With
Brexit Day looming we recall Wembley’s Common Market Match in 1973, part of a festival in which not all went to plan
Ted Heath may not have been the most charismatic prime minister in the United Kingdom’s long rich history, but at least the man knew how to throw a party. When he took the
UK into the European Economic Community in January 1973, he celebrated the occasion by spending a quarter of a million of your sterling pounds on the Fanfare for Europe, an 11-day festival that included, among more than 150 other cultural high-points, concerts by Slade, the Kinks, Status Quo, the Chieftains, and the Orchestre de
Paris conducted by Georg Solti. Fast forward 47 years, and what does
Boris Johnson, self-styled natural-born showman, have lined up for the similarly epochal Brexit Day? Not a great deal, by the looks of it. A new interpretation of John Cage’s 4’33” by the avant-garde campanologist Mark “Hot Mallets” Francois isn’t exactly scratching our itch.
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