Let's Rock

Let's Rock is a British 1980s pop and rock festival brand. The first edition, Let's Rock the Moor, was on 4 May 2009 on Cookham Moor, in Berkshire. It closed that year's Cookham Festival. This is not Let's Go Music Festival, the Annapolis, Maryland meeting. The ground here is a village moor by the Thames, with Haircut 100 hits and a one-day crowd.

Cookham is a Thames village near Maidenhead. The Cookham Festival already filled late April and the start of May. On 4 May 2009, a May Day bank holiday, the programme ended on the moor: food stalls, craft workshops, morris men and an outdoor stage. Local write-ups remember a damp day that did not empty the green. Timmy Mallett and Chris Barrie were in the crowd. The concert name circulated as Rock the Moor and as Let's Rock the Moor. It was the close of an arts festival, not the launch of an American fair.

Nick Heyward headlined that Monday. He had been the voice of Haircut 100. The Bucks Free Press spoke to him before the show: he lived in Henley, used Cookham as a regular haunt and promised a mix of jazz, punk and rock inside a hits set. Soul'd Out, Temposhark and Plants and Burdock played as local supports. Nick Beggs, of Kajagoogoo, played bass. About one thousand two hundred people fitted the moor. There was no multi-day campsite. There was a bank-holiday field, grass and a stage that closed a village festival.

That first bill explains the genre. Heyward and Beggs place British 1980s pop: Haircut 100, Kajagoogoo, chorus and bass. Soul'd Out, Temposhark and Plants and Burdock cover the local circuit, not a stadium poster. This is not metal. This is not house. It is radio pop and rock from a decade British crowds already knew. Let's Go, in Crownsville, puts Smash Mouth and Sugar Ray on a Maryland fair. Let's Rock puts Heyward on a Berkshire moor. The verb matches. The country does not.

The first-year site is not a big-city urban park. Cookham Moor is open green between the village and the river. By day there are families, stalls and a drumming workshop that reports remember with about forty people. In the afternoon the bands start. At night the volume rises and the crowd stands in front of the stage. May Day weather on the Thames can be short sun or a shower that soaks the grass. If it rains, the moor gets heavy. There are no fair halls. There is sky and ground that already hosted village days.

Later the Let's Rock name left the moor and filled other UK cities. Reports place dates in Bristol, at Ashton Court; in Leeds, at Temple Newsam; on Southampton Common; in Exeter, at Powderham Castle; in Shrewsbury and in other sites across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The format was read as a one-day series: 1980s pop, a family crowd, many people dressed for that decade. The organiser of that expansion is not fixed here. The sure fact is the first one: Cookham, 4 May 2009, one thousand two hundred people.

Getting to Cookham is simple from Maidenhead or London, by train or car, into a Thames village. Getting to a later date under the same name asks for another trip: a common, an estate park or a city site. On the moor you do not walk an hour between stages. You walk between stalls and one stage. At later urban dates the site is larger and the bill adds more names from the same decade. English weather in June or July can be mild heat or steady rain. A 4 May in Cookham was, in the local copy, a day that threatened rain and still held the green.

The first-year crowd mixed arts-festival neighbours and Heyward listeners. There were children in the workshops. There were adults who came for the concert. It was not a camping compound and not a disco. It was a bank-holiday Monday at the end of a village programme. Anyone going to Let's Go in Annapolis finds food trucks and 1990s pop on a county fair. Anyone going to Let's Rock the Moor finds a moor, an arts-festival close and British 1980s pop. Those two sentences do not swap.

Let's Rock is best read as the British 1980s pop and rock brand that started on Cookham Moor on 4 May 2009, with Heyward, Beggs and about one thousand two hundred people, and later filled commons and parks in many UK cities. The organiser of that network is not verified here. The close of the Cookham Festival is. There is no need to cross it with Annapolis: that grass is Maryland's and this moor is Berkshire's. Here the ground is a village field by the Thames. The first-day crowd fits in low thousands. The story that matters is a May Day in 2009 that closed an arts festival and left a British touring name.