AP Strange: 00:22

Pardon me while I have a strange interlude. But there is nothing else. Life is an obscure oboe bumming a ride on the omnibus of art. Among the misty corridors of pine, and in those corridors I see figures, strange figures. Welcome back my friends to the AP Strange show.

AP Strange: 01:10

I'm your host, AP Strange. This is my show, and today's show is brought to you by 23 in a trench coat posing as a man. So if you see 23 in a trench coat pretending to be a man, I'm sure you'll be fooled because it will look like a man on the outside. You have to have a very special type of perception to realize that it's actually just twenty three weasels, but he is the one that is responsible or they are the one that is responsible for the show today. Because my guest, I have been assured, is not actually twenty three Weasels inside of a trench coat, but I have suspected as much over the years.

AP Strange: 01:53

He's been on the show before. He's a good friend of mine, and he actually was was on to talk about Halloween three if you go back in the in the list of our third movies. The most reverend Stardog himself, Steve Mills. How's it going, Steve?

Steve Mills: 02:12

Good evening, mister Strange. How are you?

AP Strange: 02:16

Doing doing well. Doing well. Well and the reason I have you on tonight is because we have wibbled and dribbled over the years quite a bit of weird shit. And in the in in formal terms too, in the means of recording past shows that I've been on when I was co hosting the Eternal Void, but with Jazz, we had you on about some of your crazy paranormal experiences, and we've talked a lot, but we've never really dug into, like, the music and the festival scene that you were a part of which I think my listeners will really enjoy hearing about because there's some wild crazy shit that happened back then. So that's kind of what we're getting into tonight for the listeners is we're talking about the free festivals in The UK and some of the music that Steve did and some of the trouble that he got into back then.

Steve Mills: 03:19

That is well of Wimborne. In a field with several duns. How

AP Strange: 03:26

dare you? Yeah. Oh, out with several small species of furry animals grooving with a bird.

Steve Mills: 03:35

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Very much so.

AP Strange: 03:41

Alright. So, I'm not actually even sure where to start because we were already talking about this before we started recording. But but I had to keep keep reeling it in and say, well, we we should record this actually. But how about just a little bit of background on the the free festivals that were going on in throughout England when when you were when you were just a young and that you eventually became involved with?

Steve Mills: 04:12

They The history probably starts in 1972 with a guy called Wally Hope and a guy called Penny Rambo whose real names were Phil Russell and I think it's John Battles and they were part of a group called the Dwarves who were inspired by an anarchist group from Holland called the Cabotetur which translates to gnomes so they became the dwarves. They were set up in West London and if you look into the sort of milieu of bands around that period you're looking at people like the Global Village Trucking Company, you're looking at Hortwind, you're looking at Pink Fairies, who all part of this sort of they were part of what was effectively a loose collective. They all sort of lived in that sort squats. Fully enough, mean it's where you also get the slits and the clash come from the same sort of background, from the same squat in effect later but this is the early 1970s. You've got underground magazines called the International Times, otherwise known as It.

Steve Mills: 05:23

You've got Oz which was there was a famous lawsuit against Oz for obscenity because that sort of I can't remember what the picture was I think it's the Rupert Bearer sort of kid's character and Zig Zag and all these magazines who were sort of touting what was sort of a form of anarcho syndicalism. That was really what everybody was talking about. Everybody tends to think he's left wing but it sort of isn't even that. It's more of it's a kind of left wing libertarianism really. But there were virtually every weekend from about 1968 onwards during the summer period from about May till the September there was pretty much a festival somewhere in England on somebody's land every weekend and if you look at the itinerary of bands like Pink Floyd, even Led Zeppelin played the Bath Festival, the famous Bath Festival, which I mean if you look at the lineup for Bath Festival it's like what up, wow, you know it's a good job we're time travelers and we can go back and watch it!

AP Strange: 06:28

So

Steve Mills: 06:32

there already a tradition of festivals and also there was a sort of enlightened nimbyism that went along with this because there were a lot of traditional festivals called fairs so Strawberry Fair or the Pink Moon Fair or the Green Fair in rural parts of Britain so in Cambridge, mostly in Cambridge Norfolk and some parts of the West Country as well but you did have these fairs which had sort of died out but were regenerated by a bunch of hippies turning up and going oh well you know we'll just camp here for a couple of days' there'd a couple of bands on there'd be arts and stuff but I think the locals liked it keep it going because a lot of the places where these festivals took place there was a good chance that they're going to get built on if they didn't retain the festival. So the meadow was liable for a housing estate if they couldn't say oh well this festival's been going on for two hundred years we need to preserve it' so as I say 'enlighten NIMBYism' if you like. So there was a lot of organised festivals already and I think people it got to a point where people were almost living on the road anyway from May to the September and then they'd winter somewhere with a job because they don't have a job every day because this is the days when you could literally just walk out of one job and get another was no problem, the unemployment didn't even really exist in The UK in those days.

Steve Mills: 07:58

I mean it sounds incredible now, but it's the way it was. So, by 1972, Penny and Wally decided to start this free festival scene. I mean it was really their idea and the very first one that you could probably look back as the first in the pantheon of the free festivals was held of all places on Windsor Great Park which is basically the Queen's Back Garden. Windsor Castle Back Garden. I mean seriously I mean I never went.

Steve Mills: 08:36

I was too young, was only 14 at the time, but if you look at the photographs of it it is literally there's this immense sort of like grass walkway that goes on for about three or four miles that leads up to Windsor Castle and there's a path at the middle of it and there's woods on either side of it. Did you watch the story Crow about Windsor the legend of the Windsor Huntsman?

AP Strange: 09:02

No. I

Steve Mills: 09:03

sent you a link. All right okay it's worth watching Story Crow who does the thing about the Windsor Huntsman, the legend. So they have this free festival in the Windsor Park and it's well the tenure. I think yeah not massive but there's a couple of thousand people there. I think it lasted maybe a week.

Steve Mills: 09:21

This happens again in '73 at this point Wally and this anybody who's involved with the rave scene probably doesn't even realise this Ibiza has been a centre sort of hate culture going back to the 1960s. Wallyhope goes to Ibiza for the summer or the winter I think and whilst he's there he gets this sort of like idea to create a festival at Stonehenge. He believes that the stones belong to the people, that they've been stolen by the state on behalf of the state to make money for the state, that the people need to take them back. Mean if you look at Europe you'll find that they used all sorts of names, you know God, Brahma, you name it sort of thing for Stonehenge, but he decides to start a free festival at Stonehenge. Now this so 1974 there's a tiny there's a small but successful festival held at Stonehenge in the June for the solstice and a group of people stayed behind and effectively squat a piece of land just outside not far from the stones near Ainsbury.

Steve Mills: 10:39

In September there's the third Windsor Festival and it kicks off big time. The police, there's a riot effectively, people are hurt, it's not nice, I mean from what I've been told literally they did that thing where about 06:00 in the morning they just came charging through the tents just smacking everything that anything and everything that moved. So a lot of those people then fled to Stonehenge where you have this small group still and this is where we get to the famous Walling domestic court case because I believe they were, like I say, I thought this was an urban legend which turns out to be true, believe they were on MOD land which was the easiest one to squat on because basically the MOD doesn't really give a damn most of the time as long as you're not harming anything but there was a bit of a political pushback against I think people realised what was happening and there was a

AP Strange: 11:41

bit of Wait this is just for American listeners.

Steve Mills: 11:50

Yeah, this is Ministry of Defence, so it's either used by the army or various elements of the military. But there are there's a lot of Wiltshire is MOD land. Where they're tank tested, whatever happens, but mostly they're not interested as long as you're not anywhere near anything secret they don't give a damn. There seemed to be a bit of a political pushback so there was a court case involving all these people, the original group of people here who then as we know all changed their name to various forms of Raleigh. Right.

Steve Mills: 12:28

So you had Wally Hope, what was the one? Walter Sir

AP Strange: 12:36

Walter Raleigh I think it was.

Steve Mills: 12:39

Yeah so they all turn up in court and something rather strange occurs. The judge rather than as you'd expect sort of being rather efficient about it all and kind of thinking they're a bunch of scummy hippies who need to be removed calls them to the bench pulls out a map and says if you just move four yards over here you're in a different person's land and they can't touch you. At which point the attorneys of the MOD all got rather distraught as you might imagine because effectively they hadn't got rid of them at all and I always thought that was an urban legend but it turns out it's actually true.

AP Strange: 13:22

So

Steve Mills: 13:26

they then moved if I remember rightly, I'm digging back now, I believe they then moved into a squat in Amesbury for the winter but there was pretty much a permanent presence somewhere around the Stonehenge Pier area and there was a small festival in '75. Now with the advent of punk I think the whole hippie thing sort of disappeared. In the eyes of the establishment, in the eyes of the public, the whole hippie thing sort of just went. But the truth was that the festival was getting bigger year by year and funnily enough the punk thing actually sort of just fed into it. Mean by 8283 I remember seeing the Clash with Marilyn and George at Stonehenge, people like that were some really very famous people turning up the day at Stonehenge.

Steve Mills: 14:23

But by '79 the festival was quite a big, that's the first time I went, I went for a couple of days in 1979 because it only lasted I think it was four or five days at that time. So by 1979 it was getting quite large and I was like wow this is really interesting. But my own life changed I moved into working with a band that was touring a lot so I didn't have a lot of free time and also then I also got a job so for a couple of years I was sort of I didn't have you know I'd go away for the weekend I might go to the old festival for the weekend but I didn't really get a chance to but in that period people had shifted to living on the road. There were a lot of people moving on to the road so you're probably talking about wow I would guess if you put everybody together by about 1980 you probably had about 3,000 buses, trucks converted and other conversions of people living in them on the road.

AP Strange: 15:27

I've seen some of the pictures you've sent me it's just crazy it's just a long convoy of like refurbished double decker buses and big vans and

Steve Mills: 15:41

pan technicals!

AP Strange: 15:43

Right!

Steve Mills: 15:43

So all of a sudden it becomes quite visible, It's very hard to hide, you know when you're talking about maybe 2,000 people with tents in the field for a few days, yeah and you don't really notice it. But then when suddenly you've got five hundred-six hundred trucks and buses pulled up all over the place it's like this is interesting, this is getting towards being an urban settlement in a weird sort of way. And of course with that came a lot of the infrastructure that you get with urban living. You got cafes, you got people who looked after loos and stuff like that you know provided loos. There was a crash camp and this is like 1980 you had people who just totally volunteered out of nowhere they'd have a crash tent and if you had a bad trip or something you could go in there and people talk to you.

Steve Mills: 16:43

The people just basically you got therapy on the spot. I've seen people talk now you know I've had friends who've been there you know just said it was brilliant you know somebody really fucking broke somebody really took you know somebody really gave me a good talking to him pulled me out and pulled my basically head out of my backside over where I was at that particular point because you know whatever they've been up to. You've got this sort of structure there was almost a structure to it and quietly suddenly you've got this sort of exponential growth whereby 1980 I think it was April I think '81 was about '5 or 06/1982 was like 10,000. And then 1983, you're talking forty fifty thousand people turning up at stone age. That's problem.

Steve Mills: 17:42

The solstice for for the solstice for two or three days, all my cats now playing and stuff. So you've got 40 or 50,000 people who've turned you up for three or four days at Stonehenge, At which point government everybody starts taking notice this is Margaret Thatcher. Now Margaret Thatcher came from the trades class, same as I do. And the trade it's an interesting dynamic because many upper class people had to marry into trades class people to keep the places they lived because after post World War Two something like, I mean the house I live in, the house I grew up in used to be a hall. It was knocked down and one wall of my garden was what's left of the hall.

Steve Mills: 18:36

It was Attleboro Hall, you can look it up online if you Google it you can look at that's what my house used to, that's the land my house was built on. But literally hundreds of these places closed down and a lot of the people who do survive, the only way they manage to survive was by managing into what's called trade which is like say somebody who owns a massive sort of superstore, you know, chain of supermarkets or something, but they're not aristocracy in the real sense. They might have a title but they're not old money so there was always this sort of snobbery that went with it. Thatcher wanted to change The UK fundamentally and one of the things that why you bloody stop that guy! She saw was this sort of debauched dilettante upper middle class and aristocracy who indulged their children, who let all this sort of crazy, who sort of worked tacitly and this is true on many occasions on many occasions I spent time on people's land and it was the du duke of So and So's Land, it was Viscount So and So's land and they turned a blind eye to it because their daughter was in it, their son was part of it.

Steve Mills: 20:02

So there were quite a few people from relatively august backgrounds on the festival scene along with everybody else. Mean it was very egalitarian, it wasn't like there wasn't really a snobby involved. You used to get a bit of an attitude from some people who lived on the road totally, never came up. It was a bit of an attitude but not really much, was very much live and let live. They were only too happy to have new people arrive so by 1983

AP Strange: 20:30

Well I think in one of the stories you had told me your friend described it as there are no rules but everybody follows them.

Steve Mills: 20:37

Oh that's from Glastonbury festival nineteen eighty six the Greenfield yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah with the future archbishop of Canterbury talking to us at 04:00 five o'clock in the morning we'd all been tripping all Saturday night and he came into what's called the Greenfield which is where the festival people were he's so him and his cassock and two guys cassocked up as well with him and he's talking to us and he said this is interesting, they've done a very different energy in this field isn't it? It's like you come through the gate, it's like it's completely different energy. And we were just kind of talking to him and my friend Brian sadly now passed just turned around to suggest that's because there are no rules but everybody abides by them

AP Strange: 21:23

which

Steve Mills: 21:27

was incredibly deep and very true actually. So this is where the trouble really came. I think I've shown you a picture of you know I think I've shown you this. I would suggest if you've got whatever search engine you use put in a search engine put in Stonehenge 19 80 4 and look for images of Stonehenge 1984 and you will see something which I believe was what finally sealed the fate, which is what turned something which was I mean we were referred to as medieval brigands and outlaws which didn't do any help because that just made us look even bloody colder than we were because that just made every kid every 15 year old kid's But if you look at this photograph from 1984 what you will see is there's approximately approximately 50,000 people's tents and things it covers almost up to the horizon. But what you will notice is it's like spokes of a wheel.

Steve Mills: 22:47

In all this sort of natural chaos there's no organisation, nobody's organising this, there's like a central spoke around Stonehenge. We're all on one side we're all on one side so we're not camping on Stonehenge itself and they're like spokes of wheel going off with avenues which allow if there's anything that goes wrong any emergency services can get anything. Nobody planned that. That's just natural. But if you let people look after themselves they're nowhere near as daft as you think they are.

Steve Mills: 23:22

And even though we're all out, that's it, I'm not going to claim anything else, everybody's outrageously off the rails on anything you can think of. But there was still that instinctive thing and people without anybody telling to him say don't park there, you're blocking a route. If anything happens, we can get an ambulance on-site. So you could get to any part of the festival with a fire truck or an ambulance.

AP Strange: 23:56

Yeah. That's really interesting in in the Eurasian sense of, like, you know, Hodge versus Podge. The the more the more Grayface tries to impose rules, the more you end up with with tragic consequences because there's going to be chaos anyway but sometimes when you just let chaos coalesce into a form it ends up becoming order right?

Steve Mills: 24:23

And I think was I think Thatcher saw that because it's a photograph taken from what was obviously taken from an aircraft. Would imagine it's a news service and the other thing was news about festivals tended to be there wasn't much about it on the TV. If it was, it was anti it you know, portrayed us as you know we're all wasters, know, we're all druggies and all this sort of shit. But news companies from abroad found that they could sit and talk to people and they'd have incredibly intelligent conversations with people at festivals. They might be out of the titts but they were quite happy to talk about on a deep level and we would get good press if you went to Holland or you went to Germany or even in The States.

Steve Mills: 25:15

Even in The States there were interviews with us that were shown on various news channels and it gave a completely different idea of what the people in Britain thought of this, the picture of what was being sold to the people in The UK. Obviously they were monitoring this and I think in 1984 it is said that we had a thing called the miners' strike in Britain where virtually all the coal miners in Britain were out on strike for I think it was two years almost. So virtually all the police in Britain that were spare for crowd control were used to control the miners' strike because I mean there was this thing called the Battle of Allgreed Colgate if you look that up, terrible stuff went down and it was said that they would have smashed Stonehenge in '84 had they had the police available, but they weren't. So by '85, which is the Battle of the Beanfield, which is what I sent you the photographs of yesterday, if you people want to look this up just look up for the Battle of the Beanfield nineteen eighty five Wiltshire and you you I'll give a shout out to Alvin Lodge who's a brilliant photographer who has pretty much he's the story he's the photographic historian of the festival scene.

Steve Mills: 26:30

He's he's roughly I think he's maybe a year older than me so he only goes back to about 1976 but his archive is well worth an investigation if you want to kind of look at what people you know what this is all about.

AP Strange: 26:46

Those photos that in that that collection that you sent me really kind of tell a story because it's like I was describing earlier it's just you see these vehicles and there's so many of them and it's just like a whole bunch of hippies and then a whole bunch of cops And I think in the battle of the battle of the bean field, there's over 500 people were arrested.

Steve Mills: 27:09

Oh, good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

AP Strange: 27:10

Yeah. Yeah. Well And it's just

Steve Mills: 27:12

It's long been claimed that somebody was killed.

AP Strange: 27:16

Right and that was kind of honked Well

Steve Mills: 27:20

the story goes and also funny enough this came up on Facebook a couple of years ago on one of the anniversaries of the main field and it was his sister. They say that what happened was somebody got hit really badly, was taken to hospital and they were put in military hospital so they were taken to a military hospital because his souls be played, it's where all the military are, they were taken to a military hospital. The guy wasn't well, he slipped into coma and apparently died about three months later but he was told that he'd been involved, his family were told after about I think after three days after the bean field I think they contacted his family and said oh you know he's been in an accident he's had got head injuries but they knew he was in the bean field and there's a gap between the bean field and then him turning up supposedly having out of this accident and then it was all hushed up. They reckon they basically weren't allowed to see him for a couple of weeks and then when they were allowed to see I think he was transferred to a normal hospital.

AP Strange: 28:22

So he was accidentally beaten with a police baton probably?

Steve Mills: 28:27

Yes, I mean I don't know if there's any truth in that but I've certainly seen that I've seen the family claim that they believe that it happened at the bean Field that he didn't have an accident at all, that he was basically hit with a truncheon. So that sort of obviously put a kibosh on things but there's one thing I would have to add here it became a movie's own success to a certain extent. You see the original idea that Penny Rambo and that Wally Hope had and we'll come back to Wally because we need to talk about Wally again was that people all over England should go to Stone Circles and hold their own festival. That was really what it was all about. It wasn't like oh yeah let's get 200,000 people at Stonehenge once a year.

Steve Mills: 29:24

Whole idea was that every weekend during the summer at every Stone circle in Britain there'd be a gathering for people and you know there was a sort of don't get me wrong there was underneath this there was this sort of hippie idea this thing that they could raise a certain sort of energy that would change the country into a nicer place you know Christ invited not having that you know what I mean?

AP Strange: 29:49

Well it seemed to me that there was yeah I mean it seemed to me that there was a real mix of personalities involved in this.

Steve Mills: 29:55

Oh good yeah yeah yeah.

AP Strange: 29:57

Where some of them were kind of pagans like out of the pagan revival and a lot of magical ideas and I think you had described it at one point as some of them literally trying to hail flying saucers in the fields at night.

Steve Mills: 30:14

Oh yeah yeah yeah yeah you're right of course yeah

AP Strange: 30:17

yeah

Steve Mills: 30:18

I was watching was I mean I collected that I've got it here the we go. Lenny Hurt, this is more a power of the stones. In '83 I was perfectly healthy, twenty six years but hardly ever got periods. NJ83 I got one, very surprised and unprepared. I'd no more till as a joke I took a tampax with me to NJ84 and it happened again and May my daughter was born.

Steve Mills: 30:46

Never underestimate mother nature and their helpers. Wow! You go! And of course there's our favourite one with the rope!

AP Strange: 31:00

Yeah.

Steve Mills: 31:03

Hang on, let me look. Here we go Tim Rundle this is from Stone Edge nineteen seventy six. So this is where you know the early days. Very hot day, clear deep blue sky, no cloud. A child has me a roll of string which goes up into the sky.

Steve Mills: 31:27

My arm can feel the resistance of a large kite, but my eyes following the string upwards cannot see any such thing, just the white stream eventually disappearing into blueness. I hold the string for ages and start reeling it in. After ten minutes or so the resistance is the same, the sky is the same and there's still no kite visible. I continue reading this with no apparent effect, even getting other people to confirm that the string just goes up into the eternal blue and nothing seems to be on the end of it. After forty five minutes or so I find some likely looking candidate and hand them the string with an admonishment not to let them out.

Steve Mills: 32:06

After all we don't know what's on the other end he might come crashing down. It might be depending on us, it might be depending on it. What if it is actually flying us? I still wonder what happened. Someone still holding the string?

Steve Mills: 32:19

Even now I certainly hope so.

AP Strange: 32:22

Right.

Steve Mills: 32:24

And of course, we then sort of find that that string that rope story is repeated in history and across the world it's not an unusual story at all.

AP Strange: 32:38

Right yeah I ended up finding a bunch of them and writing

Steve Mills: 32:40

about them. Yeah and of course it appears in them and the same thing appears in, oh, Endless, the Endless. What's her name? Benson and Morehead film, the Endless, the string things in that once roved in that, it's a very great robe they hanged on to. So there was this whole sort of undercurrent of weirdness, don't get me wrong, and you know people used to laugh at us don't get me wrong again but like I say I think in the end the whole idea of people getting on and just enjoying each other and just enjoying each other's company was not one that they could live with.

Steve Mills: 33:21

I mean that sounds a bit that probably sounds a bit corny, I'm sorry but it's true. It was really was just about oh these people are enjoying it. Loads of people, particularly young people, are being drawn to this. I mean it's funny but when we talk about woke, that was this is it. This was a tiny percentage of people in 1980, in the early 1980s, who felt like that.

Steve Mills: 33:50

I'm sure there was a lot of people who instinctively felt like that but couldn't express it because of the society we lived in and if you told me that the way we were, the way we acted and the way that we thought would be mainstream thought across the whole of Western Europe, Western civilization by the time I've retired I would have laughed at you and said can I have some of what you're smoking because that's really good stuff obviously?

AP Strange: 34:14

So

Steve Mills: 34:15

I'm I am changing Yes. I'm glad you're in charge at

AP Strange: 34:21

the time.

Steve Mills: 34:22

Exactly, yeah. So I'm delighted but I'm genuinely I thought it would take a good I mean we used to sit around a campfire at night talking about this sort of shit and we used to say you know a couple hundred years time maybe but I think many of us now we're absolutely gobsmacked as it happened in a long time that it's become mainstream. So you know I think maybe that's why they really made so looking back yeah that's why they crushed it.

AP Strange: 34:51

Well it was very much communal living you know that was proving itself

Steve Mills: 34:57

yeah and don't get me wrong though don't get me wrong they're assholes at festivals just the same as they are anywhere but they were kept in check for it's interesting how easily they were kept in check by people just being decent and that's fascinating that just people very dint of most people being decent it kind of made them embarrassed about acting like that. Don't get me wrong there were still thieves, there were still but the other thing was and this comes back to the whole gender thing really you could walk around naked and nobody batted Nyla. It wasn't seen as a sexual, the whole sexuality thing. And the other thing I remember, and this is because Burning Man really comes out of this, this is where Burning Man got inspired, this is where the Burning Man was originally inspired from. But the thing I always remember was after you've been at a festival for about twenty four hours there's a whole lot of paranoia vanished that you never even realized that you had until you went to a festival.

Steve Mills: 35:58

And I think that was dangerous because people would say that people would come from a town and then maybe spend a couple of nights at the festival, they've never been to a festival before and they'd have this sort of view that oh they're all weird, they're all gonna you know there'll there'll be audios going on and of course there wasn't you know what I mean it was actually by most people's standards probably pretty boring, know, few bands and lots of people talking and taking drugs. People would suddenly say to you it's really strange isn't it? I feel completely relaxed. This is the first time ever. And I think that was said yeah that is dangerous because post '85 we actually did a lot of very small festivals which were brilliant.

Steve Mills: 36:41

There'd be like forty fifty people there and often what would happen is I remember one we did one in the middle of the literally middle of bloody nowhere in Wales.

AP Strange: 36:51

So is this with the dogs?

Steve Mills: 36:53

Yeah yeah yeah yeah one of our very first ever festivals and it was you have forestry land and they often have these things it's like a key it's like what it looks like a frying pan so it's a road that goes a straight thing into the forest then there's a huge round circle at the end where the trucks can turn around and come back out with the carrying log with the logging. But they make brilliant campsites, so what you'd have is like they'd have maybe 20 or 30 vehicles just in the on the pan all parked facing inwards. At the end you'd have a little stage, a band would play and there'd be about forty-fifty people there. But on several occasions at these little festivals, which is what it really all was about, was to try and get everybody to do this wherever you were, the locals would turn up. I remember one there was a Saturday evening about 06:00 and I think it was late May early June and these locals turned up and a few people were like oh Christ you know are we going to get heavy air you know they're going threaten violence and all these locals thought to him excuse me oh yeah very polite we've got a whole row, we've got a pig, would it be okay to bring it in?

Steve Mills: 38:13

Know a lot of you are vegetarian but would it be okay to bring it in and roast it and bring a few of the locals in and we could all have a party tonight? I know you've got a there's a band playing isn't there? I I'm like yeah cool so and before you know it there's like all the people from the local pub sitting around the circle around chatting with everybody having a joint and we'd say oh this is brilliant, you're really enjoying this! We did a Timberland festival in eighty seven-eighty eight, I can't remember it's the old thing if you remember you weren't there. We had an embedded journalist and I always remember this again this comes back to what they were scared of.

Steve Mills: 38:56

Timberland's I think it's basically Black Mountain in Wales, it's one of Black Mountains in Wales, it's the sort of thing that Jimmy Poser used to write Acoustic Sons about. It's a big flat top mountain and it looks down the valley, it goes all the way to the sea. When it's clear you can see all the way down the valley to the sea, but it's pretty bleak as you can imagine. I was pissing it there. We got there on the Friday evening somebody came out on a motorbike and was guiding people in because the weather was that foul.

Steve Mills: 39:27

So we get to this festival and we've got this embedded journalist with him writing an article about festival people And when his article actually came out and he made quite a bit of money out of sold it across the world this article, he said the thing that shook him, said you know all of a sudden I'm in a van driving through the countryside with a load of weird people who are all smoking drugs while they're driving here and you might think this is mad. But he said the thing that blew him away was we got to a festival site and it was just getting to dusk and he said within half an hour in the pouring rain I'm sitting inside a completely dry bender which is what we used to erect drinking a fresh cup of tea with these people realising that amazing this is the middle of nowhere and yet this is civilization.

AP Strange: 40:22

You know what

Steve Mills: 40:22

I mean? It's pouring with rain but I'm dry and I'm drinking tea with them and they're acting like this is nothing. You know, just poor for the cause and he did that article as I say that he'd sold that to quite a few newspapers abroad and what have you but again it was this thing about people making decisions for themselves on behalf of themselves and not being idiots. And I say that was always the danger and we all saw that. The drug taking in everything if they could sell that to people it was great but when people actually met us like in Stonehenge 87 when they tried to get to the stones there was a riot again one of our band flattening off.

Steve Mills: 41:09

Would never forget that he he was attacking a woman and he was attacking a woman who was holding the kid. So one of our band literally I just saw him go flying through the air side on because he did martial arts took his cover out and smore his back flat then. I thought oh here we go we're the police out now because I'm not going to let him get beaten up for doing that. But another couple of coffers saw what happened and again it comes back to this don't mess with festival people because there's a good chance one) the parents are connected, dad could be an incredible lawyer you do not want to go up against them in court because you'll lose. Right.

Steve Mills: 41:46

Because the judge will believe them if their father's that suit you know what I mean it's that snobbery I mean that's the British class It's the same in The States if you've got money going to court completely differently if you're poor you know we all know that. So where was I talking about 87 Stonehenge? Yes we were all camped up in a woodland about three miles from the stones and I remember as we left, we've been there for about a week, there was some, there was a local, there was a news people interviewing some of the locals saying oh you know what's it been like having all these people do the camp in the woods near you?' and this woman was going she pointed over to the road where the road turns into a track before it goes into the wood and she points over there's literally a pile of black bean bags that's like about 10 feet tall by about 15 feet wide. She goes they've cleaned everything out! That place was a mess!

Steve Mills: 42:48

They've cleaned everything. They've not only bought their own rubbish out, they've cleaned everybody else's rubbish who thinks they can just dump anything in those woods. As far as I'm concerned they could stay here as long as they like and this sort of report is going okay well we don't want to talk to you because there was this thing about the festival people used to get let in free to Glastonbury because they did the clean up afterwards because Glastonbury just looked like a massive rubbish dump the day after the festival the festival used to get free entrance for cleaning up afterwards and it used to take two or three days. It was about self reliance and self discipline and this is the whole thing you know the whole sort of attitude towards people like you and I and all our friends is oh you've got no self discipline but the truth is we do. Might be a

AP Strange: 43:50

different possibility.

Steve Mills: 43:56

Responsibility was if I see somebody trying to chop down fresh wood off a tree I'll go up to them and say look kid it won't burn, greenwood won't burn, find the old stuff and that's you know what I mean rather than just going oh you what the hell are you doing? You're talking. Right, like I say there are assholes at festivals like this. You've got 50,000 people you're going to get a couple hundred people in complete twat, you know what I mean, just by law of averages. But they were kept far more you know what I mean but their behaviour was emolliented by everybody else being quite decent to each other.

Steve Mills: 44:48

Later on you then get the sort of acid house craze with raves and a lot of the original raves were actually organised by teenagers of festival people, the kids of festival peoples, teenage kids. I mean one of the biggest raves in Britain was in a fire station in London and the guy running it was 14 glow that the kid ran the boat running it was 14 and his folks were part of what's called the Meteoroid Waste Company. If people want to look up the Meteoroid Waste Company they do if you ever see pictures of Glastonbury and you see lots of weird sort of sculptures made of with lots of metal and stuff that's usually the mutual waste company they do a lot of stuff for sets and what have you for films I think they get some of the Mad Max stuff is mutual waste I think some of the trucks in those were designed by the mutual waste company you know what I mean, made a living out of being on the festivals and all that sort of thing. But with the rave culture unfortunately that brought in a genuine criminal element and I'm talking organised crime organised criminal gangs who sort of saw what was going on, there's a lot of money to be made here' and there was.

Steve Mills: 46:09

I mean I've always said the ultimate thyroid drug was ecstasy because you could go to Holland to buy ecstasy for 3p a tab over the counter and the paper charging £25 tab in The UK. Literally get on a boat go to Holland and buy it for £3 of tab because it's used for treating alcoholism probably you know it's a mood enhancing thing. And also I sort of ducked out in 1990 when a friend of mine was sexually assaulted at first and that was it for me. Was like no, that I'd never I mean there were stories of there were some weird people at festivals in the 70s and 80s, but nothing like that. To have told somebody out to a festival now you'd have been severely dealt with.

Steve Mills: 47:04

I mean you would have got a damn good kick if anybody had done that at a festival in 1982 and somebody had said something, that would have been it. Whoever it was would have been, I wouldn't have been to them because they would have ended up in hospital, can guarantee you that. But by the late 80s, sadly there was a sort of thug element thing which is sad because ninety percent rave was brilliant, know, the vast majority of people in the rave say lovely people, great people, just there for a good laugh, have a good time and not harm anybody. But like I say there was a sort of laddish element, this sort of birth of the laddish thing, know the birth of this whole land can take fucking fuck with me, so there was people like that, so they were just predatory and to me that was like I don't want to be part of that. I'm sorry but I'm walking away from this now.

Steve Mills: 48:00

Yeah, the mates of mine still went to a group, had some great times but the staying overnight, know staying in the field for three or four days, no it was like if I have a weekend over the Saturday night that'd be cool. And of course they changed the law to make it illegal so you can't park more than four vehicles in a field without written permission, know, without having a license for a festival or whatever, you know, sort of thing. Can't remember the name of the act, but they made it virtually possible with the famous Castle Morton. The last great sort of free festival was also on a road called Castle Morton and they even lied about that they said well we've had 19 noise complaints yes they did they were all about the police helicopters incessantly flying around the bloody local villages. It wasn't about the festival it was about the bloody police helicopters twenty four hours a day over head sort of thing.

Steve Mills: 49:00

Was the noise complaints but that was our fault apparently. Castle Morton was probably the last great free festival in Britain and huge numbers have decamped to Europe. There are there's whole villages in Portugal that are ex festival people you know, I mean the original people are all in their 80s now late 70s 80s years old so they've got a lot of them retired to there's little villages in Portugal that have died because nobody wanted to live there because there's no facilities well the festival people they just rolled up yeah will they be? I always say if you want to know how things have changed in fifty years you've seen The Good, Bad and the Ugly, in fact the second run of the series a few dollars more that little white village that was what it looked like, that wasn't a set who built that, that's what that bloody village looked like in 1966. It's still there if you look at it up on YouTube there's a guy who goes around all the, forget your Western sites, what they look like now, the Western town has been preserved.

Steve Mills: 50:24

It's really funny because it's all got gardens in the you know the sort of main street with all the sort of saloons and stuff they've all got front gardens now looks really weird so people still live there but those that's what it looked like and so it was quite primitive I mean obviously they got you know it's all got email and shit there but a lot of the festival people to them that's perfect you know because no the locals didn't want to live there so they moved there so from about late 1980s onwards lots of people from the festival scene moved abroad. Mean the dogs we nearly bought a village in Spain, we nearly bought an entire village in Spain and looking back we made a serious mistake because we didn't realise well it was I think at the time it was £98,000 and we'd spoken to a couple of people around the band who were like actually we can make a go of this thing. I'm like really seriously? They said yeah yeah yeah you know what you're good. What we didn't realise was this village came with 100 acres of olives.

Steve Mills: 51:32

No 200 acres of olives. If we bothered to look it up the yearly yield on 200 acres of olives is like about £150,000 But we didn't realise this so basically we could have blamed for the whole bloody thing that was supposed to be about three years. All we had to do was rent it out to the farmers and take a cut. So to the farmers we'll split it sixtyforty or whatever you could have 40% of the profits if do look after that that would have been $50 a year. That was a silly mistake they made but the idea was to move over there and build a studio in the village so each member of the band would have a house so the crew and everybody just said but we seriously thought about it, nineteen eighty eight-eighty nine genuinely thought, but of course that village is now probably about 5 or 6,000,000 because that's the way things have gone, know what I mean?

Steve Mills: 52:30

There's no place that's not accessible in Europe now and there's wi fi there. The wi fi's turned everywhere into being accessible. There's very few persons in Europe that doesn't have broadband so even back end of nowhere in Portugal and Spain because like I say watch those if you watch the spaghetti westerns of the classic trilogy that's what it bloody looked like that's Spain in the 1960s! Well, so sorry. Go.

AP Strange: 53:09

Yeah. I was just backtracking a little bit. When when did you go from a a festival goer to somebody that was playing at the festivals or were you always playing? I was looking for a little history on like your band.

Steve Mills: 53:25

1980. Put Kubler Dogs first festival was Porkmeadow, which is a really famous place in Oxford. Porkmeadow Festival, that was our first festival and one of our lighting crew came up to us afterwards and goes well that's weird. I looked at him goes what? He says you're not my friends anymore now, you're a bloody cult.

Steve Mills: 53:48

I said you know what, do you recall? He said everybody out there is just like wow you just blew everybody away that night and we played with a band called the Cardiacs. I did a cartoon, I actually did a cartoon stunt at that festival, never forgotten it. Friend had a post office van. A post office van is really strange there's a door but the door's about five feet up the side of the van so it's got those insert footsteps that you go up you have to sort of put your foot in once you open the door, climb in.

Steve Mills: 54:25

So we got a call you're on stage, said all right okay and I don't often I've never really been I've never been particularly powerless person I've never done coke, never really done coke, never really done coke, I took some speed that night for some reason, don't know why, so I was a bit like oh right we're on we're on we're on. I opened the door, is like I say, it's about the door's four or five feet up the side of the van. I opened the door misjudged it and did a perfect Wiley Coyote swung on the door slammed straight into the side of the van like arms akin though and slid down the van down the van Watched the amusement of everybody watching. Oh, that was really clever. Can you do that again?

Steve Mills: 55:18

Sort of. But I'm so I'm so buzzy. Just like, Let's go.

AP Strange: 55:22

Yeah. I was gonna say,

Steve Mills: 55:37

But that was Shoot the Dog's first festival and by the September '85 I think we played seven but then '86 we played if there wasn't really a festival we didn't play. '87 was when we first met Dave Brock from Hortwind. I talked about the meeting when Dave first introduced himself to We were sitting around the campfire this was the Roll Rite Stones Festival nineteen eighty seven. It wasn't very particularly nice, in fact it was foul weather, forgot that, yeah, the famous we played the fucking storm and the day after the weather had calmed down a bit and we're sitting around the campfire and Dave Brock from Hortley walks into the middle of the campfire and he's got a kettle in his hand. He's like anybody would do some bushrooms?

Steve Mills: 56:35

Yeah, okay, very good. So Dave sits down and I'm having this conversation with Dave and there's a there's a friend of mine sitting between us as we're talking and my mate's tripped out of his tits and he keeps his legs. Grabs hold on, Steve? I know him, don't I? Oh yeah.

Steve Mills: 56:59

I been Dave Carney on talking. Steve, recognize him, who is he? Was pointing at Dave and was like this Dave Bruck, about ten minutes I said 'Stay, I really fucking who the fuck is this?' I was like, 'I'm kidding you, it's sitting in that fire because I'm sure a bloody name is from somewhere but I can't put a bloody name through his face!' And Dave just burst out laughing. At that point he goes 'by the way I want you to tour with us in the autumn if you're interested. I'd like I'd like you to come and tour with us and we'd like I was like yeah and everybody had a go with really?

Steve Mills: 57:37

But we played I'm not joking we had to put plastic sheets in over all the PA because literally we were playing into the teeth of Miguel. I never forgot. There was a there was still the people there out there standing in the pool in Ray Washington's. There there was a guy under the plastic sheet in one of the base bins. He spent a whole gig just rolling one joint after another because it was dry and passing it out.

Steve Mills: 58:06

It's about every two minutes, every five minutes or so this hand would bear so here's another one. Mean, fully enough it was a really good gig. I peeped laughter and I said bloody hell man, it was pouring! You were standing there, oh yeah, you know, who cares? So I just took all my clothes off and got on the bus afterwards, know, we've got a fire going so we can't.

Steve Mills: 58:30

But I missed, it was a brilliant thing to be around, it's one off, it was one of Rucker House moments in time. That period, you know, between say '72 and '88 you had that sort of sixteen year period but it set the tone and the residences that we started a lot of what goes down today that came from our original I think we set up the resonance that helped you know we weren't revolutionaries in a sense and yet we were and was like I like I say it was a whole thing about live and let live. If people aren't harming you just fucking go and get on with it you know it's up to them what they do. And more and more people sort of took that on board so to the extent now that I talk to people you know in the 20s and it's like talking to festival people from the 1980s the way they act. And I'm like wow that's so fucking cool.

Steve Mills: 59:30

But I can see why we've got such a kickback against it. Because you can see it's all drifting that way. Mean I I don't know if you've noticed this but the latest thing is hey the new generation they me. Literally the new generation don't like working, lying fuckers. You're just lying through your teeth, you're just trying to make shit up there because you've lost and that fat fucking nonce and I don't usually fat shame people but in his case I will that fat fucking nonce in the White House is the last of a dying breed because when the fucking kickback comes from at the end of this it's going to be far worse than they ever fucking thought and it's the same in The UK.

Steve Mills: 01:00:17

These people who think they're on the fucking roll they ain't. Well

AP Strange: 01:00:27

it's a pendulum, a pendulum that pendulum swings both ways.

Steve Mills: 01:00:31

Yes yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and the funny thing is they're the ones who are you know I never really felt I'd never genuinely felt oppressed. I never really felt oppressed because if you're free in your own mind you don't really. You feel uncomfortable, you know what I mean? I said to you, you go to the festival and numerous people say this to me, wow I just feel so relaxed and one of the things was you're having a smoke and everybody's going to burst Right. We're talking about shit that maybe most of a lot of your friends don't want to talk about because it's too deep.

Steve Mills: 01:01:16

Oh man, oh man that's deep don't talk about So you go to the festival, sit around the fire and suddenly somebody says to him, so what do you think? And people are asking you your opinion. Yeah, that's what they don't want your opinion. You know what I mean? They don't want you to have an opinion, let alone voice it.

Steve Mills: 01:01:41

Yeah, that's what

AP Strange: 01:01:44

it's direct human interaction that doesn't exist in like a proper setting, know, like and especially if you're of the ilk that thinks they're better than because of what family they came from or how much money they've had it's not about human connections at all it's just about winning it's just about being being on the top you know Yeah. Yeah so

Steve Mills: 01:02:16

we have to go back to Wally Hope because he died in 1975 in quite tragic circumstances. He was busted for supposedly possession of a couple of types of acid. They sent him to a mental home. He was placed in a mental home. He suffered what's that called dyskinesia where you've got

AP Strange: 01:02:39

the facial

Steve Mills: 01:02:43

He suffered from that when he came out because of the medications he gave to him and he supposedly committed suicide. Now I've heard stories that Penny Rambo has always insisted he was murdered by the state and I was just like really come on you know what I mean I mean that's stretching it a bit far I mean it was just one person. What I didn't know was at 30 years old he stood to inherit an absolute fortune from an uncle. He'd have had the financial wherewithal to put behind free festivals. That was obviously what he was thinking.

Steve Mills: 01:03:26

So maybe there was a bit of jiggery pokery going on there, I don't know. But it's only in researching this recently that I found out that he had an uncle, somebody Nags I think his name was, who left him a fortune in perpetuity until he was 30 years old and on his thirtieth birthday he had access to a large amount of money. So maybe somebody else who stood to inherit was quite happy to go along with you know yeah he needs silence and yeah you're right so they buy that voice of that fucking hip and get all the money so there might well have been something going on there but I'd always heard that while he died you know that while he killed himself and that a couple of people thought it was a bit suspicious but I didn't realise until they did some research like I say he had this relative and again we come back to this what I was saying about Thatcher hated these sort of upper middle class dilettante because they, you know, indulged their children and by indulging their children they set a bad example for the working class. Know that whole bloody thing you know basically.

Steve Mills: 01:04:45

But again, you know, you could probably tie this Crowley similar sort of thing, his family owned a big brewing company and yet they were Methodists weren't they so it's kind of weird because they didn't drink but they owned a brewery.

AP Strange: 01:05:01

They Plymouth brethren.

Steve Mills: 01:05:04

Yeah, so they didn't drink but they owned a brewery. Illogical. No wonder he was fucked up. But mean, Connor, if you look back to the 1920s, Bloomsbury

AP Strange: 01:05:26

group.

Steve Mills: 01:05:29

I would say the Bloomsbury group were the sort of first kindling and I would imagine I wouldn't be surprised if some of the people from the Wallies I bet you somebody's related to one of them, you know what I mean? I just got a feeling that if you were to look up all the Wallies one of them is probably Virginia Woolf's nephew, you know what mean, or Cain's nephew, something like that. Wouldn't surprise me, and again you know my old mentor Rex. I look back and I think Rex saw me as part of that and therefore I think that was the passing of the mantle to the next generation. Saw that the dwarves and people like Wally were the next generation because they truly were open minded and that was the sweet thing about it.

Steve Mills: 01:06:19

Mean you could say it was naive and it was. Don't get me wrong, I'm not totally unaware, it was incredibly naive in many ways, but that naivety protected us in this weird sort of way as well. It was also our protection. Was nice to be, you know, it's kind of weird because you were both, because in one sense you were kind of very married, you in a way that was incredibly neat conversations, particularly about you know weird shit. Like I say you know I collected the weird shit from people.

Steve Mills: 01:06:49

I mean let's go for let's see what else we've got. This is from Gem Sugar Shine Once when I was walking to Stonehenge I woke up in a crop circle and couldn't stop laughing. Another time the sky was taken up by a huge black cow bodice and I asked why despite shedding leather for her my shoes were so crap and the sky boomed clogs! Being a little taken aback by this I wandered off-site to Amaril and came upon a strange burnt out cottage inside of which was a huge exploding cauldron and miraculously two fine pairs of clogs, one of which fitted me perfectly.

AP Strange: 01:07:30

One of which? Oh one pair, okay. That

Steve Mills: 01:07:36

would have been the ultimate thing wouldn't it? Only one of them fitted.

AP Strange: 01:07:43

Didn't you have a missing time experience going from one festival site to another?

Steve Mills: 01:07:50

That was actually from Cradle Hill, you know, you pass me the things the other day, Cradle and Stale Hill which are the famous ones in Warminster. There were 10 of us. Gerry was driving, I don't think Gerry was tripping, everybody else was tripping apart from a girl called Jill who's actually the granddaughter of one of the most famous know her grandmother virtually anybody who's into art who knows her great grandmother. I can't think of her bloody name she was the redhead in a lot of the pro raphaelite paintings she's the witch Morgana, she's Morgana in one of the yeah that was her great grandmother. And we dropped acid at Cradle Hill, I had the incident with the guy I was talking to and this is what I was saying with people, oh I said you know no you questioned everything.

Steve Mills: 01:08:55

That was the incident I had when we were skylotting and were looking at the sky and talking to this bloke boy who's a local actually. I said yeah well I said but a lot of people mistake them. I said people get mistaken you know satellites. I said that one, think it's a bloody UFO don't they? And I pointed up and said just like that one up there and it looked like a satellite coming it was coming sort of north to south, in fact yeah it's unusual north to south, north to south, pointed up yeah yeah yeah and as we both pointed up at this satellite it did a short left turn and went over to the horizon about fucking god knows how many thousand miles an hour and this bloke just looked at each other in the dark.

Steve Mills: 01:09:36

Well yeah, there you go! It's interesting! Later that night, towards dawn, we said I'll get Stonehenge for the dawn. So we all piled in the van. The first weird thing that happened was we come down off Star Hill and all of a sudden like what the bloody hell?

Steve Mills: 01:10:02

I had a slick of policemen in the road and somehow we're driven onto bloody air bloody army base. There's always army houses and everything and there's just a bunch of hippies in the truck driving through the middle of this army base and nobody takes it. We drive out of the gates and nobody stops us, nobody takes a blow out of nowhere. So we're obviously invisible there. We hit the road to Stone Edge and I've told you this before for forty years I've never looked it up.

Steve Mills: 01:10:34

We hit the road to Stone Edge so Kerry's driving, there are nine of us in the back, eight of us tripping, and then I'm sitting at the back of the van with my back against the doors and everybody fell asleep in the van apart from Jerry who's driving and me. And all of a sudden we're in a fog and I'm thinking hang on a minute I think it's about nine, ten, 11 miles between here and Stonehenge. I'm thinking okay I'm tripping so time gets fucked up. So I think hang on, this is weird and after about five-ten minutes and I know it's five-ten minutes because Jerry got some music on and I know the length of the songs that we're listening to, I kind of climbed up the van crawled into the front side and said to Jerry how long have we been driving? He looks at me and goes I don't know, must be about half an hour.

Steve Mills: 01:11:36

I'm thinking we're doing about 40 five-fifty miles an hour down the one road that leads to Stonehenge. There's no road that you've

AP Strange: 01:11:47

heard off on.

Steve Mills: 01:11:49

No, there isn't. That's the point. At that particular route there isn't. So, I'm looking at it and going we should have been there about ten minutes ago and we're going through this fog and it's another fifteen minutes before we get to Stonehenge. We pull up and there is a cup that needs to be up.

Steve Mills: 01:12:14

So we get out the van and there's a ward there with the uniform on and we all walked up to it and we're all standing in the Indian foil. So this board is a stone this is like 04:00 in a bloody morning. Mean obviously Stonehenge being Stonehenge is not unusual but what is a bit weird is there's a warden here, there's me and Jerry standing talking to her and everybody else is lined up in a neat line behind them just blocking me to school trip sort of thing but you know this is like a load of six foot fucking hippies. We're looking over at the stones and Jerry says to me, he says hang on a minute they're fucking shimmering aren't they? I went yeah they are and we turned around and asked everybody else the stones oh look at the stones everywhere, oh there should be it, and then we looked around, are rocks, there's a couple of stones, you know, there's a stone fence and stuff around this thing.

Steve Mills: 01:13:14

So we looked at them thinking oh maybe it's heat coming, was some sort of weird heat thing, so we looked back to the stones and the stones were just as if we in a heat haze around the stones.

AP Strange: 01:13:27

So

Steve Mills: 01:13:29

that was a bit weird, got in the van we drove home. But I never for some reason ever wanted to look back at that because I knew there was about fifteen-twenty minutes that was wrong in that fog and it was only years later that I remember talking to you I went and looked at the map and looked up the route and thinking well maybe we did go off on the wrong route. No, it's 11 miles and it took us forty five minutes and we were doing forty-forty five miles an hour. That's impossible. So there's twenty minutes missing somewhere and like I said the bit that always got me was everybody fell asleep apart from me and Jerry.

AP Strange: 01:14:18

So did they fall asleep when they hit the fog or before that?

Steve Mills: 01:14:23

Yes, in fact probably a couple of minutes after we got into the fog I looked around and everybody had fallen asleep. Everybody's like

AP Strange: 01:14:32

Yeah that's strange. I feel like that means something but

Steve Mills: 01:14:39

It's the only time genuinely and I remember thinking maybe it's the accident. Was convinced it was the accident that I was just getting that time dilation effect that you get on LSD at time so I think you know it's just that because the thing that always gets me about you know acid no you actually go through things with a minutiae of detail when you're on acid you question everything that's the whole point of doing it so know what I mean fully enough you're actually far more strict with yourself about what reality is than you are when you're straight. I always say the UFO experiences people who've done acid are far better at UFO experiences than people who are straight because people who straight believe everything they see with their eyes. If they see it with their eyes they think it must have happened. People who've done acid don't.

Steve Mills: 01:15:29

People who've done acid in the day, you know, get stoned they think hang on a minute, I'm double checking this because this could just be, you know, I'm making this shit up in my own head. So you know I mean? It's an interesting thing isn't it? So when people say oh he's a police officer he could be totally trusted, why? He's got no idea what an hallucination is.

Steve Mills: 01:15:51

Nor is the guy who flies an aircraft he's got no idea what a bloody hallucination is. He doesn't have any idea. He's not checking himself, he's not thinking can I taste? Because I always say often with weird shit happens you get a weird taste in your mouth almost like you touch the back, you know how you touch the battery terminals of the turbine?

AP Strange: 01:16:11

Yeah yeah.

Steve Mills: 01:16:13

Sometimes when weird shit's happening you get that taste in your mouth so it's obviously something to do with the like there is obviously a heavy electromagnetic charge that's been surrounding the incident and you're probably you've made

AP Strange: 01:16:29

I don't know that I've ever experienced that you actually kind of get a metallic taste in your mouth?

Steve Mills: 01:16:37

Funnily enough when you're tripping often people say you get like a weird sort of metallic taste in the mouth and people will eat socco mint or something then it blows their head off because the mint's like the mintiest thing you've ever tasted in your mouth. But yeah so but I mean that all comes back to that's kind of what the festivals are about. My friend Steve, the guy, you know, absolutely a genuine genius, the guy who built the Centre for Haltmann in 1970. I used to love doing dastard with him at festivals, he was just an awesome person, straightest looking dude you've ever seen in your life. People say oh I bet he's a copper.

Steve Mills: 01:17:21

They say oh yeah yeah I mean the most obvious that's a really clever thing that is for an undercover copper to come looking like the straightest bloke you've ever fucking met. So yeah, that's really clever undercover there that is. Shut up you silly! And so you know like I say people can still be assholes at festivals you know. But Steve, like I say, has amazing conversations, them walking, so just, you know, walking around the festival site just chatting about shit.

Steve Mills: 01:17:54

And a couple of times, you know, we had like my friend Dean, had that experience with the that was what's it called? Oh bloody hell. It's where my friends got stuck for the winter. The year before the dogs started Several of the dogs ended up spending the entire winter on Hay Bluff it's called Hay And White, Hay Bluff and a friend of mine he had a really weird, him and his girlfriend, he's the guy who took the best photo I've ever seen of a UFO at the festival and he was tripping everybody else who was straight is just lollygagging. Oh look that's weird he's like I'm tripping I'm probably making that up quick get a bloody camera He takes the photograph everybody else is oh fuck, he took a photo!' He's the one going I'm tripping, this might not be real, I better take a photo just to make sure and prove that you know it's good.

Steve Mills: 01:18:57

But after that he ended up wandering off with his girlfriend and they found this weird fucking thing on top of a hill that was like a radar thing sticking out of the hill, that when they approached it it retracted back into the hill. A sort of plight shoved closed across it and it's like wow! Said I thought because his girlfriend wasn't tripping and he said I thought oh god I'm just making this up, I'm just saying no no no that just happened.

AP Strange: 01:19:29

Well see that sounds like something out of the Avengers or something like that.

Steve Mills: 01:19:34

Totally yeah. So it's because he said it I was all thinking this is really stupidly cheesy you know it's caught me up instantly But he said it was definitely, it was like this sort of little radar display came out of the ground, sort of turned around several times and they said it's almost like they saw them walking towards it and he retreated and he walked up and there was like a steel thing across the little concrete thing in the foam like a little concrete. Yeah, like a big shirt. So he was like wow that's fucking weird. But that area is again is MOD land there's a lot of MOD land around there so it could well be some sort of you know god knows well probably it could have just been a TV and you know what I mean some sort of transmission seat for the army.

Steve Mills: 01:20:25

I don't know, that's where that famous incident was the orders to fire the broadside during the manoeuvres in 1964. There's whole army manoeuvres and in the middle of these army manoeuvres they're getting orders to fire broadsides and that orders were from 1942.

AP Strange: 01:20:53

Oh right right right, the delayed radio transmission.

Steve Mills: 01:20:56

Yeah yeah the radio thing has just been bouncing around in the atmosphere for God knows how many years and then they eventually picked it up so it was literally they would get the orders from me. Somebody actually tracked it down to a specific a incident during World War II. Oh yeah, I remember that! So it's kind of magical, it was a magical place. People were looking for magic on any sort of level and I think you know a lot of people found it.

Steve Mills: 01:21:28

Look, the story when I first went to Glastonbury tour, was with two friends, I was 18 years old, it was the summer of seventy six, the infamous British summer where it was like America, it didn't rain for three months and it was like 80 degrees every bloody time. Even had cricket at night which I've never heard, you know what I mean? Night, cricket. I went on a tour with a couple of mates because we'd finished school, were all going to college, and I went on a tour for a week or so around a lot of the sacred sites in Dorset and Somerset and Ravie. Of course we went to Glastonbury.

Steve Mills: 01:22:08

I remember, got on top of Glastonbury, got tall. Well even in the in the hottest days there's still a wind up there because the tall is basically only about ten-fifteen miles inland from the sea. So there's an onshore wind all the so when you get to the top of the tour it's quite windy even on the sunny yesterdays. So I was with my two friends and I told them I said I bet you when they used to have sandwiches up there the wind used to drop and as I said the word drop the wind just went stopped dead for about thirty seconds then just started again. I'll never forget my mate just two mates just went you're fucking weird.

Steve Mills: 01:22:55

I was just like well there you go as you do.

AP Strange: 01:23:00

Well I mean that does kind of allude to a question I was going to ask you is that with this whole festival thing, I know there was kind of a mythology around especially with Stonehenge being a prehistoric site, reclaiming it and having kind of like some people are kind of jokingly associating it with like a pagan rite.

Steve Mills: 01:23:25

Oh yeah.

AP Strange: 01:23:26

Yeah. But others kind of more genuinely believing that. But do you see like that that kind of communal exercise as being related to like the the ancient festivals that are in the same spirit in some way or some kind of modern continuation of like the Celtic and Druidic rites that would have happened for seasonal changes and

Steve Mills: 01:23:51

I think yes I think people celebrated the fact that they survived the year that they prospered and they got absolutely offered tips and had a good time. The Abrahamic religions just can't handle that. Right. You know what I mean? The three great Abrahamic religions are like I know you're not supposed to do that.

Steve Mills: 01:24:12

They said why? That's the sort

AP Strange: 01:24:16

Yeah I mean I think I like to think back to you know I like to imagine that when they first built Stonehenge they had a big festival there and that was Keith Richards first gig.

Steve Mills: 01:24:27

It's Keith's design. It's Keith's design. One of those is his original amplifier. Yeah. But we definitely that that morning those stones were shimmering, there was some sort of energy coming off them and that's the only time I've ever seen that stone because I find stone energy a bit sad nowadays, it's like it's a bit like that relative of yours who was an absolute nutter when they were young and he sort of like fallen on hard times, that's how I kind of view Stonehenge.

Steve Mills: 01:25:04

Avery, completely bloody different. Avery's awesome. I would recommend Avery to anybody. It's the most beautiful fucking place. It's one of the most beautiful places in the world.

Steve Mills: 01:25:14

I mean I've been inside the Great Pyramid. I've been to Egypt. I've seen the mausoleum. I've been to I've been to the Temple Of Diana. I've seen all these places in Greece and what have you.

Steve Mills: 01:25:24

But Avery is just bloody awesome. It's just an awesome place to just go and be and it's still not succumbed to tourism in the way that many other places are. It ain't big enough to and I think most people go well it's just a bunch of stones so it kind of looks after itself in that sense because the whole village is inside this little circle but if particularly if you're female it's just an amazing place It's like connecting back to the very so I don't know what they believed. The latest evidence is that they were female not dominated but female based.

AP Strange: 01:26:09

Right, like a matriarchal society.

Steve Mills: 01:26:12

Yes, it was effectively a matriarchal society. So from that point of view, I think it's like the biggest, it's like one of the earth's wombs. That sounds really idly. Really is, fuck it. It's like one of the earth's wounds and it really just felt like there's a really sort of calming, beautiful sort of thing.

Steve Mills: 01:26:33

The only people I know don't like Stonehenge are people I don't like. Isn't that interesting? Avery are people I don't like. That's fascinating, man. You know, the people are just thinking a bit of a tosser, you know.

Steve Mills: 01:26:47

A bit of wanker. Twack! But yeah, so that sort of whole festival, mean don't get me wrong, there was one festival particularly this place called Campingstone in Wales That almost certainly comes down to, you probably wouldn't have heard of it, there's a thing called Operation Julie which I was kind of sort of peripherally involved with. Our house got busted in 1976. It's where the class song, Julie's been working for the drug squad comes from Operation Julie.

AP Strange: 01:27:22

Right, right.

Steve Mills: 01:27:23

And it was a fuck up basically. The copy ran it and said you know of the 11 people they wanted, nine of them left the country the week before we happened. There, this is what I mean, Thatcher, you look at that and go oh yeah obviously somebody was talking. But that was about LSD, that was a bust in the LSD factories and there was one in Wales. But the legend is there were four or five thermos flasks full of LSD tablets of blotting paper LSD were stashed in the forest near Campingstone.

Steve Mills: 01:28:10

So the legend is that the festival was like a lovely festival in Camping Stone and people would just wander off into the woods looking for disturbed soil or they've got metal detectors and then the whole reason that the festival was out to count these stones because people were assured there was a hell of a lot of acid buried in the woods somewhere around there. I think it's an urban legend. I think it's probably just a way of getting people to go to a festival. I think it's just in the middle of bloody nowhere. So, but yeah, I mean the Operation Journey was very real and there was a birth of acid for quite some time after it.

Steve Mills: 01:28:49

It's ridiculous. They've had 5,000,000 pounds of acid and said mate they were giving them away. I mean the whole point of the acid was half of it used to get given away and they charged you 25p which is like you know 10¢ the tab back in the day. Mean starting on day 84, a classic example, on the night of the solstice we were standing around the solstice and we were all standing around the stones and there was people going around and it was like put your tongue out, up to you if you swallow it or not, or keep it. And literally they must have given away seven or eight hundred fucking tabs of acid that night.

Steve Mills: 01:29:32

That's what makes people, it's not really people making money out of it. I told you this one before about we used to have this in our tour bus and it was a headline from a local newspaper in Wiltshire. Hippies do foreign trade in stolen knives under which is a photograph of one of the bender with a big board outside of his hash so and so blah blah hot knives 20 each. And of course the paper thinks hot knives stole the knives. Hot knives is when you get two knives you get a piece of hash, put two knives in a fire, you put the hash between the two knives, burn it and inhale it.

Steve Mills: 01:30:24

So I think it's a really good hit. No tobacco, it's just that's what hot knives are. Prince Zeepees dean were retreating stolen knives, so we used to have that headline that used to be stuck on the tour bus. Simple times, simple times! But this was it you were living alongside and outside.

Steve Mills: 01:30:58

Virtually everything we got up to is mainstream you know can't just go yeah you could do that down the same or you could go you know there's so and so meetings where they discuss that sort of stuff in the church all on the Wednesday you know so yeah which is kind of what it was all about it was about spreading we're not like trying to spread a message we're just trying to spread a vibe that's the difference isn't

AP Strange: 01:31:20

Yeah

Steve Mills: 01:31:20

we're trying to spread a vibe where you get off on it you enjoy yourself you have a good time we're not telling you how to do it and that was probably that was the victim of its own success with the festivals was that thing about the problem was that you get 250,000 people turned up at Stonehenge but no, the whole idea was yeah 10,000 people at Stonehenge, 20 Thousand people at this Stone Circle, 20 Thousand people at this Stone Circle that was what we really wanted on Solstice. So it was unstoppable. There wouldn't be enough police to have to stop court removing people turning up at 10 different sites. That's what we really wanted. We wanted people every weekend to go, you know, for people to be able to go to a local Stone Circle at any given weekend and they'd be doing good people because you don't, I mean the Nazis try to use it.

Steve Mills: 01:32:15

There's a place called Nine Maidens where there's been serious trouble I mean this is going back forty years ago we had trouble with Nazis. Were trying to think you know because have you ever read the story about you've not read Armando Crowley have you? No. He tells a story about you know there's a legend and I think it is I don't know if it's a legend or not that how Mr Crowley performed a ceremony on behalf of the British government at the height of the Battle of Britain. That involved a load of people standing on the couches, still giving it this to the prosecutor, supposedly where he got the baby from, was supposedly from Crowley.

Steve Mills: 01:33:01

But there's a legend that he performed this ceremony at a particular church somewhere in Surrey and Armando claims that effectively that was the story put out to confuse the Nazis because he said for decades afterwards little groups of Nazis would turn off at this church in Surrey thinking it was the thing trying to form this fucking ritual to try and exercise the power that Crowley had put to stop the Nazis taking over. So been bloody Nazis around you know what I mean? And like I say, you've gone about forty years to the nine maidens. We had trouble with Nazis on several occasions to the point there was a bit of violence once where we literally kicked them out. Was sort of you know Thor and they said, piss off you fucking idiot!

Steve Mills: 01:33:53

So they got a bit shirty so we rejected So I've got no minds that's another good thing, that was one of the ones that people were trying to get because it's up on a mine, it's up on the top of a hill somewhere in Buxton, New Moul, in Buxton Derbyshire. That was one of the, we had a festival there, we started one and that's what we did with the dogs to a large extent on maybe a dozen occasions we were the people who started the festival we put it around that we'd be playing at the sound zone and people turned up people just turned up out of the blue

AP Strange: 01:34:26

So sometimes here's here's my question though. When you just show up in a field where where do you get the electricity for through the generators? I brought generators with you.

Steve Mills: 01:34:37

Oh good yeah yeah

AP Strange: 01:34:38

yeah yeah

Steve Mills: 01:34:39

yeah I mean I'll be talking when we played Oldermaster there was a flatbed truck with a battery on it that could have done all the lights as well at Oldermaster because we used to because a lot of the festivals would be at places that had become had a bit of dark energy around them because nobody wanted to go anymore and nobody really objected to us having the festival there so we tried to just so there was a degree of like well if we go there we can kind of exercise the bad energy from the place. I mean I had x-ray in my left hand for ten years after I was a master because that's nuclear, it's near a nuclear facility, it's where the nuclear research facility in Britain is, and we had a festival literally virtually almost next door to the facility in an old abandoned sort of area and it is weird though, so I had eczema on my left hand for ten years after that. Eventually it finally failed but I'd never had it before and I'd never had it since. I used to get little blisters on my door. Always wondered if I'd put my hand in something over that weekend.

AP Strange: 01:35:51

That's kind of ironic too because wasn't one of the goals of the peace convoy was like anti nuclear or nuclear destruction?

Steve Mills: 01:35:58

Oh yeah, they supported the girls at Green and the Green and Common ladies. The festival people helped them out, told the Moses they showed them out, you know, basically exist on virtually nothing. Well I mean no, no, no, yeah they're all part of it. Yeah, it's all part of that. Yeah, I mean the anti UK thing, I mean that was just, I think that was as much to do with that it was so badly done, it was so shabbily looked after.

Steve Mills: 01:36:29

It wasn't necessarily that nuclear was a bad thing totally per se, it's just the way it was done was sort of half arsed a lot of the time. I mean there was a couple of incidents and people don't realise this, there were a couple of incidents in Britain that nearly turned Chernobyl. We're talking about there were at least a couple of incidents that were virgin on Chernobyl disaster level disasters in Britain. There's one in Windscale and there was one I can't remember the name of it it's somewhere near Bristol Hinckley Point I think it's called there was one there as well and they were hushed up for donkey's years and then twenty-thirty years after it happened because they were built in the 50s It came out, oh yeah, because remember what I said about the Solworth photograph? If you look at the Solworth spaceman photograph, if you look in the back, if you look at the back down, right at the back you can see the nuclear power station is behind the figure.

Steve Mills: 01:37:26

Yeah. And I postulated because he was a fireman, the guy who took the photos. I've always wondered if he knew somebody who'd had an accident in the new power station and that was his projection onto the film. Because to me it kind of looks like a 1950s 1950s 1960s asbestos fireproof suit.

AP Strange: 01:37:52

Yeah.

Steve Mills: 01:37:53

I've always looked a bit like that. If you look at if you look it up you'll just see what I mean. I've been always

AP Strange: 01:37:58

I don't think it would have been the Cockney Spaceman so

Steve Mills: 01:38:06

And that's cool.

AP Strange: 01:38:07

I like I like the idea of of of that being a psychic projection onto the film, you know, and and that that makes sense if he's, you know, he's a fireman or he knew somebody that was at the nuclear plant.

Steve Mills: 01:38:21

Yeah, But I mean that kind of joke like I say in a weird way that's the festivals. We were all trying to ask the right questions. That was really what it was all about was people asking the right questions of the site we live in because we looked at it and saw it drifted in such a way that it was becoming completely bloody impersonal. That people were becoming sort of and it's not about you know this sort of it's about a world community really that's what it's about. The whole point was you know Burning Man's become very commercial hasn't it?

Steve Mills: 01:39:03

Mean it's basically died on its own, it's basically eating itself hasn't it? But Burning Man was inspired by us. You know what I mean? The festivals in Britain were the original inspiration for Burning Man. They saw what went on over here and they tried to do it in America.

Steve Mills: 01:39:18

But anyhow from what I hear for the first five or six years it was exactly the same as a British festival. Yeah. And then it's now it's basically corporate isn't it? I think that's the you know. I think that's the best just bloody BBC corporate bullshit.

Steve Mills: 01:39:36

No. Well it's fucking been Wednesday.

AP Strange: 01:39:39

Oh really?

Steve Mills: 01:39:41

Well it's not even bloody ironic. It's not bloody it's not even funny ironic. I mean there was so you know I saw one day today he a bit of a wanker called Richard Bergen who's a writer Richard Osmond. He's a writer who used to be a TV person. The most amazing lineup was Coldplay U2 and Beyonce.

Steve Mills: 01:40:00

Was literally about 300 people in the revival go no that's probably the bloody worst line up you could possibly have bloody corporate could you get?' So that goes back to '71 I think was the first class to go, Michael Evis when he was a decent bloke before he turned into a wanger. But yeah I mean it's one of those I wish people outside of The UK could just come and sit and be in one of those places that we used to have the person with. I think within an hour within half an hour you go, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I get this.

AP Strange: 01:40:53

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think what we need to do is a time travel tour guide. You can just pick people up and bring them back to one of those festivals and

Steve Mills: 01:41:04

Oh, yeah. Well, I wonder how many time travelers I met at those festivals. I mean, I genuinely, there's a couple of times when you spoke to people who seem to come from somewhere completely you know what I mean? But because of the state you're in you just thought oh yeah well you know part of the course at the festival but in a straight if you took it out of the festival and say that happened in the house you really would be going what the fuck who is that person? Who the hell was that?

Steve Mills: 01:41:36

Right. Well

AP Strange: 01:41:39

I had wondered if in that story you told earlier about driving through the army, the army area, like, you know, I wonder if that was like a time slip sort of thing.

Steve Mills: 01:41:53

I wonder. It was funny because there's 10 the bass player for the dogs. Last time we spoke he said by the way do you remember that thing happening with the army bases? That really happen? Went yeah.

Steve Mills: 01:42:06

He was like man, fucking he said how the hell did we end up in an army base without getting stopped? Because we forget! It was September, were basically war with the IRA, so army bases were totally off, you know what I mean, wandering around army bases in a van, so it certainly wasn't because you know we could have had bombs or shit, but it'd be a serious fucking security. It's not like The USA or somewhere we did love that. Was contended with army bases were completely out of bounds and just wandering around with no particular reason to be there.

Steve Mills: 01:42:46

I still don't know we managed to get there off a Cradle Hill. That's what I'm saying. That's

AP Strange: 01:42:56

probably because it wasn't there in the 80s, but it was, you know, forty years before and you just drove through an older encampment you know. Yeah

Steve Mills: 01:43:11

very strange. We're back at festivals. We don't want people to talk about genuine things. Yeah. That's what it's all about, know, it's corporate.

Steve Mills: 01:43:22

Because we're, you know, that's not mince words. Corporatism and fascism are two of the bloody scientists and chicks of the same ass. They now think they can just do what the fuck they like.

AP Strange: 01:43:33

Well it's about commodification and

Steve Mills: 01:43:36

yeah yeah

AP Strange: 01:43:38

but also just stopping stopping people from enjoying themselves and having the room to consider these things.

Steve Mills: 01:43:48

And that is the very good and that's what Penny Rambo and Bollywood have told you it was all about. People having time to consider such shit. I wish you know you can say always if people never get anything done. No that the falsehood, that was the lie they have to sell to people that nobody got anything done but they did. Was a whole alternative culture growing up around it so they had to be next to another world.

Steve Mills: 01:44:16

It's really funny because it still exists. There is a I mean I don't know if I've spoken about this before. What was the hippie trial in the 1960s? You left London, you flew to Amsterdam, you went from Amsterdam to Greece, then you went to the Lebanon, then from the Lebanon you went to Afghanistan, from Afghanistan you went to Eastern Timor and then you flew to California and then back to London that was the thing. Well what happened to Lebanon?

Steve Mills: 01:44:50

What happened to Afghanistan? What happened to Eastern Timor? How strange! It's almost like know it's like oh this is because they were making a lot of money. Afghanistan opted because they're making a shed load of money because you know a hippie with £10 in his pocket is far better off than back in the day if he was just £10 in his pocket it was a bloody fortune to somebody in Afghanistan and the same with Lebanon and the same with Eastern Table so it's like all of a sudden yeah they've got religious walls and it completely destroys because Lebanon used to be the gambling capital of the Middle East.

Steve Mills: 01:45:32

Lebanon if you look at movies from the 50s Lebanon it's all fucking casinos on the beach and everything It was the leisure capital of The Middle East but we can't have that. It's almost like you know sorry mate we're not we're going to put a stop to this you know what I mean because it was like the whole thing about we can't have everybody around the world sort of realising that they can get on together. It sounds horribly hippie doesn't it? But you know that's what Kerry Thorne and everybody was about wasn't it? Merry Pranksters and all that shit.

Steve Mills: 01:46:07

They might have started with MK Ultra but it was same tale wasn't it when it came down to it? You know what I mean? What started out as a method of control as often happens just backfires big time and turned into the counterculture almost accidentally, you know what I mean? I'm trying to think. I honestly can't think of anything really bad that ever happened to me at Festival, that's the weird thing considering how much time I spent with them.

Steve Mills: 01:46:41

I honestly can't remember I've been you know particularly bad experience and we had one guy who reverted back to an ape that was weird. There's a guy who'd never been to a festival before took acid and he reverted back to April. I mean he literally took all his clothes off and just sitting in the fucking tree. Literally after looking out doing all the physical things and in the middle of it the place arrived and said oh we've got to move on from here. I remember the first boss pulling out because we said okay and he said we're going somewhere else anyway so there was no skin off air though.

Steve Mills: 01:47:25

I said okay I remember the first bus pulling out with this bloke wrapped in a quilt sort of sitting on the front of the bus with his legs crossed still doing the chimp thing. You know that's sort of the the pensive thing that the chimps do.

AP Strange: 01:47:42

Yeah yeah.

Steve Mills: 01:47:43

He's still reverting back to it. He's perfectly fine a couple of hours later and he cut it down. I didn't did I? Was I really? You know Scott naked sitting up a tree looking You're joking.

Steve Mills: 01:47:58

Mate. We have to go find your clothes.

AP Strange: 01:48:01

But maybe you really wanted a banana.

Steve Mills: 01:48:04

Yeah, probably. That. Can't honestly tell you the only bad memory I remember at the festival is that the one in Haybluff in the winter of 'eighty because I was working so I wasn't up there. The winter in Haybluff was a really nasty flu virus event and a couple of my mates were close to me and they fucking copied it because they stuck in a bender on top of a bloody hill bay, on top of a hill with a roaring, freezing cold bay. I mean benders are really warm, you don't even really need a fire in one, just the heat off your body because it's round, just reflects back.

Steve Mills: 01:48:47

It's amazing how warm they are and poor signs of it literally did the very real everybody got it sort of thing so there was a period when nobody could do anything because everybody was just down with flu. So I had a genuine flu, know I could fully have posted about this yesterday. Somebody was going on about oh you know this is what I'm worried about and this is what worries me about flu. I'm you've never had flu. I've had flu once in my life mate and it feels like you've been beaten up and rolled man in a hill in a barrel.

Steve Mills: 01:49:17

You cannot move.

AP Strange: 01:49:19

Yeah, I've had it before.

Steve Mills: 01:49:21

Would go. I've had it once in my life and I literally lie on the sofa for five days and I couldn't fucking move. You know what I mean? Everything. When I

AP Strange: 01:49:30

had it, I probably should have gotten to the hospital, but I I think I think my fever had gotten so high that, I was probably in the danger zone.

Steve Mills: 01:49:42

Oh, really?

AP Strange: 01:49:44

Yeah. I I had, I was living in an apartment at the time. My upstairs neighbor was a biker, a hell's angel kinda guy, and he would get up bright and early in the morning and start drinking beer outside in the driveway. He had a big cooler with ice in it. And I stumbled outside and he's like, oh, you look like shit.

AP Strange: 01:50:07

And I I was just, like, so hot. You know? I just I felt hot. And I asked him for some ice. He gave me, like, a big chunk of ice.

AP Strange: 01:50:15

That was like the size of a brick and I brought it inside. I went in the shower. I put the shower on cold and I was using the brick like it was a bar of soap, like this brick of ice. Wow. And I could see steam coming off of me.

AP Strange: 01:50:29

It was like I probably, if I didn't do that, I probably would never you know, my temp would have got too high. I could have really been. But, yeah, that was like a full week of just, yeah, not being able to do anything.

Steve Mills: 01:50:43

Yeah I mean what most blokes think of was flu is actually a heavy cold which you know it's not nice but like flu like I say I remember just waking up and I was like Jesus Christ and like about ten minutes later I managed to get downstairs I just lay on, I literally I just remember lying on the sofa for forty five days and I couldn't move and if you know you moved your arm it's like oh Jesus, yeah Christ man! Do you see this?

AP Strange: 01:51:14

Down a little bit. Oh yep I see it. It's actually called nourishment.

Steve Mills: 01:51:19

Yeah this is what you live on at festivals. This is what people used to live on at festivals and ravers ask any raver about nourishment. I don't know if you get it in The States but it's amazing stuff because people think oh right oh it's good but if you try eating a meal after you've had one of these you can't. It's like

AP Strange: 01:51:42

food replacement?

Steve Mills: 01:51:43

Yeah it's like 90% of it. It's literally the opposite it's 90% of everything you need.

AP Strange: 01:51:49

I mean we have things like that but they probably have a ton of artificial stuff in them and

Steve Mills: 01:51:56

This just tastes like strawberry milk but this the lifeblood of a festival. Took a few cans of because you could take a few cans of this and like if you suddenly thought oh shit I forgot to eat because I've been doing shit, forgot to eat for the last two-twenty four hours, a can of this and you're fine. And the other thing is there's a thing called Jordan's crunch which basically owes its sort of marketplace to festivals. It was a sort of because it's totally vegetarian or whatever he actually makes vegan.

AP Strange: 01:52:36

A story like granola?

Steve Mills: 01:52:37

Yes it's like a granola thing but it comes with fruit and it was a very niche thing until the festivals and then suddenly they discovered they were selling bags and because it used to come in bags not even in boxes so literally you'd have a Chinese takeaway tray with granola and pour this over it. That was breakfast. Because the veggie burgers used to get at festivals fucking awesome. There's a couple of people I know that's how they made their living at festivals, they did you know cooking, the veggie burgers are just bloody awesome.

AP Strange: 01:53:24

Yeah.

Steve Mills: 01:53:25

Yeah, oh god yeah.

AP Strange: 01:53:26

So I mean all those sound better than trying to bring fish to the festival.

Steve Mills: 01:53:35

Well I'm saying to my mate earlier, said there was one guy, he had an old Royal Navy Bedford truck which was converted into a sort of cafe and noticed after a few photos I said to him one day got up one morning and went out said cup of tea please. Said, she always seemed to park next door to us at festivals', 'yeah good neighbors' I never thought of that but actually we went to so many festivals we had a bloke who thought of himself as our neighbour!' So yeah, mean his tea was fucking magic. You know was the joke about British and the tea that you can solve everything. Literally his tea was just fucking up. If you felt utterly shit, if you felt really fucked up, of his teas just had this remarkable restorative impact on you.

Steve Mills: 01:54:39

Festivals weren't, you know, you didn't burn the candle from both ends you started in the middle and worked out. Yeah. I remember the story about 84 Stonehenge from two friends of mine. He said I've got Stonehenge, we've got the bender together. Swear they had Hawkwing playing and he said we must have walked about three or four miles around the festival site looking for Hortmund and they were playing.

Steve Mills: 01:55:14

They played for about four hours the night of the solstice. And for Bates said, so what were the bloody whole site? We could hear Hortmund but come fucking find out where we're playing. So we get back to our fucking bender and we realised we'd basically put the bender behind the fucking stage. He basically got all the way over there to the back and they were literally 20 yards behind where the stage was.

Steve Mills: 01:55:41

That's one of the Canadian band. But that's classic festival. That's absolutely classic festival behavior.

AP Strange: 01:55:52

So he just kept going. He probably would have wandered on to the stage.

Steve Mills: 01:55:56

Oh no here we go. But yeah because he used to, they'd have a, with the bands out, he used to work they'd have a blackboard up by the side of the stage and he'd just go write your band's name down and just take it in and say how you're up next you know. So there goes some Smart Pills, two thousand DS, oh god, the Roombies, some good, some interesting bands but they got it in, it got a bit like they're either punk or reggae or reggae punk which was like stop it, you know what I mean?

AP Strange: 01:56:33

Right, right.

Steve Mills: 01:56:34

It got a bit boring so we became, we were like the jukebox. We kind of played because we started off just doing cover versions we just did the Greatest Etc sort of stuff so we played T Rex, played Steve Irbilage, played Frank Zappa, we played Algwynd, we played any number of different bands and that's how we knew our own material when we started writing it was decent because if it didn't sound crap compared to the Zappa song yeah it must be quite a decent song you know. So we had a sort of that's how kind of we started. But yeah I remember that first festival we played, the Oxford Report Redhoe one, I was so out of my tits. We were singing, I think it was 'Motorway City', 'Motorway City' has got an echo 'Motorway City', 'Motorway City' mowed mowed away said there's a repeat echo on some of the lines and I'm standing on the stage and I'm going I'm going, it's around through the night and I see this white sort of thing bouncing across the head to go and I'm singing.

Steve Mills: 01:57:47

So I ended up starting singing shit and watching it so I must have looked really bloody weird you know because I thought woo hoo! I only completely fucked it up once and that was on mushrooms and got through the whole set, got to the encore and we used to do Pretty Vacant as an encore and we used to do about $10 faster than the Pistols and I've done this whole gig and I sort of got to sort of congratulated myself a bit here, fucking hell we've done a whole gig on mushrooms, you know, fucked anything up, that's really good going. So we go back on and do the encore but it's kind of broken my concentration. So it starts up and I'm hanging off the mic stand, the vocalist, I'm hanging off the mic stand and thinking Fucking hell we rock, this band is really really good and suddenly I'm kind of aware that the whole band's looking at me. I turned down and all the band's looking at me and I fucking realised we're about halfway through this third verse and I hadn't said anything.

Steve Mills: 01:58:54

I was just standing there listening to it. Have to do this sounds really good. So they singing, acted like oh yeah well that was deliberate!' That's the only time I ever did a good trip. That was Hot Pickers Ball nineteen eighty six. It was a good night.

Steve Mills: 01:59:24

Yeah, I mean again that was the name family, Free Shepherd name Beard who let us play on their land. That was the Neem family. Apparently people, Neems now were a bunch of proper assholes but back then they were quite cool. Apparently the guy's taken his son, I guess it's his son, he's a bit of an asshole. I've heard some really nasty things about it but Andrew name was a really nice bloke.

Steve Mills: 01:59:53

He had a really nice little festival on his land. It was just like I say you can't outlook back with you I'm sure there were people who had horrible fucking exhibitions at festivals but I don't know many you know what I mean and then the people everybody I know had hassle at festivals said somebody came up and sorted it out, know, to sat and a couple of mates of mine who had sort of got lost in the passage of it and said it was amazing you know I was wandering around somebody fucking literally just said what's up mate, what's going on? I said oh sit down mate have a cup of tea, have a fucking joint man that'll take the edge off it. So just people just being nice. That's kind of what it was really about people being bloody nice to each other.

Steve Mills: 02:00:45

Yeah imagine that. Kind of weird. I'd say looking back you know all that hassle because people were being nice to each Most of the local police were fined. They didn't like having these sort of military operations on their land. In fact the guy who retired as the Chief Constable of Wiltshire the year before the Beanfield he said he would never have allowed it to happen he said he wouldn't have happened with my watch, said I'm not having the police and not military fucking thugs.

Steve Mills: 02:01:19

So he said I'm disgusted by what might happen and a lot of police officers it's really funny the festival's worse to a degree depending on the Chief Constable but if the Chief Constable was away you probably couldn't get away with the festival but if the Chief Constable was cool they were fine. There's some Chief Constables I remember when we played in Penzance, we played the fucking, was mad, basically it was a festival on a recreation ground in the middle of a fucking town. It was really weird, mean we've all thought it was on the edge of town and it wasn't, we were surrounded by bloody houses. And on the Sunday night, no the Monday night when we left, as we got to the gate the Chief Constable stopped the van, stopped our van, knocked on the windows, can I have a word? I would just like to thank you for taking notes to the curfew because they basically said could you sort of kill it after eleven?

Steve Mills: 02:02:24

And we were like yeah sure, I'd say by eleven everything was quiet but he said I just want to thank you lads for taking notice of the curfews and spot on 11:00, it's all quiet, everybody's that same sort of thing and it was the way he came. So yeah, so it wasn't all bad you know like I said. People did, I think a lot of people did realise the vast majority of petty professionals were really decent people. Yeah. It was bit weird you know, looked a bit weird.

Steve Mills: 02:02:55

I'd say when you see we'd look at some of the fashions there's still like six, seven years before Grunge. Yeah, right. One way they, Duvanna just looked like a festival people, just looked like a beautiful people from her festival and I remember because we dressed like that it was really weird. All of a sudden 1990 people from record companies are like oh, oh they look really cool don't they? Two years precinct wouldn't have couldn't get bloody arrested.

Steve Mills: 02:03:29

Look what they look like. So you know and then suddenly bang it's like oh right yeah oh yeah you look cool now. Corporates will sell you it back somehow won't they like to say I've done it with Glastonbury. Well

AP Strange: 02:03:52

and then the Tubular Dog album came out in what? '96? Oh. So it was right around that that grunge era.

Steve Mills: 02:04:00

Yeah.

AP Strange: 02:04:01

On the tail

Steve Mills: 02:04:01

end of I mean, it's kinda that was kinda weird. Because we'd never really band split up, the original lineup split up because suddenly we became that successful. That's why we split up with one member of the band, but one of one of the guys in the band, it just became it was like oh this is dead serious. We kind of reached it, it was really weird. I remember we played a couple of gigs after we did, I remember when we came off the tour, did the first tour we did with all sort of thirty odd dates, thirty five days.

Steve Mills: 02:04:40

We did a gig in Oxford, she was Red Bull, so what we did, we met each other and I remember thinking it was like we'd lost the nervous energy of playing with Auckland, you know if you don't get it wrong you're gonna get fucking booed up. Said you know what I mean. We're still the only band who ever supported Auckland to get an uncle dreadful words and then we hit a new plateau and we got to the point where I knew we were playing gigs and we were just on a completely good deal, we could play with anybody and nobody really wanted to go on after us, not because we were brilliant but because of the energy. Just become the stagecraft, we've got it nailed, you know what I mean? We've grown into it, what have you, and then record companies really started to- we were getting serious from very big record companies and one of the guys that wasn't what he wanted to do all of a sudden he could sense that had forty-fifty people come to every gig following us around the country.

Steve Mills: 02:05:54

Know when you get to that sort of thing that's when you know that you've got something. So you know that you start to think it's like you know when there's forty-fifty people who turn up at every fucking gig there's normally another 150 people who turn up as well because they've heard about it word-of-mouth whatever sort of thing. So one of the guys he just thought oh I don't, this is because it's like a job you know what I mean. He didn't want that level of success he wasn't comfortable with. And I mean we carried on playing live, know when he left we got a couple more live, we had several very successful, but it was never quite the same because he and I had a special he was the ribbon guitar player and used to sort of like any song I wrote I'd give it to him and we'd jam it with a band and if it worked it worked, if it didn't it didn't and he was like my litmus player for any of the songs.

Steve Mills: 02:06:57

If you wanted to have a go at playing it in the rehearsal I thought oh can't be that bad and then if everybody else went with it you'd think okay this one works so I kind of lost my touchstone in that sense and he was a natural rhythm player there ain't many around you know what I mean? Most people want to be a lead guitar player whereas he just happened to be a rhythm player. He ended up playing bass and when he left he went in to play bass in another band, but it was just two mates playing in that, that's what made it became, it lost the matey thing because we were all mates just playing together you know and then it gradually got more and more professional and all of a sudden moved famous you know what I mean it's like oh really okay Like I say the whole fucking crazy thing was before the net how it fills a vacuum, you know what I mean, if people don't know. So we do an interview after a gig in London and at the end of the interview the journalist says wow it's amazing that you've all got such, you speak English so well.

Steve Mills: 02:08:12

What? Well he said we've even got sort of slight you've got regional accents. I said well, hey what do you mean? He said well you're German aren't you? We went hey what?

Steve Mills: 02:08:27

He said aren't you? And the story was because we came out of nowhere and we didn't have people in the music business, all of a sudden we're playing big venues and shit and we're playing on the bill you know not only with Hawkeye but with the Damned and Suicide and all these fucking other indie bands and what have you know, were on the bill with them. So the music business had come up with two stories. We were German and we were all the offspring of Cannes and Noy and German Prout Rock bands. Well the other story and this is a fucking mad one because you know Dog Chill the Dog, do you know there was an there was an offshoot of the Grateful Dead called Kingfish?

AP Strange: 02:09:16

Right,

Steve Mills: 02:09:18

well okay so in '88 when we played the Hammers for Sodium which is like you know Madison Square Garden in The UK, The Dead Run Tour in Europe and they took time off touring to come and see Hortwind playing at Hammersmith and we were guests with them. So the Grateful Dead had turned up to see Hawkwind, this mysterious band who like on the first night holds about 5,200 people, on the first night it was about a third of the seats were empty when we walked on, on the second night you could count the empty seats. So the story then was because the Grateful Dead were there and were called Kingfish and we were choosing the dog God Halliburton, that we were related to the Grateful Dead and that's all down to because they didn't know who we were, because we weren't so and so's kids and we've made our own way in the business. We haven't had any help as such sort of thing. But that's kind of, that's proved the internet.

Steve Mills: 02:10:32

People just, where people don't know they just make sure it's up. Well they can't possibly be, this famous without being somebody else famous as kids.

AP Strange: 02:10:42

Right.

Steve Mills: 02:10:43

For what really? So I mean that's just how fucking weird it was. I remember one dude, a journalist, who played I think it's Italian country, who wrote a bill with I think it was that was with the damned and we were second on the bill and there was a journo and we're all sitting outside, well nervous energy you can imagine you know, and we're fucking smoking, I think we must have put about an eighth of an ounce in this fucking pipe, smoked it. It's like I worked out you bastards, I can hardly stand up, you're going unstable because of the height, you know the nervous energy and so all it did with us was calm us down a bit. So we all walked on stage with this journalist basically he said I was fucking flying after the gig he goes fucking hell man, I was absolutely flying watching you that tonight.

Steve Mills: 02:11:49

I was like really? He said yeah, how the fucking hell do you play like that? And we were like well we don't, that's the point because of the nervous part all that doubt does is kill a bit of the bloody nerves for us. I mean you know, it's like anything isn't it? It's like you've got people who are brilliant, life's a series of tests in any field.

Steve Mills: 02:12:11

In music it's a it's the same as writing. You wrote when you were 15, you wrote when you were 20 years old, you started writing poems, you put out your little books that you put out, sew your own books of poetry, gigs you did and then you go we come online you say you know what I mean you move up you gradually move up and then eventually maybe somebody from a you know you were writing for a place that shut down didn't you?

AP Strange: 02:12:39

For what?

Steve Mills: 02:12:40

You were writing for a website that closed? Yeah exactly and it's the same with music you've got kids who can play in the bedroom you put them in the pub and they fall apart. Right. You've got people who are brilliant in the pub band you put them on a medium sized stage can't project it just doesn't work. You've got people who can play medium sized venues you put them in a big venue and they freeze they can't fill the stage and I remember the night before we played the first night we played at Hammersmith Odie because like I said that's like getting to Madison Square Garden You know the old joke how do you get to Madison Square Garden?

Steve Mills: 02:13:23

You practice a lot. Me and Andy the drummer were standing in the same room, we just talked, we'd just seen Levy, I was like we're coming down the stage because it's like a really tight thing at the back of the ambulance with Toby, so we're coming down this sort of spiral, almost like a spiral staircase and Levy's banging his lass up against the wall and he stops being thrust right let's have a fucking good gig, right let me just carry on on stage as you do. We're standing waiting to go on and Andy looks at me and goes are you fucking nervous? I'm I'm shitting it, I'm absolutely shitting myself and I'm like I'm looking at I'm kind of looking out from the side it's the first night I think this is fucking Armour Smithodian what the fuck am I doing here? You're on two steps out of the stage bang this is what I'm here for.

Steve Mills: 02:14:21

Really rude I went from like what the fuck am I here doing here to this is what I do. I told you a story didn't I back the Theatre gig 1976 when I first moved to London where I was sitting in a circle and watching Phil Linnet and all of a sudden it's me, because I had waist length hair at the time, I've got hair cut out about there and I'm singing on stage at Hammersmith Odeon and I'm looking there and I'm thinking what the fuck, I'm not even at this time I wasn't in a band, no intention of being in a band, I wanted to be a promoter and yet for thirty seconds that night I'm looking at me standing on stage, the same, the hair to about here instead of down here singing into my mind and I'm thinking what the fuck and then just as quickly just bang and I'm back and still winning and I always remember thinking what the fuck was that about? Because I said I wondered, I had no intention you know didn't play in the band. So they go fucking twelve years later it was exactly me and I remembered thinking looking in the mirror before we went outside looking around and said fuck I looked like a dick that night.

Steve Mills: 02:15:46

I had like a time slip whatever I don't know.

AP Strange: 02:15:51

Oh it's like a vision of the future yeah

Steve Mills: 02:15:53

yeah yeah yeah and at the time I just thought oh it's completely bloody insane singing what the fuck? Are you joking? I'm having a joke because I played bass and stuff so they said what the fuck? No way, what the bloody hell? I don't remember just snapping out but he was in the middle of Still in Love With You.

Steve Mills: 02:16:15

The song Still in Love With You by Thing Lizzie because it's a brilliant gig. I mean it's one of the ones they recorded on Loud and Dangerous so it's like kind of weird but it's the same with your writing. I have no doubt that you'd have no problem writing a book and getting it published and you'd say go go go go but a lot of people they write the book but they've never let anybody else see There's levels of everything with that sort of thing and it's the same. There's a lot of very bang average musicians who have great careers because they can do it, because they can carry on every stage they can make it. There was a guy called Dave Clark at my school who's a brilliant guitar player and he played in his band, he did three gigs.

Steve Mills: 02:17:05

The first gig he walked on stage Traute Tact turned around and played the whole gig with his back to the audience. The second gig all you could see was his lead going across the side of the stage and he was hidden behind the PA so in the third gig he didn't turn up. He couldn't do it. Brilliant guitar player but put him in public bang, fall apart and it's the same with speaking in public you can do it, I can do it. A lot of people can't, a lot of people can't you know I've won prizes for public speaking back in the day of Yeah I had a fucking mantle piece full of fucking prizes for public speaking They asked us not to enter because we kept winning shit, so the school asked us not to enter so we rented as our own group.

Steve Mills: 02:18:02

The Attleboro group wouldn't it anyway? And that was the Burwood Mountain incident I'm sure we just finished a competition, a debating competition at the council house and we were walking back when the Birmingham incident when we saw the thing go over the sky in front of us and I remember turning around and three of us went fuck me they've done it! Hit the button because it was that white, it was that little, and then as it sort of faded away we could see this sort of and it sort of it moved like that because it's going really quite slow, so that was the Bourbon Mountain, whatever landed hit Bourbon Mountain that was it. That was like I said but that's life isn't it? There'll always be people who sort of like decry other people for having that ability because they think they're better but if you can't do it in public so you know what I mean if you want a career in anything like that you've got to able to you've got to have this sort of brass neck, crap stupidity whatever it is that allows you to go out there and do it in front of people you know what I mean?

Steve Mills: 02:19:26

I mean I'd never looked at a video until I was 50 years old and eventually somebody said to me have you seen that video of you back in 1980 with trespass? No, I don't want to, I said because I probably look a complete twat. Probably look the biggest twat of the universe.

AP Strange: 02:19:50

That's thing and then you become self conscious the next time you step on stage. I

Steve Mills: 02:19:56

thought I'm 50 now, I ain't throwing shapes on stage and all that bollocks if I'm singing, I'm singing, know, so okay have a look and I was fucking amazed, I was like shit I really did it, I had that, I could see what people meant, I just had that sort of arrogance because I had a friend who's never really into the music I would play used to come and see me live. I wonder I said to her, Robin has swanked, said, the fuck do you ever come to see me? I said, well don't play, you don't really, so not really the sort of music you're into at all, none of my bands have ever really been what you're into. And he just looked at me about these really good classical guitar players he teaches. He just looks at me, he says you've got one of the best fuck off smiles I've ever seen.

Steve Mills: 02:20:43

He says you just don't give a shit. He said you can tell when you look at you don't give a shit. I said really? He said yeah, said because I'm never aware, I've never seen myself. He said yeah, he just thought like basically fuck up, I'm doing this, fuck you.

Steve Mills: 02:21:01

I said yeah, he said yeah, this is all I love watching it. He said because Sophie and Poplar in the band really have got that, most people are so fucking self conscious because he was giving shit about music and looks like he teaches. He was a brilliant classical guitar player, he was a busker, he travelled all over, I mean he travelled all over fucking Europe. Told you we went to see France Apple together 1978 isn't there too. Next day we went down the Portbello Road, we got separated somewhere down the Portbello Road, the next time I saw him was seven years later at the General Wolfery Coventry.

Steve Mills: 02:21:46

That's me, that's me the festival person. I said what the fuck happened to you that night when we got supper down the pub? I said how I'd it in Switzerland. I said what happened to you? I said I don't know, I ended up in a fucking party on a boat in Bristol.

Steve Mills: 02:21:59

Don't know it. And like we didn't bump into again because fucking 78 might be bumped into each other again in a pub in Coventry in 1985.

AP Strange: 02:22:11

Wow.

Steve Mills: 02:22:12

And he'd literally been all over the bloody world by then, so he decided to come back and go to college to do music. He could

AP Strange: 02:22:24

do a lot in seven years.

Steve Mills: 02:22:27

Oh, had some wine. Well, I mean literally he lived with the family up in the Rift Mountains. Fucking hell yeah, lived with the family up in the Rift Mountains for a year growing, you know, growing dope and what have you to sort of leave madmen. Dave Hutchinson, little Dave, everybody knows him. You don't like it because he is, he's tiny to be honest, but everybody knows him as little Dave, his name's Dave Hutchinson, really nice bloke.

Steve Mills: 02:23:01

But fucking hell that was so funny bumping into a pulp. I remember girlfriend at the time said he said oh the last time I saw him was dead pulp by the road seven years ago so we went to see friends happen together and the next day we went out with a glass and that was it we just went separate ways for seven years there you go. But that kind of sums it up. The other thing that people forget about fossils there was four cities in Britain in the 1980s Bristol, Nottingham, Sheffield, Coventry and they were the hippie cities. A lot of people from the festivals that's where they spend the winter or if they wanted to go and stay with somebody they go to Nottingham and they were the four cities where you'd go to the pub and people would smoke dope in the pub, people would smoke joints in the pubs sort of thing, and you'd go somewhere else, you'd skin up and all the locals would go what the fuck are you doing?

Steve Mills: 02:24:06

I'll just get the joint together. What in the pub? It's nothing, yeah why! And it was so different, mean Coventry was notorious for it but those four cities and if you look at the music scene it's really interesting a lot of bands came out, had the trip up scene come out of Massive Attack, Portishead they came out of the Bristol scene, Sheffield you had Pulp and two or three other bands that came from Sheffield, Coventry had the Dogs and there's couple of other bands came out of Coventry sort of thing in that so they were the sort of places that sort of held on to the Indy sort of ethic even more than Liverpool and Manchester. They were a bit more sort of corporate because that whole fucking scene, the hacienda.

Steve Mills: 02:25:01

Hacienda was really nasty really. I mean it was great if you just see it jump out of your face and you just go, but it was fucking serious criminals involved with the hacienda and all that scene. And it wasn't, our scene wasn't. We did criminals, didn't work, you know what I mean? I'm sure there weren't, know, a few dozen people.

Steve Mills: 02:25:22

Funny enough, one of the people I knew came from a genuine gangster family in London. My mother was the lass I knew, really really nice lass, very very sound lass, but her family were proper fucking money criminals. Know, the sort of person that cocky spokesman don't fucking always be the account!' Well, they're very much that way. But yeah, she told us a few interesting stories because you know the family told her about the times in London in the 60s and whatever because London in the 60s that must have been weird that must have been fucking you know that must have been the right fucking life. Bag of nails and all those places but again there are a lot of criminals involved with it you know I was spoken because Sharon Osbourne sued her own father you know Sharon Osbourne's dad is John Arden Jack Records and he was a really nasty bastard.

AP Strange: 02:26:32

Yeah that's what I heard.

Steve Mills: 02:26:33

Yeah yeah so she gets it from. Fairly fucking over. I would love it's funny because people like you and Poet and all you know all the people I know from The States might have you I would love you to have been there. Yeah. Sounds like long time.

Steve Mills: 02:26:56

Oh yeah, fuck it. I said, a lot of the stuff that we talked about, weird shit, it kind of happened. You know what I mean? There was genuinely weird shit used to that sort of thing and people were like, people would die from it, you know what mean? It's like, why fucking hell man?

Steve Mills: 02:27:15

But you reckon, you know, would know So, from that point of view, were we trying to raise it? Yeah, I guess we were. I guess we were, you know, think it was the Eurysian part of it. We never really talked about that, did with the Orisian part of it, the main part of what we've done, the festival bit. But there was a definite undercurrent know, I didn't know Kerry Thornton or any of those people, it didn't really come up.

Steve Mills: 02:27:50

But like I say, was trying to say, think you know I've been trying to work out how my lineage came out, how did the people I was influenced by, where did they get it from? I think this dwarfs group must be it. Think that's probably where they got it from and I think if we were to look I suspect there's some cross pollination between the Dwarves and the Kerry Thorneley crew.

AP Strange: 02:28:20

Yeah, but I mean a lot of lot of them were yourself included and influenced by Robert Anton Wilson too.

Steve Mills: 02:28:28

Yes, much so. Wilson was very much our guru and we went to see him at Warwick Uni in 1984 and it was literally fucking full of people from the past. So, mean he really enjoyed it. I could tell he really enjoyed that night because he knew he had a class he had literally a fucking room full of people that were all fucking weird as him, you know. Because I can imagine kind

AP Strange: 02:28:57

of where the Stardog name comes from isn't it like the series connection yeah

Steve Mills: 02:29:01

yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's right yeah but serious dog Stove was what our company was called. If we did, I mean you know we ran a business for five or six years. We actually ran a business it was called Sirius Dog Stove. Well I mean so yeah that was to do the thing that, you know, I mean, remember we've showed you the pictures of Anarchy Bridge and everything, know, because I mean that goes back to those photographs from 'eighty three, without seeing the Finals and all that's in Colventry. So it was sort of, you know, it was definitely part of it all and like, know, same festivals.

Steve Mills: 02:29:47

I don't know if Fools never went to one, maybe he did, I don't know. It's quite possible. When he toured here they were still very much alive, there were still quite a few so I wonder if she ever bothered going along because they used to have these weird little doos in old Brahway cuttings and what have you in London. And when I went to the strongest, that's where I bought the strongest doe for everything, the one that completely blew me away. That's where I bought that, it was at one of those dudes there and that was 77.

Steve Mills: 02:30:27

Because Leary was banned from The UK, They wouldn't let Leary into the country. Wilson got in but Leary was the person who didn't go after it wasn't that he was basically considered person non grafting, he wasn't looking to lay him in, wouldn't give him a visa. He tried to do, tried, Larry tried to do a couple of lecture tours over and broke up, you're not getting any trouble because he was like, he was the poster boy for it all wasn't he?

AP Strange: 02:30:59

Yeah, right.

Steve Mills: 02:31:00

Troublemaker and all that sort of shit. Whereas you know Rob really went under the radar didn't he? Because I had really Sentiye Cosmic Trigger?

AP Strange: 02:31:19

No, was earlier than that I think. Oh no, maybe that's right.

Steve Mills: 02:31:23

Was Sentiye Cosmic Trigger?

AP Strange: 02:31:26

Yeah, that sounds right.

Steve Mills: 02:31:31

Because that was like, you know, remember that hit in The See I'm talking about Britain, it might have been published earlier in The States, but you know I remembered how hard that hit and reading it and thinking wow fucking hell.

AP Strange: 02:31:45

Yeah the first book was '77.

Steve Mills: 02:31:48

Yeah yeah I thought so yeah so '78 probably in The UK but you should probably try and read some of the Macfaran stuff as well because text of the festivals is Macfaran where everybody's living on free festivals. It's like a post apocalyptic thing and the gods are haunted with the rolling stones and big deities and whatever, it's really weird. But Mick Farron played the rambler in all his books, were sort of concurrent to their contemporary role. Mick Farron was a bit like the British Robert Antoine Wilson in a way to a degree but more fiction. He really get involved with the sort of psychonaut stuff.

Steve Mills: 02:32:33

I don't think there's really ever been any of those British books like that Honestly, I can't think of any. I don't think there's any British, you know like I've got Trick Top Hat, The Universe Next Door, I'm thinking of the other titles, They kind of spread out didn't you? Fucking hell, I've got a book cash for them. Falcon Press, is that what they were in The States? Yeah Falcon Press books.

Steve Mills: 02:33:06

Prometheus Rising. That's another one. Because like I said you know I'm just reading them off now, those are the books we're all reading. Like I said, I remember I told you the '20 '3 thing didn't I? I couldn't work out, I was 23 never really had anything to do I can't really honestly think I have.

Steve Mills: 02:33:25

And we were building a rehearsal studio at the time, this was 1995, and the NEC had had an exhibition and somebody said to us I've got a load of panelling if you want it, you can have this panelling. Okay so they went and picked it up and literally the night before I'd said 23, well I lived at 23, that's the first house I lived in, that's really the only 23 I can think of. So the next day we get to the fucking rehearsal studio to put all this paneling up and it's like 40 or 50 fucking sheets of ply, what you call it, every bloody one of them's got the number 23 stencil loaded in red. I said oh well there you go, I remember John just looking at me and said well there you go, 23 for what he's doing. Said 40 the fuckers.

Steve Mills: 02:34:21

I'm guessing it was Stand Number 23 that they'd dismantled from whatever exhibition it was probably Stand 23 so it's just weird that you know like I say literally there's a whole fucking van full of panels with Number 23 on them. So I remember thinking well there you go I'm obviously meant to be reading this shit.

AP Strange: 02:34:43

Yeah it's a classic and crazy so.

Steve Mills: 02:34:47

Oh gosh yeah yeah yeah yeah I mean it's like.

AP Strange: 02:34:50

Well we should probably wind this down a

Steve Mills: 02:34:53

little bit. Yeah. Actually, yeah, for another one. I'm chewing your ear off here, mate.

AP Strange: 02:34:57

We we do wibble when we get wibbling. So

Steve Mills: 02:35:02

Well, we haven't had a good Wibble for ages.

AP Strange: 02:35:06

That's true. Yeah. Yeah. We do it more often, I think. But

Steve Mills: 02:35:13

Well, I guess we've been

AP Strange: 02:35:14

a pretty good one. There's a lot there's a lot of good stories in there.

Steve Mills: 02:35:17

Yeah, I hope you've something you can use. But I mean it's like, it's like I say, I'm sitting here in this place now and I've been here for forty fucking two years now and this is my base and I had to tour this place for the first ten years I was here. Mean I really sort of like the first few months but from then on it was like the festival, it was like you're away from sort of early May you'd come home for a couple of days every week and that was it then you're off again. It was fucking hell man. I really do wish I could take a few people back know, stick them in the time capsule, go back and just sit because I think it's one of those things that once you experience it you come back and go oh yeah it must have been fucking awesome.

AP Strange: 02:36:12

Maybe I can astrally project myself there.

Steve Mills: 02:36:17

I don't think that sadly I don't really think there's any proper I don't think it's a proper documentary. There's lots of people took lots of film.

AP Strange: 02:36:26

Yeah I mean there really ought to be you think that you'd think somebody would do that.

Steve Mills: 02:36:30

Yeah yeah I mean I've asked around because I know there's several films that the dogs like that I've never seen that people say oh yeah I'll see the film with you. I was really? And you go oh yeah the light show looks amazing I'm like really? I don't know I was always looking the other way. This is it man.

Steve Mills: 02:36:50

I going to change my dog to Wally now.

AP Strange: 02:36:55

Yeah, there you go.

Steve Mills: 02:36:56

I'm going to be Wally dog from now on.

AP Strange: 02:36:59

Well, that's the original Wally was a dog anyway so.

Steve Mills: 02:37:03

Yeah, well, yeah, that's weird, isn't it? That's kind of weird. I didn't know that you know until I always thought that was an urban legend because you hear so many stories about Wally where it all came from.

AP Strange: 02:37:15

Yeah.

Steve Mills: 02:37:15

But apparently yeah that is the real story then it's from the Isle of Wife Festival so Paul Blayne will give you his dunk wally. Who could have thought that it'd end up with so many well it's funny and I'll go back online now you know and look at Facebook and be quite chuckled you know that fucking oh yeah to a certain extent you owe your fucking you know I look at all the sort of like independent thinking people I said oh loads are really cool and you know when you go on Blue Sky when you go on Blue Sky and even threads so all the nutters on there sort of thing oh I was kind of smiling and thinking you'd love the fact you'd fit in the festival Yeah yeah yeah you'd have loved it.

AP Strange: 02:38:04

Oh that's good stuff. Yeah. Anyway

Steve Mills: 02:38:07

young man it's a pleasure to talk to you as ever. It's

AP Strange: 02:38:12

a pleasure as always thanks thanks for coming on and sharing these, festival stories with us, with my listeners.

Steve Mills: 02:38:19

Oh, thank you, Mr Strange. And don't forget. What was the coffee station say? Oi! All

AP Strange: 02:38:32

right talk to you soon.

Steve Mills: 02:38:33

Talk to you soon young man thanks man.