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Knebworth Festival 1976
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August 21, 1976: ‘Knebworth Fair’, Knebworth Park, Stevenage, England
Satisfaction/Ain’t Too Proud To Beg/If You Can’t Rock Me-Get Off Of My Cloud/Hand Of Fate/Around And Around/Little Red Rooster/Stray Cat Blues/Hey Negrita/Hot Stuff/Fool To Cry/Star Star/Let’s Spend The Night Together/You Gotta Move/You Can’t Always Get What You Want/Dead Flowers/Route 66/Wild Horses/Honky Tonk Women/Country Honk/Tumbling Dice/Happy/Nothing From Nothing/Outa Space/Midnight Rambler/It’s Only Rock’n Roll/Brown Sugar/Rip This Joint/Jumping Jack Flash/Street Fighting Man

From Louder Sound:
No-one will ever agree upon exactly how many people turned out to witness the Rolling Stones perform at Hertfordshire’s Knebworth Park on August 21, 1976

Promoter Freddy Bannister claims today that: “We expected 100,000 and got 104,000.” Bill Wyman of the Stones reckons that 110,000 presales were augmented by 30,000 tickets sold on the day, but that between 150,000 and 200,000 actually attended. Stage announcements on the day estimated 300,000. Whatever way you look at it, it was one hell of a crowd. In 1976.

The Rolling Stones were not only the world’s biggest band, they wholly defined what rock’n’roll should be. Dissenting punk voices had yet to dent their legend and the gushing music press was still very much on side. If you were a rock fan in 1976, you wanted to go and see The Rolling Stones at Knebworth. There was simply no excuse not to.

A series of early summer gigs at Earl’s Court had been massively over-subscribed, had sold-out rapidly and, thanks to appalling sound, were disappointing. Demand for the Stones had never been so acute and with rumours rife that Knebworth was to be their last ever show, even those unable to secure one of the precious £4.25 tickets were determined to attend. We set off at 6am and ultimately abandoned our car by the side of the road to make our way to the site on foot as the traffic gridlocked. An unmanageable sea of humanity jostled to gain entry as The Don Harrison Band came and went. The narrow entrances were hopelessly inadequate, but following a three-hour heave we popped through the fence like corks from a bottle to witness the last knockings of Hot Tuna and to marvel at a crowd that surpassed the horizon.

As the delays continued, an ominous mood descended. Amid wildfire rumours that the Stones had already left the site and an official announcement of cancellation was imminent, the already minimal crowd lights were extinguished and the mid-section of Pink Floyd’s Echoes (the bit that sounds like ghostly seagulls) began looping repeatedly over the PA. Tensions rapidly increased and time seemed to stand still as the unmistakable sound of fights breaking out was only punctuated by increasingly desperate demands for the lights to be turned back on that were simply ignored. Presumably at their Satanic Majesties’ request.

“A lot of it was down to 10cc,” Bannister says of this purgatorial wait. “But the Stones delayed things for another hour because they were too busy posing and acting like rock stars.” Finally, after an interminable pitch-black ordeal in Hell’s own waiting room, countless searchlights seared our eyeballs as Aaron Copland’s Fanfare For The Common Man heralded the arrival of The Greatest Rock’N’Roll Band In The World. The overall effect was totally staggering – probably unlawful under the Geneva Convention, but totally staggering all the same. The purpose-built stage’s canopy had inflated under cover of darkness into a pair of immense lips, and as Keith Richards punched out the riff to _Satisfaction _at the end of an extensive walkway at stage-right, Mick Jagger pranced onto its tongue in a leather jacket and tights combination that (according to the following morning’s Daily Mirror) made him look like ‘a gay Richard III’.

One hundred and fifty minutes later than billed the Stones delivered a performance that was, to Wyman’s calculations, “the longest show we had ever played”. From the brand new (Fool To Cry), to the vintage (Around And Around); the rarely heard (Get Off Of My Cloud) to the seasoned set-pieces (Mick Jagger whipping the stage with his belt at the climax of Midnight Rambler), the Stones perfectly précised their already vast legacy into a crowd-pleasing set of, apparently effortless, world-beating class. As traditional show-closer Street Fighting Man finally reached its climax there were sighs of relief backstage.

“We were supposed to finish by midnight,” Bannister remembers, “and it eventually ended at about 2am, I think David (now Lord) Cobbold, who held the licence, got fined £2,000.” As The Who’s Baba O’Riley provided the triumphal soundtrack to our first stumble into an unlit ditch, we staggered off into the breaking dawn. It took four hours to find the car, but as we’d just seen Keith Richards smoking a cigarette, we didn’t mind a bit.