ABSTRACT
This chapter examines changing state policies on popular music festivals, the most significant live music event for both rock commerce and rock politics. It focuses on live music and the local state. The chapter also focuses more generally on the ways in which local authorities sought to control what live music its citizens could experience. Such control is usually described in terms of ‘bans’, which could be exercised most easily when an authority was not just licensing a venue but owned it. The most intractable source of tension between rock promoters and local authorities was noise. Leeds’ noise policy reflected a concern for the welfare of audiences, but a second kind of noise problem was the effect of live music events on local residents, a problem that was posed in particular by outdoor events. The Arts Council’s most significant music policy initiatives in the late 1960s and through the 1970s were still made in the name of high art music.
