The day the hippies came to Worthing

Local paper condemnation and a threatened council injunction couldn’t stop Worthing’s first underground rock festival

- Dicky Howett

“Everybody who had anything to do with Phun City – whether they went there, helped arrange it or opposed it – it changed their life. It was a communal experience.”

So says Gez Cox, one of two former Worthing High School boys who helped set up the south’s first free music festival in their former hometown 50 years ago this month.

In the lead-up, to the free event, the Worthing Herald ran stories warning of a “pop festival invasion” on Ecclesden Common – an open stretch of land opposite the Fox Inn in Patching now occupied by the A27 dual carriageway. There were predictions that 20,000 drug-taking hippies would invade the quiet coastal resort.

Hippies did set up camp in the woods surrounding the festival site, on one occasion bonding together to help move the stage 100 yards when it was set up in the wrong location. Gez, now living in Marin County, 40 miles north of San Francisco, admits there was drug-taking. But the numbers of revelers descending between 24 and 26 July 1970 only totaled 10,000 at most – with caterer Mr. A Carter complaining to one local paper that he’d had to throw away 400 packs of his salmon and chicken sandwiches.

In his 2002 autobiography Give the Anarchist A Cigarette, Gez’s old schoolmate Mick Farren, once the leader of the band The Deviants and editor of International Times (IT), describes the night the festival was born in his Maida Vale flat: “Our assets totaled a half-finished bottle of vodka, an almost untouched quid deal and two and ninepence in cash. ‘Is that enough to launch a rock festival?’ We all looked at each other and shrugged. No one had told us it wasn’t, so what the hell?”