Outdoor festival season is upon us again, with Bearded Theory taking place as I write. Typically, the organisers have assembled the best bill yet, but the elements have conspired in the build-up to render the site something of a mudbath. Hopefully the bad weather will hold off and things won't get as bad as they did at Bluedot last year.
Major contemporary festivals are (by and large) slick, well-coordinated affairs - safe and somewhat sanitised. A far cry from their counterparts of the past, in other words, Just take a look at David Hurn's pictures of the Isle of Wight Festivals of 1969 and 1970 for proof.
Or consider the example of the Bickershaw Pop Festival, which took place in Lancashire in 1972. The brainchild of an eccentric and ambitious local entrepreneur, the event featured appearances from Captain Beefheart, the Kinks, Hawkwind and the Grateful Dead, among others - but, by virtue of a perfect storm of weather conditions, inadequate infrastructure, poor planning, local opposition and gross naivety on the part of the organisers, it descended into complete chaos. And - as this fantastic BBC archive footage illustrates - at the centre of it all was a young Jeremy Beadle, a bedraggled and beleaguered optimist trying in vain to hold everything together and looking for all the world like he'd been, well, framed.
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