FIFTY years ago, The Incredible String Band were booked to play a “little folk festival” in upstate New York. The only Scottish act on the bill, the bohemian band had an unusual trip to Woodstock, according to multi-instrumentalist Robin Williamson – and one unrelated to the warnings given by stage manager Chip Monck for festival-goers to avoid the “brown acid”.

Monck’s team had been given an ultimatum three days before Woodstock was due to start. Banned from their original site, organisers had not had enough time to prepare.

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On August 12 they had two options: complete the perimeter fencing or the stage. By the next day, the choice had been made, with a large crowd already waiting in front of the half-built stage and reports of thousands of cars choking the roads to Max Yasgur’s dairy farm.

Promoters Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld and backers Joel Rosenman and John P Roberts had told local authorities they expected no more than 50,000 people. Ten times that number made it.

“We were taken there in a military helicopter,” says Williamson. “We were all strapped in, the String Band and Ravi Shankar. We didn’t know what we were flying into. When it banked over the crowd, all you could see were little dots, the heads of people all the way to the horizon. Half a million is an abstract number, but to see such an amount of people in one place, you don’t forget it.”

It wasn’t The Incredible String Band’s greatest gig, he admits.

“We were supposed to play the first night but the rain got our drums so wet that we couldn’t play,” says Williamson. “We had to play the following afternoon, after Canned Heat, which was the wrong place for us. They were extremely rock and roll and loud whereas we were extremely, extremely acoustic.”

Rain delays dogged the weekend. Originally meant to close the festival on Sunday evening, Jimi Hendrix tore into The Star-Spangled Banner at 10am on Monday morning.

By that time, many of the remaining 30,000 souls had endured poor sanitation and lack of food.

Mud was everywhere, John Fogerty describing Creedence Clearwater Revival’s stage-view as “a painting of a Dante scene, just bodies from hell, all intertwined and asleep, covered with mud”.

Though echoing the images from 2017’s failed, £1000-a-ticket Fyre Festival, entry to Woodstock was $18 for three days – around £95 today – and declared free when people simply walked through the rudimentary fencing.

The tension between business and idealism has been a constant as the number of festivals has grown over the years, right to present-day ructions over Woodstock 50, scheduled for August in Watkins Glen, 155 miles from Yasgur’s farm.

In 2018, a report for Mintel valued the UK festival and outdoor concert market to be worth around £2459 million. With at least 15 large outdoor festivals taking place in Scotland across the summer, people of all ages continue to be drawn, despite concerns around price, gender imbalance, duplicate line-ups and a “creeping classism” where access to better facilities can be bought.

According to Johnny Lynch, aka Pictish Trail, the organiser of Eigg-based annual spring bash Howlin’ Fling, there’s “currently an entire generation of festivals packaged by and catered to the super-rich – devoid of any character”.

“A truly great festival” such as Glastonbury, he continues, retains the power to “completely alter your life”, however.

“Everyone is accepted,” he says. “At a time in which there’s so much political division, a trip to a festival like that can restore your faith in human nature.”

Festivals serve a “deep social function”, says author Alan Bissett.

“For as long as there have been tribes, people have gathered together to celebrate, which is why we feel that freedom at modern-day music festivals. We’re escaping the daily grind of work and tapping into something ancient and liberating.”

Folklorist Amanda Edmiston agrees, noting how the modern music-led festival shares features with older gatherings held to mark changing seasons, such as Lammas fairs.

As much else of our lives atomises, we want to come together to eat, drink and dance, says Stuart McMillan, one half of Slam, the techno duo behind Riverside Festival.

“We naturally gravitate towards dancing in a crowd together, collectively,” he says. “It has become a rite of passage.”

“Music festivals can indeed be viewed as a rite of passage,” says anthropologist and photographer Jannica Honey. “The first stage is leaving something behind, entering the festival and detaching from what was before. The second is the ‘liminal phase’, or as we call it nowadays, getting wasted. The third is re-entering society with a ‘new’ identity.”

She adds: “When I arrived back home from my first festival at 16, I didn’t only feel like an adult, but also that I had been invited to something else, that thing that humans can only experience in a group. I think it’s called worship. In my case it was Red Hot Chili Peppers at Roskilde in Denmark.”