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.

Led Zeppelin were to have topped the bill, but desisted in order (presumably) to further indulge the feelings they get when they Look To The West on their up-country Celtic farmsteads. Or maybe they’re doing another album — who knows?

Round about now, y’see, the denizens of the rock‘n’roll First Division are usually found biding their final-mixes for the market-research proven September/October period (just the right distance from Christmas to ensure that the seasonal gift-purchasers pick up on you before the Yuletide tsunami of steamin’ vinyl drowns all instincts towards discrimination and people start asking for Simon and GarfunkeVs Greatest Hits in self-defense).

Any earlier, and your killer new album gets forgotten; any later, and nobody except some benighted critic in a freezing Fleet Street office ever hears about it.

So the release-date for the Stones’ It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll But I Like It trends ever further back towards those two golden months, and Roxy Music — obsessive-compulsive studio-skiweys par excellence — are battering the Air Studio consoles with their fourth band offering (having spawned, directly or indirectly, Eno’s Warm Jets, Andy MacKay’s In Search of Eddie Riff, and Brian Ferry’s new move to embrace the cognoscenti, Another Time, Another Place all since ’74 got on the road).

Eno also cropped up on an album called June 1st 1974 recently — a “selected high-lights” live recording of the Kevin Ayers/John Cale/Nico/Eno gig in London’s Rainbow Theatre last month. AyerS, it seems, is at last realistically on the verge of a mass break-through with his fifth elpee The Confessions of Doctor Dream — a long overdue eventuality .. . speaking of which calls to mind the possibility (if their reportedly stunning appearance at the Palladium is anything to go by) that the Kinks are finally about to achieve honour in their own country with the now-completed Preservation cycle, scheduled for mutation into a stage-show here in the autumn.

In the meantime, the scene lies approximately dormant — though, with the pressure off temporarily, one can distinguish the phasing-out of the Old Order of last year and the efntry of‘75’s New Boys.

Slade, for example (and to the delight, no doubt, of all you Dolls fans), appear to be fast running out of steam.

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Their last two or three singles have contained more than a morsel’of deja-vu and the current offering, “The Bangin’ Man,” has a palpable air of desperation about it,"notwithstanding the fact That it’s fairly high in the charts.

Likewise Gary Glitter, whose last two hot-shots (“Remember Me This Way” and “Always Yours”) have been conspicuously lame — well wiped-out by the pleasantly moronic insistence of “Angel Face,” a competitive release from his backing-group.

Completing the fall from grace of the teenybop wing of glam-rock are The Sweet, who have recently been attempting to convince everybody that they’re heavy, firstly with an album of misappropriated punk-metal-isms entitled Sweet Fanny Adams, and now with a single called “The Six Teens” which has vague aspirations towards sounding like the early Who.

At the other end of this dubious movement, we encounter the off-shoots of the Bowie/Roxy syndrome of last year: Cockney Rebel (a “controversial” unit led by self-tormenting loony Steve Harley), Queen, and the new contestants BeBop Deluxe and The Heavy Metal Kids.

In the event of the inevitable occlusion of these unremarkable talents, we have a Jap collection called The Sadistic Mika Band lined up to take over — although the much-admired pubrockers Dr. Feelgood and Ducks Deluxe (yeah, things are getting a shade repetitious over here) seem, on paper, to be healthier alternatives.

As it happens, Queen look all set to crumble into obscurity (Silverhead have already gone), The H.M. Kids are unlikely to get off the ground, and BeBop Deluxe, despite the presence in their coiffeured ranks of a very listenable gpitarist called Bill Nelson, seem so jaded a retread-of-a-revamp of what was close-to-a-cliche-in-the-flrst-place that I can’t honestly see them achieving much in terms of audience-duping.

Meantime, the freaks make the most of the summer Silly Season. Tangerine Dream, a German trio of synthesizer-operators, have shifted an incomprehensibly large quantity of their album Phaedra and sell out wherever they decide to appear; G.T. Moore And The Reggae Guitars are causing a semi-justified stir with their imitation Jamaica number (they’re good for about three songs and then get brain-freezingly obvious); and “BoWie” hasn’t made much of an impression on the pop-pickers with his graveyard-smash single-lift of “Diamond Dogs” from the album of the same collar-tag.

Top of the pops is Gallic warbler Charles Aznovoice with a slab of gritty, documentary realism called “She,” which has all the uncompromising sentimentality of “Love Story” and treats Mysterious Womankind as some sort of willful spaniel — one day she’ll slobber all over your trousers, next day she’ll bite your thumb off. How can you live without such a charmingly irrational creature? (Reassures hen-pecked husbands and flatters dull housewives.)

Hardly credible that “Walk On The Wild Side” was a big hit here less than a year ago. Apres Lou le deluge ...