ARE festivals as good as they used to be? Discuss.

Certainly, as this interesting documentary (how naff is the term rockumentary?) shows, they’ve undergone something of a transformation since Woodstock in 1969 and the first Glastonbury — or Pilton Pop Festival as it then was — in 1970.

Then it was all about free spirits and battling the system, but hardcore drugs and violence took over in the mid ’80s, with clashes with over-the-top police presences eventually culminating in the infamous Battle of the Beanfield at Stonehenge in 1985.

That signalled the beginning of the end of the festival as being something to annoy the man and the start of something he could organise and make money from.

There’s disturbing but not unexpected footage of some particularly brutal police attacks on a “peace convoy” and interviews with some of those who took part.

In the middle, somewhere, is Glastonbury organiser Michael Eavis, who admits to annoying Tories and offers a home to those with an alternative lifestyle, who he calls to their face “bloody unreliable”.

As they did with the miners’ strike, the police and the Conservative government of the time crushed alternative gatherings and with the death of free festivals expensive events sprung up all over the country, better organised, safer, more reliable, but, equally, missing the point.

With them, as the documentary rightly noted, alternative bands became mainstream and Middle England, which has always run scared of what it would call youth culture, took control of it.

The Government and the police even brought in a law which stated that gatherings of more than 10 people where “repetitive beats” were being played could be broken up. So endeth the rave and their accompanying motorway station meeting points.

Eavis speaks well on here, as does Sham 69 frontman Jimmy Pursey and a bloke from the Spiral Tribe sound system, which incurred much police wrath in the early to mid ’90s for organising large-scale raves.

The conclusion seems to be that festivals are still great, Glastonbury especially as the crowds are afforded much more freedom than at Reading/Leeds, they’re just not free. In more ways than one.