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Fact #106966

When:

Short story:

Redbone, Kris Kristofferson, Tony Joe White, Mighty Baby, David Bromberg, Judas Jump, Kathy Smith and Rosalie Sorrels play on the first day of The Isle Of Wight Festival, at East Afton Farm, on the Isle Of Wight, England, UK, Europe. Officially, this is a three-day event, but in fact music takes place over a period of five days.

Full article:

Rikki Farr (co-promoter) : It was very fashionable in those days to be revolutionary in a physical sort of way, and pull things to pieces.
(Source : not known)

Richard Wootton (fan, later to become a music publicist) : In 1970 I was obsessed by popular music. There was so much great stuff. But I had a nagging feeling I would eventually have to abandon it all, grow-up, cut my hair, and dress like an adult. Then I went to the Isle of Wight Festival and discovered there were an enormous number of people just like me. Not thousands, not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands. There were so many of us that I realised this music I loved was going to last and life would be different for us from that of our parents. This would be my big takeaway from a chaotic but brilliant weekend with great music and limited facilities. Rock and roll was here to stay (and - as I would later discover - it was also here to pay).

The Guinness Book of Records (relying on the number of extra people who travelled on the Isle of Wight Ferry that weekend) put the total between 600,000 and 700,000, comfortably outdoing Woodstock’s 400,000 from the year before and therefore the biggest music festival at the time. This was the third one organised by Fiery Creations - the brothers Ron and Ray Foulk. The first, apparently to raise money for a new swimming pool, attracted 10,000 and they’d managed to book Jefferson Airplane as well as British acts like The Move. In 1969 they somehow got Bob Dylan for his first show since the motor bike accident. For 1970 they booked an incredible line-up. Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, The Doors and many, many more. Too many in fact so the music, which started in the afternoon, would continue until dawn.

I got the train to Portsmouth on the Thursday and waited for hours for my friend Ray Aplin but we didn’t realise there were two stations in the town and we were in different places! Eventually we got together and queued for the ferry, then queued for buses. Eventually we got to the festival site, Afton Down in the south-west of the island, near the sea. We put up my flimsy tent that didn’t have a ground sheet and then queued for ages to get into the site. It was already clear that this was going to be chaotic but great fun with so many like minded people. Tony Joe White was the first act we saw and he was fantastic. Kris Kristofferson was next but with awful sound and he was booed off!

The next day lots more people arrived and it soon became obvious that many did not have tickets. Not that surprising as they cost £3, an unheard of amount for seeing music at the time The first Glastonbury held a few weeks later was £1 and that included a pint of milk a day and an ox barbeque. Tickets for concerts by The Rolling Stones at the time were no more than £1.

But you only needed a ticket to get into the large arena, which had two high fences with security men with dogs walking around the gap between them, and you could hear the music in the surrounding area including the camp site, the car park. and (best of all) the hillside owned by the National Trust which ran alongside the arena and had room for thousands. The Guardian photo shows the hill at left and campground at the back. The dark oblongs are the “toilets”, which were deep trenches.

Meanwhile, The Guardian report of “Cheats threat to pop” was the kind you’d expect in the Daily Mail these days. We had to wait for the NME to find what really happened, because things were confusing; there was no list of who was on and no screens so you could actually see anything clearly.

Years later I would discover many people I knew had also been there, including a very young John Giddings who would become a promoter and revive the festival in 2002; Charles Shaar Murray who was writing for the free newspaper and had yet to join the NME; David Hughes, then a journalist for Disc, one of many rock writers, like Richard Williams and Michael Watts who would later employ me and my future brother-in-law Ron Binns! Anyone else? I’ll tell you about the music in a day or two.
(Source : Richard Wootton Facebook entry, Aug 27, 2020)