Child To Be Burned at Stake at London Music Club (1968 rumor)

The memoir of British musician and songwriter Richard Thompson relates a rumor from 1968 that a child was going to be burned at the stake at a London music club, leading to an attack on the club by outraged workers.

Richard Thompson with Scott Timberg, Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967-1975 (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2021), 43.

Here’s the only other reference to the rumor I could find, in a review of ElectrickNick: No Direction Home (2013), which quotes the independently published memoir by Nick Butt and Richard Harris.

“One Sunday afternoon a few months later we were putting on a benefit for a group called The Tribe of the Sacred Mushroom when we were raided aggressively by the Bow Street constabulary. As they left they told the market traders that we were burning a child at the stake, which goaded them into smashing up the whole club with axes and grappling hooks.”

http://peromyscus.blogspot.com/2018/08/electricnick-no-direction-home-by-nick.html