Ah Woodstock. I remember it well! Only not that well because I was obviously off my tits on acid and making daisy chains with a Piscean chick called Aurora. But I was there when Hendrix played the Star Spangled Banner! When we all burned our draft cards and played bongos! When all the sensible world seemed to be gathered here and peace and love, you could just pluck it out the air, and Vietnam and Janis Joplin and stuff. Ah Woodstock. I remember it well...

...My memories are naturally as hazy as you would expect from a minus 12 year old. But I'm not going to come over all cynical about this. I spend long enough mocking the betrayals and hypocrisies of the baby boomer generation, the revised memories and the false claims. Some of my parents friends were lucky enough to be at the Isle of Wight festival, the really legendary one, and only after waxing lyrical for a long time did they admit that they slept through Hendrix and The Doors.

But dammit, who am I kidding, I'd have loved to have been there, at Woodstock. Can you imagine how everything must have come together at that point? How powerful? I am pathetically weak when put in front of a few grainy colour images of zonked out hippies, flickering to a few bars of San Francisco or Get Together. Find it totally intoxicating. I think a lot of my generation are the same, grew up with our parents' generation yakking on about rebellion and free love, listening to acid rock and wondering when our teenage years would get interesting. Never mind that the reality for most Woodstock attendees must have been hunger, sunburn and sleeping through Crosby Stills Nash and Young.

Is all this any excuse, however, for promoter Michael Lang to attempt to bring the festival back? If he can raise $10 million in three weeks, "The chances that something will happen are probable". The sponsorship is needed if it is to be free and green, as Lang desires - thus in tune with the original spirit.

Only the picture above left shows what happened when Lang revived Woodstock in 1999. The headliners were Limp Bizkit and Korn - very peace and love - and the festival ended clouded in rape allegations and violence. Lang claims they have learned from these mistakes, but can the 40th anniversary event really be much more than an empty exercise? The rumoured headliners are The Who, veterans of 1969. Surely that's in the proper spirit? Back then, Pete Townshend, according to witnesses, spent his time feeling uptight in a hotel room, complaining about the hippies. Only, speak to him today, and that's not how he remembers it.