Just A Feeling

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But this July it is going to be the venue for another exciting music event, Badfest, a three day extravaganza featuring some of the bigger names from the past 25 years that continue to play live even though shunned by the bigger festivals and music companies. It will be an annual event. Buster: We were going to have it in Butlins by the sea and there were many other places planned but once we came here, to Twinwood, we sort of fell in love with the place. It’s got lots of connections, with Glenn Miller taking off from here on his last flight, so it’s quite a special place to hold a music festival. The grounds being RAF based actually looked the part for a Badfest – it all goes with the artwork! We’ve got the artwork everywhere and we all want to be a bit more camoflagued up on that weekend. There’ll be lots of tents, lots of camping and lots of shorts! From their beginnings as a school group in 1976, throughout their chart success of the 80s (11 top 20 hits) right up to the present day this troupe of ska troubadours have maintained a punishing live schedule and deserve their billing as 'the hardest working band on the planet'. Amazingly some of these bands still sell more records and play larger shows than some of the bands we hear everyday on the radio.

Buster: Oh totally – I perform like I was 18 again. I’ve just got this mad idea that my body seems to be getting better and younger and fitter and as long as I’ve got that in my head and my body’s responding I’m not complaining! They were at their most popular during the early 1980s, during a period when other ska revival bands such as Madness, the Specials and the Selecter filled the charts. Bad Manners spent 111 weeks in the UK Singles Chart between 1980 and 1983, and they also achieved chart success with their first four studio albums, with Ska 'n' B (1980), Loonee Tunes! (1980), and Gosh It's ... Bad Manners (1981) being their biggest hits.Buster, who has recently slimmed down from 31 stone to 13 stone has put together a lineup that includes many bands that he has had the pleasure of playing with throughout his long career.

Bad Manners are an English two-tone and ska band led by frontman Buster Bloodvessel. Early appearances included Top of the Pops and the live film documentary Dance Craze (1981). a b c "The Journal - All manner of mayhem". Journal-online.co.uk. 19 September 2008. Archived from the original on 19 December 2013. And if you actually look at its radius – in a 100 mile radius you have captured the whole of great Britain except for the North East and the North West and a bit of the South - but the rest of it you’ve got. It’s also got very good transport links and it’s all very close to Milton Keynes and Bedford. It’s the perfect place and yet it’s not that well known, but I’m looking forward to the uprise of its whereabouts!A continual high level of performance over the last 30 years has rightly earned Bad Manners their reputation as a magnificent live band. One of the main reasons for their notoriety was their outlandish huge-tongued and shaven-headed frontman, Buster Bloodvessel. His manic exploits got them banned from the British BBC TV chart show Top of the Pops, for painting his head red. [5] The band was also banned from Italian TV after Bloodvessel mooned a concert audience on live television at the 1983 Sanremo Music Festival, [6] after being told that the Pope was watching on TV. [5] [6] His huge personality and big voice were matched only by his gargantuan proportions but even now, after losing an incredible 18 stone, Buster is still as larger than life as he ever was! And as he has the same boundless enthusiasm, unbounded energy and vigour for this project that is a trademark of his stage performances – I’ve got ‘Just a Feeling’ Badfest is going to be great! Q. This festival is kind of a celebration of the amount of time that you’ve been in the business isn’t it?

Buster: The whole of the music business is run by record companies who are very self-centred and if you don’t do what they want you to do then you don’t go anywhere. Of course once you get a bit long in the tooth you realise that these people are taking liberties out of you and you don’t want to be part of that. This means you survive any way you can and a lot of bands die at that point or go on the road. If they’re good enough they will survive and if they’re not, they won’t. It’s a dog eat dog world. Everyone’s out to try and earn a shilling and to make themselves as successful as possible. I know it’s strange that I should be promoting health as people would think that I’ve lived more of an unhealthy lifestyle than anybody in the world, but I feel so great now. It’s just given me a real zest for life and the desire to want to achieve greatness on stage.

Companies, etc.

It’s going to be a solid three days of bands playing because there’s also a lot of small bands that will be going on. We’ll also have the bar running up at the museum end. The whole thing is going to be growing and in the next five years we hope to make it into a place where people will come along and really enjoy themselves – not just for this event but for other events. This has been our worst year for a while [numbers wise] but we’ve deliberately done that because we don’t want to overplay. We will be doing tours just before we do the festival that will be part of the promotion. But we’ve got that tag because we have seriously toured more than anyone else that I know and certainly over the years the distances that we’ve travelled - other bands would have just gone “no we’re not doing that!” When, in the early 80s the first single I ever bought was Bad Manners’ ‘Just a Feeling’ (for 65p!), little did I know that some 25 years later I would meet up with the bands larger than life frontman Buster Bloodvessel in a disused airfield in deepest Bedfordshire!

I’m expecting a lot of these bands to actually outplay themselves because there’s never really been a line up quite as good as this and that will encourage each of the bands to perform more.

a b Walters, Sarah (4 September 2008). "Tongue and groove with Buster..." manchestereveningnews.co.uk. Q. So, what bands are confirmed? "Anybody who comes along will just go to themselves – “Wow I can’t wait for next year!" Buster: We were originally booked to play the club that they’ve got here. It was a nice Christmas do and it wasn’t over sold but we saw the potential here to have a brilliant festival. Nobody else has probably ever seen this potential and we want to be the first to really set it alight really because I’m sure in years to come this will be a well-known place – certainly a landmark.