The Times They Have A Changed

America's satirical weekly The Onion recently published Our Dumb Century, a book of imaginary newspaper headlines for every year of this century. One of the pages for 1967 bears a picture of Jerry Garcia at a rock festival accompanied by the headline 'Grateful Dead Begin To Play Twenty Eight Year Song'. The report goes on to state that San Francisco's legendary band expect to finish their Spinal Tap-like rock-bluegrass-jazz oddessy sometime in the mid-90s. Had Garcia not become a dead Deadhead somewhere towards the end of the track, he would have put down his guitar and realised what a megalithic nostalgia machine the music festival has become.

There was a time when, apart from Garcia, the only hazards to avoid at festivals were trench-foot, dodgy acid and a nasty dose of crabs or John B. Sebastian. Summer was traditionally the season when rock fans came pasty-faced and blinking out of dingy city clubs into open fields for free love, free drugs and the opportunity to watch bucolic hippies frolicking like the Fall from Grace never happened. Temporary autonomous zones were created, free from the uptight rules of The Man. But, as of late, the fans and festival promoters have cut their hair and gone square. TAZs looked at themselves and realised they weren't autonomous after all. 90s festival goers seem less concerned with World Peace and more worried about whether their tent is going to get kicked in before they get to the head of the queue for the on-site cashpoint.

Glastonbury, the mother of all British festivals, is now Glastonbury Festival Ltd and as much a calendar fixture as Royal Ascot. When it began in 1970 the entrance fee was £1, which got you Marc Bolan and free milk from the farm. Publicity for the event these days reads like the poster for a Cecil B. DeMille epic: 'Europe's biggest festival!', 'Over one million gallons of water!', '1200 toilets!', 'eight km of perimeter fencing!' and a cast of '100,000 revellers!' Stateside, marred by allegations of rape and the outbreak of riots, the Woodstock revival is a sad travesty of its former self: overpriced tickets for a resolutely unimaginative MOR line-up. Most Woodstock goers now prefer their RVs to camping, so why not stay at home and watch it on TV? Smaller events, such as V99, Reading or Creamfields are held on rhino-fenced wastegrounds policed by burly security firms, and a curfew is imposed at midnight sharp. Even Notting Hill Carnival, once a dangerous, seething, riotous event is now sponsored by Western Union. So where have all the flowers gone?

Festivals seem to have gone the way of the record market, which is flooded with boxed sets - digitally remastered reissues of 60s and 70s classics with an extra track and a tacky badge. Punters now pay upwards of £70 for the chance to camp out and listen to tenured rock radicals such as REM or, as happened at Glastonbury this year, Joe Strummer embarrassing himself with a lame attempt at revolutionary rabble-rousing. The illicit sound systems and 24-hour free parties of the early 90s have now upped sticks and hit Continental Europe. It's easy to be cynical, or to romanticise the past. Every generation believes its own hype, that the golden years of their gilded youth marked the highest point in human endeavour before or after, and nostalgnik music journalists love to eulogise the Summers of Love - 1967 and acid house's 1988. Perhaps this is why today's festivals are such Dadrock affairs.

On the face of things, the festivals of 1967 and 1988 weren't all that different - hedonism, anti-establishment poses and platitudinous peace and love speeches - which, of course, are very easy to do during an economic boom. There was also music your parents could hate and a penchant for dancing in muddy fields. But there is a crucial difference. Baby Boomer festivals were defined via the politics of group resistance: resistance to conservative America, to Vietnam, to the Cold War. The post 1988 generation had no obvious evil-establishment to rail against. It was essentially individualistic - a fusion of punk, Thatcher's DIY attitude and marathon Northern Soul weekenders, geared towards self-gratification. The underground rhetoric of 'subversion' and 'resistance' was more a celebration of its own underdog status, radical simply by virtue of being somehow 'underground'. Woodstock had 'turn on, tune in, drop out'. Post '88 grooved with the rather less eloquent 'Make some fuckin' noise!'

Both epochs had convenient historical pegs on which revisionists and mythologisers could hang blame for things turning sour. Woodstock's dark coda was the Rolling Stones' disastrous free concert at the Altamont speedway, as documented in David and Albert Maysles film Gimme Shelter (1970), which saw out the Age of Aquarius with a fatal stabbing. For the ravers of the 88 generation, there was the infamous 91 free party on Castlemorton Common, in the heart of conservative rural Britain. A group of New Age travellers, including Bedlam and the notorious Spiral Tribe sound systems, set up camp just outside the village of Castlemorton. Media scaremongering fanned the flames with extensive TV news coverage. Over 40,000 people from around Britain descended on the common and the party lasted for well over a week. One result of this was the 1994 Criminal Justice Act, which gave the authorities the power to close down any unlawful free party. Conspiracy fans, eager to feel oppressed, read it as the death knell of the free festival and dived back underground.

Despite the incessant 'it's not like it used to be' whining of pop's hagiographers, there are still pockets untouched by OmniFestival Inc. In the US, there's Burning Man, a crazed weekender held out in the searing heat of the Nevada desert. Central and Eastern Europe also have their share of free festivals - the annual Teknivals, the largest of which is held in the Czech Republic, are serviced by travelling sound systems, mainly from the UK. In Britain, one festival in particular stands out: the Big Chill, held at The Larner Tree Gardens in Wiltshire. It is a strictly word-of-mouth affair - they never advertise, yet the few tickets available sell like hotcakes. The three day weekender has garnered the suspiciously un-rock 'n' roll epithet of 'politest festival ever'.

The Larner Tree Gardens were built by the Victorian anthropologist and explorer General Pitt-Rivers. Roman follies and bandstands for his own personal brass band dot the well-manicured site, inhabited by peacocks, macaws and other wild birds. There's none of the Mad Max vibe of other festivals, no violence, no herd-like crowds, no gurning E-heads. People wander about, laze around, maybe dance. The music stays fairly left of the dance music field - Squarepusher, Plaid and Giles Peterson played this year.

The visual aspect of the festival, organised by Alice Sharp, is given as much precedence as the music, raising up the hoary old art and clubs debate. Nightfall saw the Gardens transformed with laser installations, video projections and numerous interactive constructions. It was a far cry from the usual, rather tired festival fare of hand-painted flagpoles and signs. For all the talk of combining art with music, or taking art and placing it within a club-type environment, the installations at The Big Chill seemed more like stunning club visuals in the expanded field. The artists at this year's event were less of a strictly 'fine art' crowd than last year's line up, with more experience in the world of music videos, graphics and digital art. They created an environment wholly in keeping with the weekend - contemporary, relaxed and playful, and were refreshingly unconcerned with the mores of contemporary art practice. With the preponderance of hi-tech equipment being used, and the ever present electronica soundtrack emanating from tents and stages, 'art' seemed an unfairly prescriptive description of work for which a term hasn't yet been coined.

Free parties still go on, often promoted over the internet by organisations such as Network23 or nwnet (built on the back of a corporate telecommunications company's site). Perhaps with events such as The Big Chill, the paying festival is beginning to find a new role for itself, circumventing impotent political agitation, acting less like a 67 themepark and more like a chill-out room: neither Bacchanalian bender nor sanctimonious quasi-pagan communion with Gaia. However, winter is now upon us, and until the mega-festivals collapse under their own lumbering weight, it's back to the dingy city bars, safely tucked away from mud, tie-dye and the ghosts of the Grateful Dead.