ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the development of the relationship between politics and popular music in the united kindom (UK) from the arrival of rock and roll in the mid-1950s to the present. While Harker argues that Abrams's work ultimately comforted those in authority by showing that these new working class consumers could be coped with and a profit made from them, it is also important to note, as Laing does, that it was rock and roll which turned youth into a self-conscious generation. The issues around festivals came to a head via the People's Free Festival (PFF). Held annually from 1972 in Windsor Great Park without the permission of its controllers, the Crown Commissioners, the festival was overtly political in its pursuit of alternative lifestyles and disregard of both property and drugs laws. Short-lived pop political movements such as Rock Against Thatcher and Rock Against Sexism floundered and did little to either raise leftist spirits or engender political change.
