Film / News
Early Glastonbury Festival film unearthed
Hippies, punks, pagans, Rastas, ravers, witches, feminists and, er, flying saucer cultists. They can all be found in Other Grooves – the latest irresistible archive film collection put together by the BFI. Many of these have rarely been seen before. You can watch all of them on the BFI Player VOD service and most are free to access. We’ve trawled through the archive for titles of local interest.
Glastonbury Festival and the First Pyramid Stage (1972)
A terrific early example of the ‘square TV reporter getting down with the kids’ genre, in which Tom Doyle quizzes some rather posh hippies at the second Glastonbury Fayre about whether they’re getting enough to eat. Watch enviously as a few hundred hairy freaks cavort in front of the first Pyramid Stage in a mostly empty field and hammer away on their bloody drums. First sighting of mandatory topless hippy lady at 4.10.
Ancient Beltane Festival at Glastonbury Tor (1966)
Cloaked Druidy types trundle up the Tor, parp on their horns, guzzle from their chalices and wave their swords about in this short silent film.
Flower Power Interview (1967)
An intrepid reporter manages to find Cheltenham’s one and only “flower fellow” (“I’m a hippy, sir,” he affirms. “I believe in love”) and quizzes him about what the spa town’s “psychedelic freakouts” involve. His response? “Just being kind to everybody and just dancing all round the place, mainly.” Shamefully, this so-called hippy denies smoking pot and admits he plans to go back to being a ‘greaser’ once the hippy fad has burned out.
Spirit of Albion (1987)
Richard Philpott’s sympathetic documentary tracks the Peace Convoy as it wends its way round the country hotly pursued by the rozzers, who eventually deal with this menace to society by beating the crap out of everybody at the Battle of the Beanfield. There’s music by Test Department and the Penguin Café Orchestra, and the film includes the struggle for access to Stonehenge.
Further highlights of the Other Grooves collection include Burn Your Bra! (1968) in which ‘women’s lib’ arrives in Truro; the self-explanatory Rave (1997); The Jah People (1981), a profile of Birmingham’s Rastafarians; flying saucer cultists The Aetherius Society at Holdstone Down (1963); Secret Rites (1971) with occultist Alex Sanders and naked witchy ladies; and the unutterably shocking Nudists Stay Near Norwich (1980).
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