Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music

The Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music was a counterculture era music festival held at the Royal Bath and West Showground in Shepton Mallet, Somerset, England on 27–29 June 1970. Bands such as Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin performed, and the festival was widely bootlegged. An 'alternative festival' was staged in an adjoining field where the Pink Fairies and Hawkwind played on the back of a flatbed truck. This line up was approaching the level of the more famous Isle of Wight festival held in August of the same year. As it attracted less press coverage at the time and was a smaller affair, it has generally received less attention in the years since. Bath was the brainchild of promoter Freddy Bannister and his wife Wendy Bannister, who had held the smaller Bath Festival of Blues within Bath itself in 1969. The 1970 show attracted a significantly larger crowd of 150,000, but, like the Isle of Wight festival, an audience of such magnitude created some serious on ground difficulties. The logistics proved to be too vast for Bannister's small team to adequately cope with, and his security staff stole large amounts of gate receipts, resulting in a far smaller profit than expected. Actually getting to the festival itself was another problem for many of the throng of fans. The country lanes leading to the site were swiftly blocked by cars, also meaning that many of the bands' equipment trucks could not get to the site. On Sunday morning this led to Donovan casually walking out onto the empty silent stage, to address the expectant but bored crowd who were slowly drying out from the drenching received during the night. Being a folk singer, his genre was not what the crowd had gone there to hear. So to test the mood of the crowd out, he engaged in a bit of small talk, where he explained that he had spent the night in his van in a nearby field and so on. Then worked around to asking if they would like him to play a song whilst they waited for the billed act to arrive. A lively rendering of "I know an old lady who swallowed a fly" raised the crowd's spirits. Then he played some of his classics. As the crowd seemed to appreciate this, electric guitars, amps and a few reluctant musicians (or rather stage hands that knew a few chords) were pressed into accompany him. Still no bands came, so Donovan continued. His impromptu and free performance eventually filled in for 2½ hours of what otherwise would have been silence. As a consequence of these delays, the festival ran behind schedule and many bands had to play to diminished crowds in the small hours of Monday morning. The last act, Dr John, hit the stage at dawn on Monday. The festival featured many innovations, including projections of the bands on screens on the side of the stage, a good quality PA system, on site tents for the patrons to sleep in and larger tents which projected films such as King Kong throughout the night. The expenditure on these items ate into the profits, and many people decamped with the tents, which were hired. This was another expense that had to be borne by the promoters. The festival was captured on both film and on video, in varying quality, but a lack of post festival organisation led to the footage being lost for many years. Much of it has now been recovered, but the black and white footage is of poor quality and is in many different hands. It is considered unlikely that it will ever see the light of day as a legitimate release since no one can agree on who owns the copyright. This situation could be contrasted to the Isle of Wight Festival, which was professionally recorded and filmed in colour. The festival was widely bootlegged, and several audience tapes are now in circulation. It is rumoured that excellent soundboard tapes also exist, though to this point they have not publicly surfaced. An 'alternative festival' was staged in an adjoining field where the Pink Fairies and Hawkwind played on the back of a flatbed truck. This was a precursor to the many free festivals of the 1970s.