DANCING: Meigan Fayre, social organisation and documenting history.

‘A carefully-planned event that conforms rigidly to a pre-programmed pattern is an impossibility and would inevitably lead to disappointment. Therefore Meigan Fayre will not be heavily structured and publicised, but rather spontaneous, organic and flexible.' (Publicity material cited in NME, 16 August, 1975)

Meigan Fayre, a festival that took place on a field in Cwm Meigan, North Pembrokeshire, in 1973, 1974 and 1975, before shifting into something else, is perhaps the pinnacle of this particular slice of time and place, largely due to its archival profile, appearing in websites, books, magazines and local press. It was organized, or at least attended, by nearly everyone who has spoken about this particular time and place, within this particular enquiry. Embodying much of the spirit of the age, it was free, experimental, a community undertaking, and sought to foster new relationships with the land, with 'nature', and with one another. The 1975 event happened to be filmed by a small production company from London, and the resulting film provides a tangible site of debate. It opens gaps between representation, memory and meaning. For one, the festival was a collection of small fires to inspire gatherings of music and conversations, and bore no relationship with the film of the same event. It was also noted by many that the film had no night-time scenes (because of a lack of lighting equipment) which, of course, were crucial, and offered performances by Gong, Mazariba and the Global Trucking Company, who were contributing to the ethos of the event in their own way (and, interestingly, all three of those bands broke up at that festival). As an archive, therefore, questions need to be asked before the film is thrown into a history of assumptions: assumptions about attitudes, socio-economic backgrounds, relationships between locals/incomers, political motives, and so on. We need to ask of those talking to the camera in 1975: What is it like looking back at yourself? Did you really believe the things you (and the narrator) talked about, and do you still? How much of it was about rising to a performance fit for the media? How does a film like this fit with other perceptions of the same event? Many have already commented on the strange gap between the rhetoric being spoken and the actual, passionate, dynamics of bodies in space. Perhaps the sound should be switched off.

First, we should separate the way in which Meigan Fayre has been read, including those concerned with individual experience, to those concerned to place it within larger, national and international, movements. For example, the sociologist and cultural critic George McKay situates such free festivals, in his book Senseless Acts of Beauty: cultures of resistance since the sixties (1996), within a particularly British form of social resistance that creates marginal spaces of cultural re-invention. These spaces are used to protest against specific issues, such as motorway extensions, as well as addressing more general themes of anti-establishment by offering alternative structures of housing, economies and socialising (and is in contrast to Boltanski and Chiapello’s assertion that it is not periods of crisis that has dominated the years since the early seventies, but rather, and simply, a flourishing capitalism). So while the book traces a history of alternative forms of resistance, the problem is in the telling itself. George McKay is both insider and outsider, someone who has a history of such activism while, today, working within a university as an academic thus, it is argued, having a naturalising effect on any such gestures of protest. As libcom.org (an abbreviation of libertarian communism) states, McKay’s book ‘is an attempt (not necessarily deliberate) to appropriate antagonistic expressions and render them harmless through transformation and integration into some form of commodity (in this case, academia and the world of coffee-table publishing). Recuperation is a constant danger for anti-capitalist practice.’ In other words, that strange gap between rhetoric and activity appears again. More pragmatically, a writer in the New Musical Express, while being exceedingly impressed by the festival’s infrastructure, is tantalisingly vague, questioning its ‘indigenous authenticity' in relation to Welsh culture. But, in the end, the article implores local action, hoping that Meigan Fayre should still happen next year: ‘But if it goes ahead and you don’t live just around the mountain, then don’t go. Find your own site. Create your own fayre or festival. Yes kids. It can be done.’

Rhetoric aside, Meigan Fayre seemed to be a natural progression from the events, plays, music and ceremonies that already played a large part in the formation of the very community who put it together. It is a story of the networks that created it, just as much as the event itself. The critique of McKay’s book in libcom.org notes that ‘McKay fails to develop the obvious point that otherwise ‘escapist’ or pleasure-seeking movements become ‘politicized’ because of their (often unexpected) antagonistic relations with the forces of the state.’ But by the time of the 1975 Meigan Fayre, there were already efforts to avoid such ‘antagonistic relations’ in a way that contributed to its success. So, the Meigan Work Force, alternative news-sheets (The Mountain and Valley Echo), community relationships, and land use, are all instrumental. And the cultural politics of such a music festival should not be overlooked. The infrastructure for Meigan Fayre drew support, and strength, from local, national and international interest. Where many festivals, pageants and cultural events involved a behind-the-scenes organisational structure that sustained power relations – for better or worse – such as prominent councillors or businesspeople, it seems that Meigan Fayre’s organisation structure was more dispersed. And it was free. Surely this is why, as well as representing a revolutionary spirit, it was intensely practical, with hot vegetable stew for 15p from the 24hr kitchen, proper festival toilets and so on.

There was also the irresistible lure of technology to provide music to large numbers of people in a field. Chasing bigger gigs and better equipment, one person remembers that ‘our manager persuaded us that we could earn a fortune picking potatoes in Pembrokeshire, and that would pay for our PA’. At the time, The Grateful Dead had the biggest sound system in the world – ‘The Wall of Sound’ – which, in the end, strained the resources needed for transport and building too far. But the ambition was contagious, and fuelled the desire for an immersive experience in electronic psychedelia to complement the mind-altering substances available. Technologies were being embraced, rejected and altered in order to advance a social and practical know-how, in order to play, as one person noted, ‘the enlightened fool’, taking an approach from Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. Technology was intimately bound to renewing a relationship with nature, and nurturing a collective spirit: ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’.

What Ned Thomas does so well in his book The Welsh Extremist is to show how closely knitted are cultural expression (via, in particular, language and literature) and life practices in Wales. And so it is here, remembering and watching the film, seeing the outfits, the movements, music and dancing all coming together in a kind of mimesis of returning to ‘nature’. The appropriation and manipulation of technology to work with ideas of the past (celebration of the seasons, age of Aquarius, intoxication, communing with 'nature') in futuristic fashion (LOUD electronic music, vehicles to congregate) all become a part of this heady process.

Click on images, below, to hear soundclips from interviews, 2012.

'The principles behind it were very wide...'

'The field we were allowed to use was on top of a hill ... but he was up for it...'

Pantyderi field

'It wasn't anything like the film .. to me it was all little fires...'

'Our manager persuaded us that we could earn a fortune picking potatoes in Pembrokeshire and that would pay for our PA..'

'The Grateful Dead ...You could go totally psychedelic, then find the folk music in your soul...'

'Maypole dancing .. childlike .. a pure state of joy'

'There were gigs going on all the time .. it was wonderful.'

'People coming to celebrate with a fire - you've got to have it...'

Meigan Fayre 'was the extended network...'