On This Day In 1971…..

……the Tregye Festival in Truro, Cornwall played host to a superb selection of bands, including an early appearance from Queen. Here’s the original flyer/handbill with the full line-up…..

With Arthur Brown’s Kingdom Come and Hawkwind as the headliners we think it must have been a pretty freaky day out! So who else were on the bill?

Duster Bennett Band

Long serving British blues disciple who would often perform as a one-man-band or with fellow blues luminaries Peter Green and Top Topham

Tea & Symphony

Largely forgotten prog/folk duo that recorded a couple of albums for top prog imprint Harvest, here’s a taste…

Brewers Droop

Oi..stop sniggering at the back! This short-lived band from High Wycombe counted a young Mark Knopfler amongst their alumni, they specialised in a tasty form of bluesy proto-pub rock and were a regular feature on the live circuit of the era.

Indian Summer

Just one (very collectable) album released by this British rock/prog act who shared the same management as Black Sabbath.

Graphite

Super cult late ’60s early ’70s act who appear to have released nothing at the time (please correct me if I’m wrong), although bizarrely underground reissue label Audio Archives released the band’s set from this very festival – I kid you not..here’s the link

Queen

So what do we know? They’d played quite a few gigs in the South West by this stage, the first of which were under their original name ‘Smile’, here’s a few words taken from the artcornwallorg blog by David Hook was the guitarist and founder of Graphite who played at Tregye in 1971 with Queen….

“I don’t really remember much about Queen’s set. Which is extraodinary given how successful they later came, and how amazing they were live later. But then they seemed rather ordinary. I remember thinking they were just another heavy rock band and there were loads of them around then. But I do remember them off stage.

The dressing room was a great big room in the hotel – one of the big lounges – and all the bands shared it. I’d met Arthur Brown and Hawkwind before as I was entertainments secretary at Reading (I’d also worked as a booker at Clearwater Productions and Hawkwind and Arthur Brown’s Kingdom Come were 2 of our acts), and actually he had been at Reading as an undergraduate so we had lots in common. Anyway Arthur was the same off stage as he was on it. Larger than life. And he would do these amazing singing exercises. Scales and so on.

But in the dressing room Queen too had a real presence, a real aura. They weren’t casual like the rest of us hippies. They seemed more arty. And they had hangers on, which perhaps helped give them aura too. I can’t remember what they were wearing but they reminded me a bit of Roxy Music, who I met later. I remember thinking when I saw Roxy that this was the end of the hippy era.”

Here’s an image of the ticket that your £1 (£1.25 on the day)….