Welcome to MusicDayz

The world's largest online archive of date-sorted music facts, bringing day-by-day facts instantly to your fingertips.
Find out what happened on your or your friends' Birthday, Wedding Day, Anniversary or just discover fun facts in musical areas that particularly interest you.
Please take a look around.

Fact #154884

When:

Short story:

Appearing on the first day of The Bath Festival Of Blues and Progressive Music are Canned Heat, John Mayall, Steppenwolf, Pink Floyd, Johnny Winter, It’s A Beautiful Day, Fairport Convention, Colosseum, Keef Hartley Band, and the Maynard Ferguson Big Band. Tickets cost £2.10s. Attendance : 150,000.

Full article:

Stuart Cruikshank (fan) : The thing about Shepton Mallet was that it had all the exotic American bands that we’d never seen before. We came down from Edinburgh in a hired bus.

John Giddings (music fan) : Pink Floyd debuted Atom Heart Mother there and called it The Amazing Pudding. Led Zeppelin and Frank Zappa were playing as well. We bought a Ford Consort for £15, and eight of us got in it, drove it into the arena and watched the groups from the car. I remember it went on until six in the morning. It rained so The Byrds had to do an acoustic set. It was an incredible time because there was so much great live music coming through.There was absolutely no commerciality.

The loos were just scaffolding and a ditch there. I saw someone fall backwards into it; one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen.
(Source : http://www.festivalinsights.com/2015/05/striving-perfect-lap-conversation-john-giddings/)


Freddy Bannister (promoter) : The PA systems for outdoor festivals were getting much better. I remember getting Charlie Watkins at WEM to do the Bath Festival in 1969 at the Recreation Ground and nobody complained about the sound, not the bands or the audience - which was amazing. People like Charlie helped bands to get a new sound; suddenly you could hear the bass

Bernard Docherty (fan) : In those days, we all sat down and listened, very polite, and only got up when the music was right for dancing. Fairport Convention totally blew me away, with Richard Thompson on brilliant form. John Peel was the deejay and he played Nellie The Elephant. Two brawny Hell’s Angels drove right through the crowd on their bikes at the start of Steppenwolf’s set, and began snogging openly right in front of the stage. It wasn’t a gay thing, they were just being outrageous.

Stuart Cruikshank : Donovan kept coming on to cheer us up when the bands were having problems or were late and, also to fill in time, a band called Joe Jammer was hastily assembled from roadies of other bands. They were awful.

Johnny Black (audience) : I had come down in the bus with Stuart and a bunch of friends, and this was my first festival experience. I have all the classic memories of, for example, being sound asleep in the tent when Pink Floyd were playing, and completely missing It’s A Beautiful Day because I spent the entire length of their set waiting in a queue to buy hamburgers for other members of my party. Joe Jammer, the band formed from roadies of other bands, seemed to keep turning up like a bad penny every time the show started to run late.

Stuart Cruikshank : Santana were brilliant and Pink Floyd premiered Atom Heart Mother with fireworks about four in the morning. We missed the bus home and had to walk to Gloucester before we got a lift. It took us three days to get back to Edinburgh.

Michael Eavis (local farmer) : My wife and I crept in through a hedge. Every band in the world seemed to be playing there, and we kind of fell in love with the idea. I had such a good time that, when I got home, I thought ‘We’ve got a good site here in Pilton. Why don’t we do something similar?’ So I did.