Review: The Horse and Flipchart 40th anniversary festival

 

26th-27th May 2012. Tickets from £2 (carton of calypso orange and packet of cheese and onion crisps included in ticket price)

 

 

 

To some that original festival of forty years ago may seem just a crazy, drug-fug of a dream, preserved only in the browning photographs that adorn the walls of the toilets at the Horse and Flipchart. The images of such bands as the Oscillating Strawberry Deckchairs, Captain Alain's Bourbon Distillery and Slut eyeing one up as you take a slash seem like time-slides from a lost generation. But that's for the people who were there at the time. The rest can have no idea. Today's current band of hipsters and geezers that take their alcohol and exercise their mouths here can only imagine what it was like that barmy weekend in 1972 when almost a hundred people descended on the place and for just forty-eight hours the Horse and Flipchart seemed as if it was the true centre of the universe. And now, despite the wanton destruction and deaths that marred the 10th, 20th and 30th anniversary celebrations, comes this, the Horse and Flipchart 40th anniversary festival.