The Norwich Peaceful Green Fair

Actually July 1st - 3rd in Earlham Park, UEA Village and the UEA Rural Development Unit

There had been a few free festivals near Norwich in previous years but this time someone had the idea of asking the council if the fair could use Earlham park and they'd agreed, so it was going to be a legal one. An organising group of mostly squatters from Norwich's Argyl Street (at the time one of the largest squats in Europe apparently) and uni students had booked the park from the council, somehow I don't think that would happen now.

The planning meetings were all held at the UEA - the Norwich university of East Anglia where I had been a student some years before, The meetings were a bit chaotic but things did actually get done.

Having never done anything in the way of gig promotion I offered to run the music stage, so along with Dave Goringe I did just that! There was much debate as to whether they wanted anything electric, but as luck had it we had a site split by a main road, so one part was set aside for the music and the rest for the no-electric hippy fair.

With all the confidence of a sleepwalker I went around local gigs booking bands. We had Karma Kanix headline Friday night, Here&Now as the main band on Saturday night and Underground Zero (UZ - a local Hawkwind style band) on the Sunday. Somehow we managed to get a 2.00am music licence which caused loads of complaints from the nearby houses. UZ finished their show with two huge rocket fireworks, only one of which went upwards.

I decided to give each band a time slot of 40 minutes and allowed a fixed set-up time of 20 minutes for each band. Given what I now know about hippies and punks and their idea of time keeping I would never have tried this, but I did. I scheduled a complete show for three days of mostly local bands plus a few festival circuit bands like Big Amongst Sheep and a reggae slot on Sunday with Benjamin Zephaniah and the liberators. Nick Turner was there and played with Underground Zero on Sunday night.

Anyway, as I worked in a school and had an offset litho printer, I run off hundreds of copies of the running order and gave everyone a copy with strict orders of when to turn up and amazingly they all did. In the event the worst we got was about 20 mins behind time!

Despite all the planning we did, somehow no-one had thought too much about about toilets on the music site. As we were setting the stage area up, I hassled the UEA security staff (they were called "Porters" back then) and they came up with not only proper loos, but showers as well!

My job on the days was to keep the stage running and get the bands on, which I did in manic style, fueled by rather large amounts of herbal flavoured roll-ups I seem to remember. Come the final band Sunday night my role was over and I suddenly became way too wellied to talk, or do anything really and I had to get someone else to drive me home.

Great fun it was though.

I don't think any of the running orders survived though which is a real pity.

I didn't get to see much of the rest of the fair. The music stage was on the old UEA Village site next to the wonderful but long gone Barn and the main fair was over the B1108 in Earlham park. The camping was the other side of the river in what was the UEA farm.

The weather did something very strange as well, the run up during the week had been overcast and not at all nice and so it was on Friday morning. Come time for the first band though, the sun came out and out it stayed for the rest of the fair.

Despite being legal, the Peaceful Green fair was a genuine free festival and had all the elements that make such a fair. We set aside a section of the camping site for travelers and they provided much of the labour for getting the site ready, of course this was before the tabloid press declared war on the "convoy", all that was just about to start.

Although fairs happened in Earlham park in 1985 and 1986 (The Rainbow fairs) and into the 90's as Sun in the East, they were never quite the same thing.

Much to everyone's surprise and even embarrassment the fair made a sizable profit, so a large donation to a local charity Swan Rescue was made and a follow up indoor festival "the Peaceful green breezeblock" was staged that November at the UEA. The "breezeblock" name coming from the brutalist 60's concrete nature of the campus, but that's another story.

Nick "Nation" - Shake the Nation	Eugene The Daemon poet
Richard "Penguin" and Roger Foyster of Tonton Taboo	Stephen Bennett and Rebecca Abott of Tonton Taboo
Nick Turner playing with Ground Zero	Live band recordings from the Peaceful Green Fair At the time I recorded just about all the bands who played at the fair. These were sort of "official bootlegs" and all the bands knew they were being recorded. Of course, not all of the recordings have survived sadly. Most of the bands of course have vanished without trace a long time ago although a few went on to bigger things. Ground Zero became Underground zero and are (as of Augst 2008) still gigging. Here and Now and the Karmakanix were a regular around the free festival scene for years. The Disrupters made a name for themselves on the punk scene and have recently reformed. The recordings from the Peaceful Green Fair were made on cassette from stereo cross mics, if it sounds like a free festy, well it was. The PA was by ADD run by Geoff, a well known figure on the Norwich music scene. Warning! these are large files of 40 - 60M, not really suitable for dial-up connections, all MP3 format. If you can't get them to play, right click and "save target as". Be patient - the server is a bit slow to respond sometimes.
The live band recordings

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Big Amongst Sheep from Cumbria

Tonton Taboo

Nick Turner on stage with Ground Zero

Disrupters Kev

Disrupters Steve