and sold back to young people by cynical capitalists. By adopting the right clothes and music anyone could easily lay claim to being an acidhead. These so called “plastic hippies” were loathed by the genuine LSD counter culture, becoming just another in a long line of youth fashion fads stretching back through mods, rockers, beatniks and teddy boys.

The authentic LSD counter culture was about to start mobilizing itself through the free festival movement and the Operation Julie LSD manufacturing and distribution network. These two strands were crucial to keeping LSD culture alive throughout the Seventies and were to mark both the death of the LSD dream and point the way forward into the final two decades of the twentieth century.

Naked she danced in the warm morning sun. Her hips swayed suggestively to the beat of the music. On her back was scrawled in ballpoint: “Got any Acid?”
¹

F
ree festivals were a response to a variety of emerging needs within the counter culture. Night clubs and commercial rock festivals did not appeal to the sensibilities of acid sensitised hippies who were questioning ideas of profit and control; wanting to be more than just consumers of entertainment industry product. There was a demand for events self-generated by the counter culture, which would provide hippies with gatherings where they could live out their lifestyle with like minded people in a spirit of celebration and purpose.

Another factor in the development of the counter culture was the growth of communes and the squatting movement in London. By necessity this had led to a more communal way of life; whole streets in London had been colonised by squatters and it was a natural progression from community in the cities to communality in the countryside.

During the Seventies, local authorities evicted thousands of squatters; many went on the road permanently, their lifestyle
becoming intertwined with the free festivals. Writing in
Festival Eye
, Krystoff summed up the contribution of squatters to the free festival scene: “The Free City of Camden, which became the base for early Stonehenge festivals, was a loose, street-by-street network of squatters, revolutionaries and artists who subscribed to the philosophy of giving and practiced consensus politics rather than ‘representative democracy’, establishing an anarchic lifestyle and a sense of community feeling. The first festivals at Stonehenge were the expression of this kind of community feeling. They were spontaneous ‘happenings’ and quickly attracted other avant-garde groups and communes from around the country. The eviction of the Free City of Camden made tens of thousands of people homeless and many of them took to the road. The festival became the community’s home, rather than its playground.”
²

The first multi-day free festival was Phun City, held on Ecclesden Common near Worthing in West Sussex on 24 July 1970. It was organised by Mick Farren and backed by
International Times
. The organisers made the purpose of the festival clear: “Phun City is attempting to provide a three day environment designed to the needs and desires of the Freak, not just a situation set up to relieve him of his money.”

There was no entry fee, food was cheap or free and there was an endless stream of music from the cream of Britain’s underground bands. For the 3000 people who attended, the festival proved to be enormous fun. Many went feral for a few days, living under tarpaulins and plastic in the woods. LSD was in great demand but was more than matched by the supply. One veteran of the event, “Tom” remembered: “A genuine Californian hippie in long white robes holding a plastic bag with thousands of hits of pure acid came along trying to give us some tabs, but all the people around the fire were surfing on lots of clean high quality acid and everyone had more than enough anyways.”
³

Bolstered by the music and sense of communality engendered by psychedelic drugs, many people who were camping in the woods resolved to stay there. But the West Sussex constabulary had other ideas. On 27 July those remaining were unceremoniously ousted and sent on their way. Though the organisers lost significant
amounts of money, Phun City had been a success, showing the counter culture they could come together in the country for several days and make their own entertainment. There was now much talk of a far larger festival, a real gathering of the tribes. But for such a festival to take place an organiser and a location were needed.

The annual Glastonbury Festival is 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 closely linked with LSD. Had it not been for the psychedelic focus of the first major Glastonbury event, the festival in its present form would not exist.

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, had led to an explosion of interest in a variety of belief systems during the Sixties. As we have seen, psychedelic seekers often chose to explore Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions. Others found themselves drawn to the Western Mystery Tradition, Arthurian legend, magic and shamanism, wanting to discover at firsthand the legacy of spiritual traditions and beliefs of the British Isles.

The Glastonbury area is steeped in myth and legend; it is claimed Jesus visited Glastonbury Abbey, UFOs were seen flying over the Tor, ley-lines criss-crossed the area sending serpent power through the West Country, a terrestrial Zodiac could be discerned in landscape features and so on. These and many other legends had recently been re-vivified for the counter culture by 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.”
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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 spiritual heritage. Michell lived in the hippie enclave of Notting Hill Gate, as comfortable at counter culture events as he was hanging out with the Rolling Stones and minor aristocracy. His books were key spiritual guides for the British counter culture and could be found in every thinking hippie’s pad, offering a source of discussion and speculation for those long LSD trips toward the dawn.

Michell 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
, to which Michell contributed heavily. Dragons and UFOs teem in the skies over Glastonbury Tor, here stylised as a woman’s breast, whilst swords, serpents and geomantic imagery are visible in 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 developed.
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The first festival at Glastonbury in 1970 was a low-key, commercial event attended by a few hundred people. The festival, organised by Pilton farmer, Michael Eavis, was not a financial success. To recoup his losses, Eavis left the organization of the 1971 event, known as Glastonbury Fair, to a rather unlikely group of people.
⁶

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 counter culture. 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. 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.”
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Kerr’s intention to hold the festival at Stonehenge was put in abeyance when he was given Michael Eavis’ telephone number. A meeting was arranged at Worthy Farm and Kerr prepared by spending the night before atop Glastonbury Tor on LSD. The meeting was successful. Eavis agreed to the use of his land and Kerr, assisted by Arabella Churchill and utilizing a small inheritance, formed Solstice Capers to organise the 1971 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.”
⁸

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, the stage was situated above it. John Michell told him the stage should be built to the 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.”
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Bill Harkin, now a respected stage designer, designed and built the stage and a silver pyramid sprang up among the cows and hedges of Worthy Farm.