VARIOUS ARTISTS  
Bickershaw Festival 1972 (Ozit/ Morpheus DVD)
The Deeply Vale Festivals (Ozit/Morpheus DVD)
     Two DVD's commemorating a couple of the more obscure mud-fests of the 70s. The Bickershaw Festival was held near Wigan over the May Bank Holiday weekend of 1972 and predictably the weather ensured that the site soon became only fit for submarines. A whole slew of superstar names from both sides of the Atlantic (Grateful Dead, Captain Beefheart, Kinks, Donovan etc) found themselves in danger of drowning. Four years later the Deeply Vale Festivals were inaugurated at a natural amphitheatre near Rochdale. This time the emphasis was more on acts of a 'local legend' (i.e unknown) status, with the odd 'Star' name (Steve Hillage, The Fall and errr…Tractor) on hand to spice up proceedings. The mix of underground 'Hippie-Rock' and New Wave sounds made Deeply Vale a modest success and it managed to survive for four years.
     So what's on these discs? Well, everything. Everything that has survived at least, and that isn't much of worth. Firstly I've got to admit that a hell of a lot of work has been done in putting these discs together. Every scrap of available film, lots of still photos, shed-loads of interviews with those who were involved…it's all included, and at first glance it's all very impressive, with the Bickershaw disc running to 96 minutes and the Deeply Vale set stretching to a mammoth 3 hours and 40 minutes, but…and this is the proverbial BIG but, I can't possibly recommend the purchase of either of these DVDs because their entertainment value is virtually nil. The problem is, you just can't make a silk purse out of a box of pork scratchings. Alarm bells begin to flash when you actually study the wording of the blurb on the cover of the Deeply Vale box. It says "Contains music video footage from artists who appeared at the Festivals". To a casual browser that could easily be interpreted as "Contains actual music and video from the Festivals", and it does, up to a point, but only the barest scraps. Unless you take the time to really study the smallprint it's easy to misinterpret exactly what you're shelling out the dosh for here.
     Nowadays of course, you can film an entire World Tour on a mobile phone, but unless the organisers had the cash and the clout to hire DA Pennebaker or Murray Lerner, the only film of 70s Festivals that survive are those fleeting moments preserved in local TV News Reports, and it's these that make up the bulk of the moving pictures on these releases. Unfortunately it usually amounts to just a couple of seconds of jumpy, grainy, virtually unwatchable jumbles, with sound dubbed on from an entirely different source. The gaps in the 'performances' are filled with still photos, or clumsily edited 'Talking Head' interviews. It's a technique that's often used in music documentaries but here it's taken to an infuriating level purely due to the paucity of actual performance footage. The worst examples are the Beefheart sequence, which manages to regurgitate about twenty seconds of film into a full song, and Steve Hillage's 'Searching For The Spark', which plays an audio version of the song over a revolving set of about half-a-dozen distant Polaroid snaps. But perhaps the peak of the 'Cor, what a swizz!' collection is reached when the Deeply Vale package is reduced to boasting of showing 'footage of the backstage area while part of The Fall's live set can be heard playing in the background'. Yes indeed, as an unknown young lady strolls across the kind of grey, cloudy images that are normally the preserve of Crimewatch UK, you can hear a muffled, weedy noise that might, just might, be Mark E Smith and his cohorts, but by the time you've unwaxed your ears to the level demanded it's finished anyway.
     I haven't rabbited on and on (and won't) about the extensive interview segments because frankly I have more important things to do and I'm sure that you have too. Mostly consisting of "Wow, it was a great scene because I was there but I can't actually remember too much about it…" stylee non-quotes, I recommend that you ensure your remote-control battery has been topped-up because the fast-forward button will receive a hammering.
     So, if you're writing a thesis on 'Popular Culture In The North Of England In The 1970s' and your local library has copies of these discs in the social history reference section, then by all means immerse yourself in the digital labyrinths, but for God's sake don't waste your money on them, because it's odds-on that you'll end up feeling deeply, deeply conned. Anyone who manages to sit through these discs surely deserves a medal, so I trust that a chest-full of OBE's is in the post to me already, Mr Mills!
www.bickershawfestival.com
www.deeplyvale.com
www.tractor-ozit.com
Mick Capewell