From Sounds, January 3, 1976.
Decided not to dial back the saturation on this image, as the dingy yellow-brown seems to convey the already-curdled-even-then aroma of this three-day event.
Old Wavest of the Old Wavest here must surely be Ronnie Lane's Slim Chance. Only two rungs below last night headliner Bad Company
A whole day - as buffer zone? - between that and the opening night's appearance of the Steve Marriotts All Stars
Climax Blues Band, Steve Gibbons Band, Barclay James Harvest, John Miles, Baker Gurvitz Army, Nazareth, Status Quo
But who the hell are Jack the Lad and Snafu?
For total hang-overs of the Sixties, you got Pretty Things and Procol bleedin' Harum
The issue contains a Special Souvenir Supplement of pieces based around the Great British Music Festival line-up - including cover stars Bad Company.
Hark at that zip, made of leather laces. With the leather stitchwork, it fairs screams LOOK AT MY LOINS. In this photo, there's also a weird sort of pube-tinged camel toe effect. Talk about "cock rock".
Plus Sounds writers predictions for '76
Roogalator! Kokomo! Boxer! John Bennett Band! Graham Bell! Mr Big!
A few New Wave-ish names poking in there, though - Patti Smith, Jonathan Richman, Dictators, The Tubes (attitudinally if not sonically), Motorhead (attitudinally but also a tiny bit sonically), Chris Spedding (well, as a gun for hire - he'd been a Womble - but "Motorbiking").
Last Exit is Noo Waver Sting's first, extremely Old Wave entity, a fusion-ish outfit
Snide coverage of the Great British Music Festival from
New Musical Express - "but where was the great?"
Ah looking at the ticket the first night is on the last day of 1975 - New Year's Eve - a Wednesday, so that issue of Sounds would have come out, in London if not the provinces, on that very day (the Sounds issue date is the Saturday - Jan 3 - as was the norm with the weekly music papers, but you could get hold of them a few days before the official publication date)
Imagine spending New Year's Eve in the Olympia suffering through that lineup.
Well, there's Thin Lizzy - and bottom of the bill Doctors of Madness. But still...
Now wait a minute - I don't know if there was a GBMF in '77, but there was one in '78, with a New Wave made-over line-up
Not completely made-over - Quintessence of Old Wave Hall of Famers Lindisfarne headline the middle night, there's also Frankie Miller, Bernie Torme, Bandit, Slade, and old trooper John Miles plugging away. And David Essex.
But the first night prominently showcases the next generation.
I had literally never heard of the Great British Music Festival in any of its iterations - clearly t's not entered the annals of fondly remembered Old Wave fests, even to the extent of Bickershaw Pop Festival of 1972 or Deeply Vale Free Festivals 1976 onwards
But otherwise there is a surprising dearth of documentation or reminiscence about TGBMF
Except Doug in Comments points to a usage of a photograph taken at the first festival of a well known "idiot dancer" infamous for dancing in the nude although not here
As used on the cover of The Chemical Brothers's 1999 album Surrender
I remember Ed from Chemicals telling me (when
I interviewed the groop around Surrender) that what he liked about raves - as opposed to nightclubs - was the "s
exless uniformity" of the mass experience, nobody posing or trying to look chic. So an event like GBMF or Knebworth or Reading probably be in that continuum... the opposite of the in-crowd, the mod / Northern Soul / New Romantic / rare groove continuum
Oasis at Knebworth would be a merger of the rock festival and the rave unity vibe.... as had been Stone Roses at Spike Island earlier
The crowd slumped on the concrete floor of the Olympia reminds me a bit of what people said of the ambience at the
Futurama festivals in Leeds.... indeed the
NME reviews of those festivals described as drear returns to the festivals of the pre-punk Underground era.... a nouveau hippiedom.... the New Wave reverting to Old Wave.
