Tomorrow's People - Jeremy Sandford & Ron Reid

 TOMORROW'S PEOPLE -

JEREMY SANDFORD & RON REID

I was reading the autobiography of Chris Difford from Squeeze and he mentioned a hard-to-find book called Tomorrow's People that contained some pictures of him and Glenn Tilbrook in full hippy regalia taken at the Windsor Free Festival in 1974. Two weeks later and I'm in Oxfam and on the shelf there's a near-pristine copy of that very same book along with with some old copies of Oz magazine. I ignore the Oz magazines (as they're £35 an issue) but go for the book. And yep, there they are: two pictures in fact of Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook; all long hair, painted faces, bare feet and technicolour dreamcoats not yet Up The Junction but happy as Larry at the Windsor Free. Like punk might never happen.

The title of the book, Tomorrow's People, refers to the suggestion by the authors Jeremy Sandford and Ron Reid that festival-goers can be called this due to them being in rehearsal for a future society where basic amenities as we know them have broken down. It's the hippy dream, essentially, where everything is free, everything is groovy, and where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts - and of course, there's nothing wrong with  that.

Anyone who has ever been to a real festival as opposed to a corporate shindig passing itself off as a festival, cannot but help to have come away from it reeling, with a distinct feeling of it being how society should really be. The crossover between a festival situation and the 'normal' world is so distinct that it can be felt physically, as if it's an actual wall you have to walk through between the two.

What constitutes 'normality' is oppression, adherence to rules, conformity, wage slavery and false idolatry to vacuity. What constitutes a festival is a tangible sense of freedom, a genuine sense of community and 'togetherness', smiles, eccentricity as a norm, and good vibes. You should never say never but hardly ever does the twain meet. You go back to the 'real' world after having been to a festival and you can experience a kind of culture shock where for what feels like the very first time you see things a little too clearly and the way that things really are. It's not exactly a pretty sight. Society has a way, however, of sucking you in and it doesn't take long for you to be back in the fold and the festival experience to be suddenly the unreal one.

Tomorrow's People is a reflection on a pipe dream that at the time - we're talking early to mid-Seventies here - seemed very achievable, however naive it might in hindsight all look now. Have you ever been to a festival with just £5 in your pocket, just the clothes on your back, no tent and no sleeping bag, and stayed for a week having the best time? I have. It takes a certain amount of good faith, optimism and youthful enthusiasm but it's possible to do.

This is one of the striking things about the photographs of all the festival-goers in the book, how they're all very unprepared dress-wise for any change in the weather. No campervan, backpack, kagool or pair of wellingtons in sight; just the clothes they're standing up in and maybe a blanket to sit upon or to wrap themselves in. There's one picture of a girl even, where she's wearing a hat with a fork protruding from it and that seems to be the extent of her luggage, and even this seems a bit excessive and extravagant because what's wrong with eating with your fingers?

Tomorrow's People was published in 1974 so therefore there's no mention of the Stonehenge Free Festival that started the following year and what can be argued as being the full, florid flowering of the free festival experience. That's not to say Stonehenge was without its problems because there were some though in comparison to the 'normal' world that at the time was advocating mutually assured destruction via nuclear weapons, they were as nothing.

Attention is paid instead to other festivals such as Phun City (organised by the International Times collective and offering among its many delights 20 acres of woodland available for copulation), the Isle of Wight festivals and its Desolation Hill aspect, the first Glastonbury Fayre, and of course the Windsor Free.  The writing, it must be said, is kind of all over the place, almost as if the author wrote it whilst on his sixth chillum but the photographs are exemplary - even the possibly embarrassing ones of future pop groups such as Squeeze.

John Serpico