Bickershaw Was a Shitshow

Season 1, Episode 2: The 'earthy' experience of live music in 1972

WHAT’S NOT TO love when a music journo drops their guard and lets it all hang out?

Here’s former columnist and reporter Norman Jopling having a rant in his May 13, 1972, Record Mirror article titled “Bickershaw”:

“Krishnaburgers, loaves-and-fishes, hashmescalinacidspeed, and hundred[s] of mimeographed documents published the Unvarnished Truth, all of which found their way into the incinerator together with the multitude of beer cans, fag packets, plastic cups, bottles ad nauseum that carpeted the festival area.

One bit of paper reads: ‘Yes folks, Bickershaw is undoubtedly a Grade A catastrophe. It’s got the lot—overpopulation, high technology, a disposable philosophy to match a philosophy of disposability, plastic food, and underneath it all, right up Bickershaw’s arse: Kapitalism.

‘And the people? They spend the days in an unreal, irrelevant world of distorted rock music, failing to make contact with their neighbors in Instant City and ignoring the garbage which this modular system produced. Something’s wrong.’”¹

Something was wrong, indeed.

After all, the Bickershaw Music Festival was nearly three years after the disaster of the Altamont Free Festival and less than that for the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in August 1969. While those festivals were on the U.S. coasts, Bickershaw was held in the U.K., near the Lancashire mining town of Wigan from May 5-7, 1972.

Did that make a difference? Had the live music experience taken a turn for the worse?

I got curious and dug deeper.