Castlemorton and Traveller Culture

they all went back to Eton when the new term started.

noodle vague are you Simon Price under an assumed name?

all that being said you strike me as just the sort of person who'd have many of your class/cultural assumptions rather confirmed by http://www.livingstonemusic.net/hangman.htm (and, indeed, the entire "Rowan Williams factor", as i call the idea that hippiedom and old-institutional conservatism are two sides of the same coin, an idea i do not fully agree with at all but can fully understand)

nope. my crusty-hating views are entirely independent.

ok. you merely have the same view that Pricey had - he related the sonic whiteness of the music crusties preferred to what he saw as a latent racism among the social class he believed they came from. David Bennun and Jamie T. Conway (the latter a sometime poster here) saw it the same way.

new age traveller hippy scum shitting on my beach.. *cough*

a few came across the water to Ireland I think, there are dregs you might see every so often, around Galway/Clare.
sitting around with mangy dogs and kids with fleas
at least i believe that's where they come from

I haven't any answers for you though.

i'd pretty much agree. fear of pop miscegenation seems to me to be a middle class thang, as does spending your summer holidays in unroadworthy ambulances.

i had hoped this question wouldnt go back into the lets laugh at crusties thing, though i concede that it was always a likelyhood. i am more interested in the clash/merging of the suburban-prole rave culture with what was 'hippy traveller' culture, during this period. because, relatively speaking, it was only a fleeting period, before paths took people in different directions again, i think there was an interesting meld here of different cultures, if you like

but, yes, there is no reason we can't look at the class makeup of the traveller populations at this period. i think it is accepted fact that the traveller dropout ravers were affluent bourgeois, postponing return to closeted background, or whatever. but i'm not so sure that is the case. i think the class make up of that subculture was not as middle class as was made out. so perhaps a further question could address the class make up of that particular subculture...

edward platts leadville, which i think was written considerably after this period, (1997?) dealt with the different kinds of people that lived along the western avenue in west london, immediately prior to their forced eviction. among the varied population living along that road, he came across a number of travellers that probably were involved during the castlemorton period, i wonder how many people like that have just disappeared into the cracks, because of evaporated media interest?

or maybe they did just go back to school?

I can remember thee whole stonehenge festival scene in the '80's, which I suppose was a kind of predecessor to this, though it was band-related rather that dance/dj/whatever related, hawkwind and here & now band, possibly inner city unit were the festival regulars that I can remember, obv ozric tentacles were the 'new' band who (just) made it out the gate before dance culture swallowed what was left of it after the cops fucked them all over, and shut down stonehenge all up. I never used to go, but lotsa friends did, and they were all w.class s.shields prole scum like me haha.

I thought it was a shame the way "crusty raver" culture swallowed the whole traveller/neo-hippie/'henge scene, I saw it as a homogenising thing, which alwys makes me feel a bit sad. OTOH, the cops fucking people over like they did, and getting away w/it damaged that scene quite a lot, so perhaps it wd have fizzled out anyway, people moving abroad or whatever. Plus, I remember reading stuff abt sp|ral tr|be in melody maker or whatever and thinking they seemed like total wankers. Like, boring ideologues, who thought their views counted for more than other people's. Likewise, I thought putting that big event on at castlemorton was a really shitty selfish thing to do, like we're going to fuck you ordinary people over for a couple of days, you don't like our music TOUGH, you will have to put up w/it, blasting out at 1000000 watts for three days or however the fuck long it went on for. Wankers. I still theoretically like a lot of the music from then, but I thought it was a pretty lame scene. Most of the stonehenge festival people I knew didn't make a transition to the crusty raver scene, and got jobs, or vanished into dope/dole life for 10yrs or more. In retrospect, it all seems a bit fucked up really.

I'm probably going to look at this tomorrow, forgetting that I've posted to it, read the above post and think "what the fuck???"

i get your point, noodle vague, although i wouldn't go too far - for every young wannabe Ashley Hutchings among the young middle classes in the late 60s / early 70s there were several wannabe Mick Jaggers and Tony Blackburns.

somewhere on here there's David Bennun's MM review of the Levellers' "Zeitgeist", which i posted once under another name ...