Music festivals have become synonymous with the summer with huge events such as Glastonbury and Chelmsford's V Festival bringing the biggest acts to the UK each year.

However, this August bank holiday weekend marks the 45th anniversary of the Weeley Festival, a three-day event in a small village in Tendring which was never to be repeated yet, despite reports of chaotic disorganisation, primitive facilities and some wild behaviour, seems to be remembered very fondly.

Among the 110,000 reported to be there were a teenage couple and their five friends, all squeezed into a Sunbeam Rapier Estate.

The couple carried on their love affair, they've now been married 42 years, as well as their love affair with music festivals, still getting together with their children and grandchildren at the Isle of Wight Festival each year.

GARY and CHRISTINA PEARSON and others tell MARK EDWARDS about their memories of those three days in 1971.

WEELEY festival seems to have been marginalised amid the standout moments in UK rock history. This is odd when you think of the quality of the acts involved - Rod Stewart and The Faces, Status Quo, T Rex, the Groundhogs and Barclay James Harvest, who played with a 45-piece orchestra, and many more of the biggest rock acts of the Seventies.

You had big names, The Faces and T Rex, fighting for the right to headline and trying to outdo each other like Jimmy Hendrix and The Who at the Isle of Wight Festival the year before - most people say the Faces won. Even Jimi's iconic pyrotechnics, he set fire to his guitar, was outdone in Weeley. English hard rockers Stray, famous for their exploding dustbins on stage, overdid it to such an extent the resulting blast led to the local coastguards being alerted.

Unfortunately, there was also, Altamont-like, some violence involving the Hell's Angels, though there were no reports of anyone being seriously hurt.

Still, for those that attended those three days, and nights, of music in Weeley, it will never be forgotten - well, not entirely. As Christina Pearson says: "It's like they say. If you remember the Sixties and Seventies you weren't there."

What the 61-year-old can recall is her and her then boyfriend, now husband Gary, 62, along with five friends, "threw some clothes into a plastic bag", jumped into their friend's Sunbeam Rapier Estate and headed for Weeley.

Christine says: "We had no sleeping bags, no food, we just set off. Sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll!"

Despite only being 16 and it being her first festival, Christine was not fazed by the hundreds of thousands of music fans there. It was an adventure. She says: "When you're young everything seems like fun. We had a great time."

The group put up a "massive" tent, which singled them out from the majority of revellers who, in the August heat slept under the stars or, in many cases, didn't sleep at all.

"The tent proved very popular," says Gary, then 17. "We had about 10 or 12 sleeping in there by the end of it."

The couple did not go to the festival to see any specific band|", but rather to soak up the atmosphere. Gary says: "At that time we were spoilt for bands. We saw Led Zep in pubs in Dagenham. We went to Weeley for fun."

In fact, Christine is only sure of one band who were there, psychedelic rockers The Edgar Broughton Band, and that's because they kept her awake!

She says: "It was about three in the morning and I'd had enough and wanted some sleep. I lay down but the music was so loud it seemed to be coming up through the ground. It felt like the music was vibrating through my head."

The music was round the clock, something that appealed to Colchester's Hatpeg, who has fond memories of the festival. He says: "Mark Bolan, Status Quo and Rod Stewart were there, along with Mungo Jerry, Lindisfarne and Head Hands and Feet. there was non-stop music from Friday to midnight Sunday. What a weekend!"

Yes, Weeley was a three day, and night, festival. It was planned by the Clacton Round Table in order to raise funds for charity and projected to attract 5,000 visitors, but over a 110,000 are thought to have attended, many of them getting in without paying - even though the ticket price was just £1.50.

The unexpected scale made for a chaotic timetable. Bands squeezed in their sets when they could. First band Hackenstack kept playing for a couple of hours because other acts had not yet turned up.

Gary remembers: "Yes, it was chaotic, but festivals are so commercialised nowadays. Weeley was nothing like that."

Facilities at Weeley were primitive. Christina can still remember the state of the toilets, which in the seventies far out nomenclature were signposted "chick's bogs" and "guy's bogs". She says: "There was just a trench on the floor. It was very embarrassing. I don't think I went for the whole three days!"

Gary has even more unsavoury details, "Someone had dug a trench about 100 yards long and there was scaffolding suspended over the drop and a plank of wood with a hole in it across it. I think most people just ran off into the woods."

Indeed Weeley seemed to have had little in the way of facilities at all.

Gary says: "I don't recall any food stalls at all" and Christine adds: " I remember waking up one morning and our friend Steve was cooking a full English breakfast. I don't know where he got it all from because there was no food on site."

Many took food preparation into their own hands, lighting rubbish fires ,which, according to ukrockfestivals.com, in the dry conditions , rapidly got out of control. Mary Hempstead, from Colchester, who was also at the festival says "it was a good atmosphere even though a bit smokey".

There must have been some food stalls on site as, if an article from the International Times at the time is to be believed, it was a group of pie sellers, the Fun Caterers of Battersea, who were responsible for sparking riots with Hells' Angels and getting many of the bikers thrown out of the festival.

Christina says: "I remember getting home on the Sunday and my parents were very upset because they'd heard on the news about lots of fighting at the festival, but we didn't see any trouble at all."

Gary adds: "The Hell's Angels were strutting their stuff like everyone was. We were down by the stage watching the Grease Band on the Saturday night when it was all supposed to have kicked off, but I didn't see any of that.

"The papers do love a bad story so they focused on that."

Mary, who had gone up to the festival after a night at the Yachtman's Arms Pub, in Brightlingsea, says: "There was a lot of talk of Hells Angels and fighting when we were there."

Despite the disorder, the Weeley Festival sparked a lifetime love of festivals for Christine and Gary. Christine says: "We now go as a family, with our children and grandchildren, to the Isle of Wight Festival every year, but no more sleeping on the ground. We like a bit of comfort now."