HW:Lyrics Question

[Doug Pearson]

On Wed, 6 Feb 2002 02:48:32 +0000, Nick Medford <nick at HERMIT0.DEMON.CO.UK>
wrote:
>... In the late
>80s a new phenomenon emerged at the festivals, the so-called "Brew
>Crew",  nihilistic malevolent "fuck everything" crusties whose drugs of
>choice were Special Brew and heroin and whose entertainment of choice
>was often violent...
>
>Footnote to Doug- the song Festivals is not about the "Battle of the
>Beanfield", although "Confrontation" on Out and Intake and ICU's
>"Stonehenge Who Knows" both relate to that infamous episode. But
>"Festivals" is about being attacked by your "own side" as it were, it may
>be connected to the incident described above but in a broader way it's
>about the loss of innocence of the festival scene, its burgeoning dark side
>of hard drugs and violence and the loss of community spirit.

Thanks for providing the details, Nick (and Kris!).  What an ugly story!  I
found the interview where Dave was asked about "Festivals" (in 'Crohinga
Well #13'), but the first half of his answer was all about the
gov't/police/Thatcher politics/etc., and the second half just made a vague
reference to something like "bad greedy people on heroin" (which must have
been referring to this incident).

>But thanks
>for digging up all those links nonetheless, and I think the 'Festivals'
>incident may be mentioned at at least one of those sites if you look hard
>enough.

I obviously didn't have time to go through all of them, but there
definitely appeared to be a lot of info about Free Festival situations post-
85.  It was really a shock when I received the set of clippings Brian Tawn
(or was it Trev Hughes?) sent out with his 'zine later in '85 ... the
incident had barely been covered in the US press, so I knew nothing about
it until then ...

    -Doug
     jasret at mindspring.com