It’s a tax-loss-honoured tradition of British rock that Nothing Happens in July (or May, June, and August, for that matter), except rancid open-air scaleddown replicas of Altamont — the recent sheep-dip squat at a wind-scoured Derbyshire moorland site called Buxton (at which more folks were counted out from exposure than got busted) being just one of these hardy old perennials.

Next in this year’s let’s-all-lie-in-afield-and-die stakes is something by the catchy title of “The Bucolic Frolic” — though this one promises to be a little tamer than Buxton and the recent “Rock Proms” (held in the enormous Olympia hall in London, within the Cyclopean vistas of which the tiny audience bore a startling resemblance to a bunch of Yank tourists kicked off a semi-legal charter-flight and dumped in a disused aircraft hangar at Heathrow). It’ll be held in the vestigially-civilized Knebworth Park in Hertfordshire and will feature an impressive aggregation of American big-timers, including the Allmans, the Doobies, the new Mahavishnu Orchestra, Tim Buckley and Van Morrison — the latter complete with revamped backing band, having sacked the entire Caledonia Soul Express in a fit of pique a month back.