City Rock Festival

Chelmsford

September 17th 1977 .

The Rods

Doctors of Madness

The Damned *

Chelsea

Slaughter and The Dogs

Fruit Eating Bears

Lew Lewis Band

Aswad

Glory

Solid Waste

* ( did not perform)

Compere: John Peel

   Yet another futile attempt to bail out a financially embarrassed football club . There had been a spate of such festivals in the early 70s and almost all had ended in disaster as inexperienced promoters ( usually club secretaries or fans ) had either booked the wrong bands , booked the wrong mix of bands or had chosen performance dates that clashed with other , bigger events.

   It has a sickening inevitability, but as always , we humans never seem to learn from past mistakes. Its really not so surprising that , seven years on from the other attempts to hold festivals, another amateur took it upon himself to try and save a club . Unfortunately , once again, his efforts were to be spectacularly unsuccessful .

   The gentlemans name was Bob Mardon and his major problem was that he did not have enough of a strong lineup to entice the expected 10,000 fans to attend his festival. His other major problem was that he was attmpting to hold a Punk Rock festival- a first for the UK - when punk bands were really not guaranteed to bring in big festival crowds. Although a few bands were making inroads to the charts, Punk was still largely a club and medium sized venue phenomema .

A large of section of the amoral punkish hordes :-)

( only 1500 attended out of the 15,000 expected ).

    In fact, it was all relatively tame - most of the issues that occured were around non appearances of bands and non payment of stewards and site workers. For all the demonisation that the British media had heaped upon Punks spiky little collective head , it couldn't be overlooked that , in fact , this was just another youth subculture . albeit a far more challenging one than the relatively passive hippies. who for all their use of nasty mindbending drugs, didn't tend to spit on you .

    Despite all the media hype,punk wasn't going to destroy the establishment , because it was too disjointed and nihilistic to actually ever present a united front . It stirred up the pot and it funnelled disaffection into musical activites, rather than into a physical revolution. Also, it was too extreme to really appeal to the mainstream punter. Popular as punk was in 76/77, in festival terms it was a minnow compared to the groper sized Metal Festivals that emerged in the late 70s and early 80s. To our knowledge the hard core punk bands never drew 80,000 to a paying gig and there was no punk equivalent of Donington or Reading .The nearest thing was the Jam at Reading in 1978 or the freebee in Victoria Park in 1978.

   Whatever energies that Punk had were all too often turned inwardly into fucking up its own members , such as Sid Vicious's all out campaign of self destruction . It was fun , but when it came down to it- Punk wasn't going to overturn the status quo.

   A perfect example at Chelmsford was , when it became apparent that the Damned weren't going to get paid - they didn't play. Compare that with Phun City in 1971, a festival that ,for various reasons , could not pay its performers .There almost all the bands played for free ( apart from Free who left in high dudgeon !) For many of the punk bands concerned (despite all the rhetoric ), anarchy was ok, as long as one was going to make a quid out of it ......