‘POP fans slept out all night to get early tickets for Bradford’s first pop festival at Park Avenue, which was expected to attract up to 20,000 people.’

This sentence formed the introduction to a piece in the T&A describing the music event, which attracted fans from across the UK, including a coachload of visitors from Plymouth, as well as people from Wales, London and Cumberland.

They all descended upon the city for the event, on August 28, 1972.

Turnstiles opened at 11am to let in the crowd of 600, which had queued outside, undeterred by cloudy weather, the paper reported.

Records were played through the 4,000 watt amplification system, until the first live group, Midnight Blue, led off with the rock and roll song Johnny Be Good.

Spectators were allowed to sit on the pitch in front of tarpaulin-covered stage.

By 1pm the crowd had swelled to 2,000. One of the organisers, David Barker, of Five Star Promotions in Driffield, said the mid-afternoon crowd was well below his expectations.

The festival, which featured a dozen bands playing non-stop from noon to 8pm, cost £8,000 to stage and the promoters needed about 8,000 fans to break even.

There was a minor accident at the event when the lead singer of the band The Weazels fells off the stage. Thankfully, he was unhurt.

Mr Barker said the organisers accepted as ‘virtually inevitable’ that there would be drugs among the crowd. ‘You tend to get this wherever there is a large gathering of young people now.

“It is unfortunate, but that is the way the world is going. It’s a case of ‘what can you do about it?’”

He said members of Bradford City Police drugs squad would mix with the audience.

Another 20 uniformed men hired for the day would be inside the ground. The 30 stewards supplied by the organisers, however, would “have enough to do without looking for that sort of thing.”

The extra security measures at the concert would in today’s world seem woefully inadequate: ‘Extra barbed wire was put up round the walls and police had a radio van near the entrances,’ said the report.

The promoters also brought in nurses, and also bank clerks to count the money taken.

Hot and cold drinks were being laid on, including 100,000 packets of crisps and 15 tons of Coca Cola.

Mr Barker was adamant that the show would end at 8pm as planned. “That is when the licence expires,” he said, “There’s an agreement between us and the police because we don’t want any bother with the locals.”

He said the festival was aimed at the average disco user and the general public. “There is no minority stuff. Lots of festivals go for folk music and the really heavy stuff - this is for the average girl who works in a shop.”

The promoters tried to prevent ticket forgeries by having them made from a special plastic printed with special inks. The number 1 of the pound sign was punched out so that gatemen could immediately tell by touch whether the ticket was legitimate.