Phun City

Phun City was a free festival held July 24–26, 1970 near Worthing on the south coast of England, about 14 miles west of Brighton. It was organised by underground journalist, musician and (later) science fiction writer Mick Farren. About 10,000 people turned up. The UK rock festivals webpage which provides much further information cited here summarised:

One of a veritable plethora of festivals held in 1970, Phun City also had the dubious distinction of being one of the most shambolic. It was also a financial disaster, but despite this, it also was one of those festivals that managed to transcend its difficulties and which has attained almost legendary status.

Phun City's relevance to Fancycopedia is that as well as rock bands such as Pink Fairies, The Pretty Things, and MC5, the programme featured a self-described 'Sci Fi Con'. In truth it bore little relationship to a convention as the term is used here and might better be considered a new wave-oriented literary festival. However, it seems sufficiently unusual and indeed unlikely as to warrant an entry.

A festival poster included a separate section for the 'Sci Fi Con' with appearances from William Burroughs (Wikipedia), Alexander Trocchi (Wikipedia), Mal Dean 'and many others', one of whom is seemingly tacked on as an afterthought, J. G. Ballard.

A different and perhaps earlier poster or maybe flyer included Burroughs and Trocchi and also Bill Butler, an American beat poet who ran a bookshop in the North Laines of Brighton.

On the Saturday the Sci Fi Conference and Poetry Festival got off to a bad start as the inflatable domes in which they were supposed to be happening were still lying flat on the grass. Some of the poetry crowd occupied the Christian tent, until they were evicted after a complaint from the missionaries about obscenity.

The domes were later inflated but there is not much mention on the UK Rock Festivals site of what actually happened at the convention beyond that there was a screening of Fahrenheit 451 at some point. An attendee recalled:

Meanwhile Burroughs had passed out in the corner – although still looking magnificent in a full leather trench coat and smack ravaged face – he didn't seem well at all. Attempts to wake him failed so me and a couple of others including Alex Trocchi half carried and half dragged him over to the medical tent. 

Farren devoted a dozen or so pages to the Festival in his autobiography, Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, but didn't mention the Sci Fi Conference at all.

Maxim Jakubowski, though, added some more information on Ballard's attendance:

Everybody associated with New Worlds had been invited. William Burroughs was also there, which is the reason that I suspect got Jim out of Shepperton. There was music (MC5 for the first time in England were heading the bill) and there was supposed to be a lot of multi-media events. In fact, all the writers present were utterly bewildered as to why they should be there and never made it to the stage although the deejay kept on saying through the sound system that all these fab groovy people were there.

Ballard would fictionalise the event in his novel The Kindness of Women (1991), portraying himself as reluctant to attend except for the opportunity to appear alongside Burroughs. He later said:

I was doing a reading … so was William Burroughs and when I arrived the Hells Angels security guards said to me, "Dad, you're in the wrong place…"

A number of the photos on the UK Festivals website are credited to Dicky Howett, although his own quoted recollections are mostly about the cameras used to film the event.

The Great British Life website says:

There was also a sci-fi line-up, which included Beat legend William S Burroughs and J G Ballard. Another science fiction writer, who later penned classics The Prestige and Inverted World, happened to be in the audience – Christopher Priest. He had travelled down from Croydon with former BBC cameraman Dicky Howett on the Saturday. Today Dicky says he and Christopher are proof that the festival wasn't just filled with hippies: "Christopher and I and our wives were dressed rather conservatively – although it was still casual clothes. It wasn't anything like the Isle of Wight Festival, it felt very homemade."

It seems safe to say that science fiction conventions did not go on to be a regular part of rock festivals and Phun City was very much unique in this respect.

____

---

Convention
	1970

This is a convention page. Please extend it by adding information about the convention, including dates, GoHs, convention chairman, locale, sponsoring organization, external links to convention pages, awards given, the program, notable events, anecdotes, pictures, scans of publications, pictures of T-shirts, con reports, etc.