Free festivals are a combination of music, arts and cultural activities, for which often no admission is charged, but involvement is preferred.

They are identifiable by being multi-day events connected by a camping community without centralised control.

David Bowie's song Memory of a Free Festival, recorded in September 1969 and included on the 1969 album David Bowie, mentions the free festival organised by the Beckenham Arts Lab and held on the Croydon Road Recreation Ground on 16 August 1969.

"[1] "Free festivals are practical demonstrations of what society could be like all the time: miniature utopias of joy and communal awareness rising for a few days from a grey morass of mundane, inhibited, paranoid and repressive everyday existence…The most lively [young people] escape geographically and physically to the ‘Never Never Land’ of a free festival where they become citizens, indeed rulers, in a new reality."

Un-authored leaflet from 1980, quoted in George McKay's Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance Since the Sixties (p. 15).