Forty years ago, I spent 14 hours in a large field near the A1 in Hertfordshire.
I had just taken my O-levels, liked Be-Bop Deluxe, Genesis and Rachmaninov, and often danced my head off to The Who’s ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. I was confused about girls and worried that I’d chosen one wrong A-level (Ancient History).
In the nation at large, Harold Wilson had resigned as prime minister in March. Under James Callaghan, Britain would wobble further into a strife that marked the late 1970s like a purulent eczema. Pop music would start, rather violently, to reflect it. In the polity these were not confident times.
Friends had persuaded me to go and see The Rolling Stones, headlining at that year’s Knebworth Festival, a rock jamboree that had begun in 1974. In mid-1976 the Stones had completed a two-month tour of Europe and agreed quite late in the day to play Knebworth.
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