The Deeply Vale Festival started in 1976 when the core of the North-West
counterculture gathered together with the substantial and practical input of the
Tractor organisation. The latter included Tractor - the band - and extended to
Tractor Music, their PA hire company, a music shop and Cargo Recording Studios.
Together with the unrelenting drive of festival organiser Chris Hewitt, Deeply
Vale lasted three memorable years, growing from three hundred original die-hards
to crowds of over 25,000 at a festival which, at its height, lasted 6 days. And
among the many weird and wonderful happenings, memories and music that Deeply
Vale conjured up, two significant things marked the festival out as being
unique. Firstly, it was a co-operative, rather than corporative, effort, and as
such was an example that free festivals could work. And secondly it was at a
unique point in time when the counterculture was seemingly split between
enduring hippies and the new kids on the block, the punks. The two contrasting
subgroups somehow conjoined to enjoy a festival that many still regard as a
highlight of their life. And as if to emphasise the warm memories that Deeply
Vale sparks in a cross-section of people, members of the then-punk agent
provocateurs Wilful Damage now look back at the event with some affection, even
though their altercation with self-styled hippy leader of the time Sid Rawle led
to the late band member Wayne breaking his arm.
‘Deeply Vale Festivals - The DVD’ is a documentary that starts off as an
engaging, almost genteel, retrospective of a provincial North-West England Free
Festival, which, as Chris Hewitt takes great delight in explaining, was
sponsored at its outset by an ad-hoc dope tax. You scored your quarter-ounce or
whatever and had to pay a 50p levy that went towards funding the free festival.
By degrees the documentary narrative builds up a momentum, partly on the back of
Bob Harris’s keen voiceover, but also through organiser Chris Hewitt’s
unyielding passion and the positive vibe from a cast of musicians, many of whom
became big players in the contemporary music scene.
Also, unlike most other festivals in the previous decade, just about all the
headline bands and emerging artists alike, from Steve Hillage, The Fall and The
Ruts to Misty in Roots, Spizz Energi and, of course, Tractor seem to remember
the festival with a glint in their eye. Indeed, by the end of this marathon
three-and-a-half-hours-plus documentary, which concludes with a series of
retrospective interviews, you realise that the event had outgrown its local
pride to become one of the most significant free festivals ever.
Significantly perhaps, when asked whether it should happen again, most
participants demure, if only because, as Tractor’s guitarist Jim Milne points
out, perhaps it had peaked, while fellow Tractor member, drummer Steve Clayton
expands the point by suggesting it had achieved all it could and things moved
on. On the other hand, the trancy, riff-driven crossover guitarist and headliner
Steve Hillage takes the ‘never say never’ approach but again remembers Deeply
Vale as being different, while The Mock Turtles' Steve Cowen, in a very
enlightening interview, feels strongly that it should happen again, even if to
forgo its free tag because of today’s spiralling costs.
Then there were other younger musicians at the time like Orchestral Manoeuvres
In The Dark’s Andy McClusky (who played with Pegasus), whose recollection was
simply ‘the trees, the valley, the damp, the heath land and tepees’. He also
brings a sense of perspective to the times by tempering his enthusiasm by noting
that compared to the following decade’s festivals, Deeply Vale was like the
third world. But as the sporadic archive film, video footage, carefully restored
clippings, sound recordings and informative 16-page booklet suggest, Deeply Vale
was all about making something happen successfully, a meeting of people at a
real people’s festival, right down to Nik Turner and his pyramid tent!
Deeply Vale was also probably one of the last festivals in the land unencumbered
by state legislation, and as the wonderfully named Grant Showbiz, the one-time
roadie for Here & Now, poignantly concludes, Deeply Vale was the 'unity of the
human spirit rather than drugs'.
This DVD comes highly recommended as a documentary of a unique festival that
reflected an essentially unique time before a mixture of repressive laws and
corporate sponsors moved into the festival scene. Split into three clear parts,
the main mid-section of the DVD comprises nearly 50 minutes of a documentary
within a documentary that includes some great band footage. Overall, this is a
fine account of an optimistic people’s festival which, although slightly
overblown in tracing the triumph of the communal spirit in a local festival
context, nonetheless successfully carries with it the same proud message from a
wide array of participants, that they were all proud to be part of it!
Pete Feenstra
August 2007