Fact #117094

Robert Smith (The Cure) : The first concert I attended was Hendrix on the Isle of Wight. I was 11.

My brother took me but I wouldn’t say I was aware that I was at a concert. Jimi Hendrix played, and I stayed in the tent. I just remember two days of orange tent and dope smoke.

Richard Wootton : Next morning (Sunday) things were starting to look grim. We were filthy. My green tent was now brown, covered with the dust kicked up after several dry days. But the main toilet block was a sea of mud with a high risk of people slipping into the deep trenches, so was closed, although their wooden doors had gone, presumably to feed the fires which the tent-less sleeping in the main arena had made. It became obvious that 600,000+ people trying to get off the Isle Of Wight on Monday morning would be very chaotic, so we decided to leave at lunchtime on Sunday. The queue for buses meant a three hour wait but we were entertained by the sound of live sets by Free and Pentangle. It had been a great experience and the future of popular music seemed bright. So thank you Fiery Creations. Back in London the festival was front page news in all the papers, mostly describing things I hadn’t experienced. But the NME, Disc and Melody Maker got it right later in the week.
(Source : Richard Wootton Facebook post)

Nick Richards (fan) : I couldn't really say there was a lot of trouble there. There was one stage when a couple of rockers or angels decided they had had enough of being shut out of the arena. I think some of them were French. They attacked the steel fences with pick axe handles, chains, you name it. Broke their way through first and second fences. Security guards and dogs just scattered because there were so many. It was quite violent although I don't think anyone actually got hurt. From then on it was free for all.

Robert Johnson (audience) : There's a dankness and gloom about this festival. No-one's sharing their food and cigarettes. People are uptight and are staying in not very friendly groups.

Buttons (leader of Hell's Angels) : That evening the concert was declared free. I was pissed off with hippies and thought nothing of knocking a few heads and moving a few bodies so that we, our family, could get to the front of the stage for a better view while Jimi Hendrix was on.

Nick Richards : It's funny, I don't remember an awful lot of the acts, I think a lot of the time I was either a bit smashed or very much enjoying myself. There were so many nice things going on, you couldn't watch every band. Ten Years After went down a lot better than Hendrix because Hendrix was such a long time coming on people were cheesed off by the time he did arrive. Ten Years After had had about three standing ovations to kill time prior to Hendrix coming on. They just couldn't get off the stage.

Mitch Mitchell : We’d been touring America for nine months and when we arrived in England for the Isle Of Wight gig, Jimi was knackered. We hadn’t played for three weeks and it showed in the show.

Pete Townshend : Hendrix was a psychological mess of a man. Nobody cared. People thought ‘He can play such great guitar, so he’s obviously okay’. What made me work so hard was seeing the condition Jimi was in. He was in such tragically bad condition physically, and I remember thanking God as I walked on stage that I was healthy.

Jeff Dexter : I went out to introduce Jimi, and he said ‘Hang on, I’m not ready.’ It took him about forty minutes to get himself together. He was in a state. He didn’t want me to introduce him. I was to say ‘This is Blue Angel music’ - the Blue Angel was the parachute division he had been in the US Army. He went to go on in his new gear and said ‘Hey man, I can’t play my guitar…’ The sleeves were too big, and got in the way of the strings. So I put another record on, went to one side and I sewed up his sleeve. I was trained as a tailor at school, which is why I was so into clothes. By this time the audience had been waiting seventy minutes, so I said, ‘Better get on, Jimi,’ and I just ran on and said ‘Here’s the man with the guitar!’ He was about to come on, and his trousers split. So I pinned him up and he went on stage all pinned and stitched up.

Jimi Hendrix : The Isle of Wight was strange because we did not get on until 3am and the audience seemed strange - sleepy, I guess. I played God Bless (Save) The Queen but I don’t know that I could base my whole thing on that, so I just have to, like, lay back and think about it.

Nick Richards : When Hendrix finally came on people were so fed up with waiting, it was a bit of a let down. I know we watched Hendrix sat on top of the hill in the night. It was getting pretty late. At that point in time we had been adopted by a group of Hell's Angels. I don't know why. We were obviously hungry and a bit cold and they sort of adopted us and got us in by the fire and plied us with some food and drink, which was a bit of a surprise. They were a bit rough but they were great. We were just kids.

Glenn Tipton (fan) : I came down from Birmingham with a bunch of friends, because Hendrix was one of my big influences. He was out of tune for the first two or three numbers, but the rest of the show was amazing. Mind you, with Hendrix, even being out of tune was pretty good.

Bob Craig (American fan) : I don't remember too much of Jimi Hendrix. It was difficult 'cos he played unfamiliar stuff, extended stuff. It's all music I know now, but back then I'd only heard his first three albums. The sound quality was bad - well I was quite a way from the stage, a block away - Jimi was, like, two inches high! I only really heard the guitar and bass, no vocals, no drums.

Buttons (leader, Hell's Angels) : The French Algerians flipped out and started to demolish everything in sight. We left them to it. A force of pigs stopped us and hassled us with facts relating to the looting of food stalls while Hendrix had been on. They weren't discouraged by our alibis and I was warned that I had a total responsibility for the whole biker population on the island.

Nik Turner (Hawkwind) : I was the guy Hendrix called 'the cat with the silver face' at the Isle of Wight in 1970. Hawkwind played a protest concert outside that festival, in a kind of sausage-shaped dome called Canvas City. The Pink Fairies had vaguely organised it, but we seemed to play for days. I don't have memory loss, but I'm very vague on whether we played the Phun City festival too, organised by Mick Farren and Twink for the Pink Fairies.

Gerry Stickells (Hendrix road manager) : It was the end of the love and peace era. People broke down the fences, there was violence. It had run its course - the love and peace bit.

Jimi Hendrix : Festivals shouldn't, er, worry about getting so many people. It's a big ego trip now. 'Five-hundred-thousand people came. Oh wow! That's great!' Well with, with the five-hundred-thousand, that's way larger than the average city, for instance, in England. And every city in, in the world always has a gang, a street gang, or their so-called, the outcast, you know. So you're gonna get that with five-hundred-thousand people. That's a city right there! You know. So you're gonna have to have gate crashers. You know, you're gonna have the other side of everything. All of it, it's up to the people. If they really want to keep it going, they'll keep it going. If they don't, well then they'll appreciate the music itself. But see, you can't mill about when you're at a rock 'n' roll theatre, you know?
(Source : interview with Keith Altham, Sept 11, 1970)


Ralph McTell : I saw Joan Baez and Jimi Hendrix’s roadies backstage. They said that Hendrix was very out of it in somebody’s garden and they were worried that he wouldn’t be able to play.

Kirsten Nefer : The whole atmosphere was very weird … he was so afraid of going on stage in the first place.

Roy Carr (journalist, NME) : In the weeks leading up to his death, Jimi’s hair became flecked with grey and his skin took on an unhealthy pallor. This was most noticeable in the bright sunlight backstage at the Isle Of Wight. Jimi shared a catering-size bottle of vodka with friends and journalists, before giving a well-below par performance.

Iain Anderson : By this time, Jethro Tull had performed with Hendrix on quite a few bills and our star was in the ascendant, while he was in decline. As a result, on many dates we were effectively co-headlining. The golden rule of festivals, of course, is never close the show. Nobody wants to play to an audience that is exhausted, doped, hungry and ready to go home. As a result, when the Moody Blues came off, there was a real battle between our road crew and Jimi’s to see who could get set up first and get on stage quickest. We beat them to the punch, and left him to close the show, which he really did not want to do.

Mike Lax (film sound recordist) : He was scared, because there were a lot of problems there. I mean, the stage got really bunged up … we were all paranoid. We thought the audience would rush the stage… the whole front stage area was streaming with Special Branch, keeping an eye on things. It would have been so easy for a nutter to shoot someone there.

Mike Lax : Hendrix came on stage with an eleven skin joint and then, after the first song, he went back to his amplifier, had some white powder sprinkled on his finger…

Kirsten Nefer : They booed him because he didn’t do what they expected him to do, you know, all these gimmicks.

Kris Kristofferson : Nothing went right! They hated me and it was my third gig in show business. The Algerians were tearing down the outer wall and making so much noise they couldn’t even hear us. Billy Swan was on the stage and he thought that they were going to shoot us.

They hated Jimi Hendrix, they hated everybody, except on the last night when Leonard Cohen charmed them at four o’clock in the morning. They were burning down the concession stands and burning trucks and he went out on stage in his pyjamas and took twenty minutes to tune up. I said, ‘They’re gonna kill him.’ They were brutal to Jimi Hendrix, to Joan Baez, to Tiny Tim for crying out loud, and Cohen won them over.

Leonard Cohen : I hadn't been singing in public very long, in fact I still haven't, and I had a second lot of thoughts about playing for that many people or about being effective in front of that many people and I still do, but I'm glad I got up there. I think I went on about four in the morning.

The band and myself were sleeping in this sort of trailer. We were supposed to go on at midnight and the whole thing was delayed so we all flaked out in this trailer. They woke us up and we got up there in this kind of daze and everyone was asleep in the audience; well a lot were sleeping. I think our music fitted in well with the general mood of the wipe-out that everybody felt. I feel that the conditions of the festival were very unpleasant. (Source : Rock magazine, 3 January 1972)

Bert Jansch : I remember being actually under the stage to listen to Jimi. I don’t know if I was stoned or whatever, I just ended up under the stage so I could actually be able to hear him. Maybe the backstage area was too crowded or something. I don’t remember us (Pentangle) playing at all - I just remember Jimi Hendrix, nothing else - most exciting part of the whole proceedings for me.

Kirsten Nefer : After the concert, Jimi walked off the opposite side of the stage to where I was standing. It took me thirty minutes to find his caravan. When I got in there, there were twenty people, you know? It was packed with people. When we got out, Jimi said to me, ‘Don’t you ever leave the stage while I’m playing.’ Then we went back to his hotel, The Seagrove. We stayed there for a few hours, then Jimi had to take the helicopter and I had to go back to London. Jimi said that he would be playing in Denmark and, as I’m Danish, it was the big idea that, you know, I go to Denmark, and he gave me and Karen money so we could go there and everything was arranged.

Jimi Hendrix : I was so mixed-up there and at that time it got so confused, like, eh … I didn’t have a chance to base any of my future on that one gig, you know?

Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull) : This was the end of the hippie ideal. This was where the whole thing imploded. It was somewhere between Donovan and a football crowd of hooligans, that sums up the Isle of Wight… and terribly English.

Mary Drysdale (audience) : I could have heard better music on my stereo set. Don't tell me there was any kindness or sharing or love at this festival. It was cold, man, cold and I didn't like it one bit.