42 Years Ago and the Music is Still Fresh

Me and Kieran were lucky enough to have been there at Knebworth Park in 1975 when Pink Floyd eventually came on stage to a Spitfire fly past, after they had sorted out their tuning problems and the man who had climbed the very high scaffolding tower holding the model of Thunderbird One finally agreed to descend into the arms of the waiting Police rather than risk the ire of a previously peaceful and largely stoned crowd who had started to get a tad pissed off with him. Thus, Thunderbird One was duly despatched into the stage to explode at the end of On The Run.

42 years later, less about eight weeks, we finally saw some footage of that very concert as we relived a very important part of our music education by visiting Their Mortal Remains exhibition at the Victoria & Albert museum. The few shots of the audience showed the sea of blue denim that typified outdoor music events at the time. That extraordinary day cost us £2.25 and it seemed like a fortune at the time but I will challenge anyone to disagree that it was significantly better value for money than today’s obscenely priced festivals where being able to say you were there and pay upwards of £300 months in advance for a weekend lineup as yet undisclosed, where multiple bands are scheduled on and off stage like a production line, where yurts abound and and where those prepared to pay top dollar will find themselves in a cordoned area closest to the stage. Bugger the music.

Few who went to Knebworth 1975 did not go specifically to see Pink Floyd, although the supporting lineup wasn’t bad either: Linda Lewis, Monty Python, Roy Harper, the Steve Miller Band, and Captain Beefheart all put in top performances before the astonishing headline set took us through a couple of numbers that later appear under different names on Animals, then Wish You Were Here and Dark Side of the Moon in their entirety. £2.25 for a full day was value for money indeed!

We could have chosen to take the tube on Sunday, but instead we walked from our surprisingly good hotel in Earls Court, via a cracking, affordable breakfast from a farmers’ market in a schoolyard opposite Langham Mansions, and then all the way to the V&A hoping to see 101 Cromwell Road, the house where Syd Barrett lived, en route.

Although many of the grand terraced buildings remained, the one we wanted to see had been replaced by a gruesome Holiday Inn hotel, outside which as a limited area of garden with a shaped hedge that we estimated marked the spot where 101 once stood.

The stunning exhibition took us back into our youth for a magical few hours. Issued with headphones we entered the show to the opening chords of Interstellar Overdrive, and as I pointed at some nostalgic items inside one of the telephone boxes Kieran pointed out that I was shouting…again! As a teenager I had done exactly the same when I was listening to The James Gang Rides Again on Headphones in the record shop in the basement of RHO Hills in Blackpool “What’s it like?” he asked “FUCKING BRILLIANT” I shouted.

This morning, the day after the exhibition should have been a bit of an anti-climax. Our train back to Manchester was at 12:20 so we decided to make something of the morning, and Kieran suggested we might try to find Wetherby Mansions where this photograph of Syd Barrett had been taken. So we looked at a map and found that Wetherby Mansions was on the same road as Langham Mansions, and went there without any thought of what we might do when we found the place. A few daft moments later I took a photo of Kieran stood exactly where Syd stood all those years ago, we think around March 1969 but Mick Rock will know because he took the original!

So a perfectly rounded weekend of nostalgia, with the music living on and feeling as fresh today as it did 42 years ago. And not a yurt in sight.