Roy Webber (guitar, vocals) / Pete Cosker (guitars) / Nick Glennie-Smith (keyboards, vocals) / Paul Middleton (lap steel guitar, bass) / Pete Sage (electric violin, bass, mandolin) / Roger Narraway (drums)
This band became a byword for the weekend and synonymous with a few festivals yet to come you could still hear people wandering around the site shouting out “Wally!!!” at the tops of their voices, especially late at night when the sound travels better! I knew what to expect from this band having seen them only a few months earlier at the Scarborough Penthouse, and I would also go and see them again before the year was out. They were a gentle, melodic rock band with a very prog feel about them so they certainly ticked all of my boxes. I already had their first imaginatively titled album and would go on to buy ‘Valley Gardens‘ when it was released soon after this gig. As the official programme pointed out, they were heavily backed by the Beeb’s Bob Harris – “Bomber” and not yet “Whispering” at this stage of his career – and Yes keys-man Rick Wakeman so they obviously had potential. No setlist is available but we can assume that they played a mixture of tunes from both of those LPs, most notably – probably – ‘The Martyr‘, ‘Sunday Walking Lady‘, ‘Nez Percé‘ and ‘The Reason Why‘. The only music press cuttings that I have – Melody Maker and Record Mirror – both chose to ignore the band which is surprising given the legacy that they would afford the festival. But then, it seems that the music world in general overlooked them because after the release of the second album they vanished and were never going to compete during late 1976 with punk, which was a shame. Still, I would get to see them once more in less than a month’s time…
“Wally!!!”
Setlist: unknown
Here’s what the official programme had to say about them…
Gigs'n'Stuff 