1967 - 7th National Jazz & Blues Festival
7th National Jazz & Blues Festival
Royal Windsor Racecourse, Berkshire, UK
August 11-13th, 1967
In 1967 the National Jazz & Blues Festival was headlined by Cream , Small Faces, Jeff Beck, Paul Jones, Donovan, Crazy World of Arthur Brown and the Move. Pink Floyd were originally announced but they were finally replaced by the Nice since Syd Barrett had started having troubles performing live. Precisely on October that same year the band was forced to cancel the US tour after Syd Barrett started acting strangely by keeping all quiet during a performance on Dick Clark's American Bandstand TV show and later staying mute during an interview at the Pat Boone TV show.
This year the festival featured two different stages, the main one as an open-air ramshackle structure and the other inside a marquee. Crazy World of Arthur Brown provoked panic in the organization during Arthur's classical set flying with a flaming helmet. This time the fire burned out of control and the father-in-law of the organizer Harold Pendleton ran into the stage to extinguish the flames with a pint of beer.
This was just a little anecdote compared with the problem derived from the volume of the PA system during the whole festival. The sound system, provided by the company Watkins Electric Music (WEM) had built the first 1,000 watts P.A. System with Hi Fi quality in the UK for the festival, under the encouragement of Harold Pendleton. Apparently the city council imposed a decibel limit on the system and when the authorities started getting complaints from the nearby villages they tried to put the event down and arrested Chalie Watkins of WEM. From this moment on the organization was forced to cut the sound low. The Melody Maker reported: "A host of guitarists like Peter Green , Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and David O'List, had their sound reduced to a near pathetic level". Apart from this, continuous technical problems left some bands standing around waiting for the PA to be fixed. After the festival the Windsor banned the festival from returning to the site and both WEM and the organizers, Marquee Promotions, were issued and taken to court at Reading County Court in September. The case was finally dismissed.
Line-up:
Small Faces, The Move, Tomorrow, Marmalade,12th August, The Nice, Paul Jones, Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, Zoot Money, Aynsley Dunbar, Ten Years After, Amen Corner, Time Box, Cream, Jeff Beck, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, PP Arnold, Alan Bown, Chicken Shack, Fleetwood Mac, Donovan, Denny Laine, Blossom Toes, Pentangle
Copyright © TheMarqueeClub.net.