Photograph
Rivington Pike
1976

“The first Rivington was a small affair organised my me and Pete Henry using my Marshall 50 and Sid Kavanagh's Vox AC30 with about 50 people in 1974 using the smaller pavillion in the Rivington Chinese and Japanese gardens as a focal point with just recorded music. The following year, we joined forces with Paul McCracken who'd run a similar small event in '74 in the railway cutting at Red Rock, near Wigan, featuring John Foxx, later founder of Ultravox! Paul built a mixer to improve our sound and we ran a festival at Red Rock and Rivington using 2 Altec Lansing Horn loaded speakers that Paul and I built. We used the larger pavillion in the Chinese gardens as our stage. '76 and '77 we hired a PA system from SAI and built a stage with scaffolding donated by Turner Scaffolding in Preston.”