Those convicted at the Crown Court of robbery (that is, looting, however minor) during these nocturnal disturbances were sentenced with stunning celerity to an average of 29.8 months in prison, nearly treble the usual rate of 10.8 months. Whereas the rampant financial criminality at the top of the class structure leading to the near-collapse of the banking system in the autumn of 2008 saw no reactions from criminal justice, even as it sent the UK economy into a tailspin, overturning millions of lives and causing hundreds of billions of pounds in damage, a street fracas at the bottom, estimated to have cost around 300 million pounds, triggered a lightning-fast and brutal response from the penal wing of the state. This extraordinarily harsh sentence would normally be cause for widespread denunciation of judicial abuse but, following five nights of fiery rioting across a dozen English cities from 6 to 10 August, the extraordinary turned ordinary for the courts. On 11 August 2011 in Camberwell Green Magistrates Court, a 23-year-old student with no criminal record was sentenced to a prison term of six months for stealing a pack of bottled water worth £3.50. Some of the more important popular culture events where these features manifested, performed and celebrated themselves, produced what I see as a significant phenomenon: the youthful gathering of the festival, the surprising splash and clash of street culture (McKay 2007). I foreground the shifting cultures of the street, of public space, of this extraordinary period, when urgent and compelling questions of youth, race, colonialism and independence, migration, affluence, were being posed to the accompaniment of new soundtracks, and new forms of dress and dance. old’ (Morgan 1998, 123) sonic landscapes of popular music, social practice and political engagement. So I chart and interrogate the 1950s in Britain from the perspective of the rise of socio-cultural experimentation in the contexts of youth, some of the ‘new. The aim of this chapter is to contribute to our understanding of the relation between popular music, festival and activism by focusing on a neglected but important area in festival history in Britain, what can arguably be seen as its originary decade, the 1950s.
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