The Archive.

Updated September 2009- New photos of the Dead , the site and Family

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THE HOLLYWOOD FESTIVAL. Madeley, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, May 23rd and 24th 1970.

        Hollywood - The Way We Were. Pt 1.
 
 

30 Years after the festival  the local paper The Sentinel, - inspired by Hollywood  aficionado - Garry Marsh ( left ) revisited the festival history and published the articles that are included below. They featured Farmer Ted, on whose land the festival was held and they also interviewed a number of locals who had attended the festival. You can read all of the articles by visiting the links below.

   Back in 1970 Garry Marsh was feeling miffed because he’d had to miss the first day of the Hollywood Music Festival. That was the say his father and stepmother were getting married at Stoke registry office. So Garry duly went along to the ceremony. But early the next day, he set out from Cliff Vale with his mate Alan Simpson to walk and hitch lifts to Madeley.

"People were just driving up and down the road to Madeley, giving people free lifts to the festival site. I think we had a lift from a Reliant Robin. When we got to the site the atmosphere was electric, it was really incredible. "

remembers Garry, now 53 ,a senior teacher at the Coppice Special school ,Newcastle.
 

"There was a field of people surrounding the stage. WE went into the crowd . WE just sat there all day listening to the musicians like the Grateful Dead ? which were THE band , Free and Jose Feliciano.  No one knew who the hell Mungo Jerry were at the time but they went down so well on the Saturday that they were asked to play again on the Sunday . The crowd went wild when they sang "In The Summer Tme " As we sat there listening to the bands we noticed a lot of thing s were being smoked and passed round , but we weren’t into that scene , we were really quite naïve I suppose. " Garry and his mate were hippies in the making  and attempted to look the part. "Hippies tended to be  middle class we were working class and fairly young. I wore a shirt with fringes on and Levi jeans which I’d frayed around the bottom of the leg. We might have worn bandanas as well we saw ourselves as hippies even thought we came from working class background ." The festival went on until the next morning ,  "We walked back home , we felt like conquering heroes as we walked into Cliff Vale. I remember walking down Shelton New Road, thinking I can’t believe where we’ve just been."

Garry in 1970

Farmer Ted revisited.         Local girls re-visit the festival.

Hollywood festival menu

Many thanks go to Garry Marsh for his fantastic archival material which has enabled us to construct most of the site. Also to Martin Williams for his oral history and colour photo of the stage and site ,Simon Phillips for all the Grateful Dead archival material and Bob Colover for the film footage .

    We have been endeavoring to collect audience or sbd tapes of the performances at this festival , so we can effectively review the performances, provide set lists and band line-ups. The intention is to also display as many personal histories of the festival as possible.

  If you can contribute in any way, with tapes, reviews from the music press, photos or personal histories, please Contact us.