The 1970 Isle of Wight Festival Remembered

It is thirty-five years on since the West Wight hosted the third and largest Isle of Wight Pop Festival. This was the greatest gathering of people the Island has ever seen, the biggest pop music festival ever organised in its time, unrivalled until the Live Aid concert 15 years later, and one of the defining moments in the world-wide artistic, social and cultural revolution of the 1960's.

According to ferry ticket sales, up to 600,000 people came to camp on East Afton Farm and Afton Down overlooking the site. The festival was the climax of the three Isle of Wight festivals (Godshill 1968, Wootton 1969, Freshwater 1970) masterminded by Totland based Fiery Creations. For three years the Island was catapulted to world fame as a focus of the 1960's musical revolution.

The festival involved massive organisation. A workforce of 400 prepared the 300 acres of camping and built the walled inner 38 acre site containing 130 shops, 80 food outlets, including restaurants, 1,200 toilets, a half-mile of urinals, water; electricity for the most sophisticated and vast scale outdoor sound and lighting system yet attempted; a fully equipped field hospital, and the largest outside stage yet built, all the essentials for a five day city and music festival in a corn-field.

Tickets were sold across the world as Fiery Creations signed up "an international line up of artists unequalled in this country before or since". Some are forgotten 30 years on, others etched into our cultural heritage . Among the 47 acts were Jimi Hendrix (his last concert). The Doors, The Who, Free, Moody Blues, Hawkwind, Supertramp, Chicago, Procul Harem, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Jethro Tull, Donovan, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen...

There was intense local opposition, including death threats and sabotage. A public meeting at the Memorial Hall attended by 650 ended in uproar, as festival supporters took over a meeting organised by those opposed. Many were terrified by the prospect of the thought of half a million hippies occupying the West Wight.

The miracle happened, there were no major incidents. The ferries ran 24 hours a day as the population of the Island multiplied five-fold. The sun shone, and despite the inevitable chaos, the festival was a huge success, fondly remembered by everyone I meet who was there. They recall an extraordinary sense of togetherness and trust amongst this happy army of strangers. "I asked the audience to hold hands," recalled M/C Rikki Farr in 1971, "the emotion of which I could never explain. Never in the history of the world has that amount of people joined hands together in a field without being under the standard of a military flag."

"For five days all barriers of class, creed and nationality were totally ignored." wrote a reader to The Times, "People shared their food, money and possessions with complete strangers..."

Apart from the inconvenience caused, local retailers were doing a massive trade, employment was boosted, e.g. 250 security guards for the site, and local people generally enjoyed the friendly, if bizarre intrusion of multicoloured long haired youth.

As the festival broke up on the drizzly Monday, September 1st some already felt that it was the end of a beautiful dream. Fiery Creations sank with a debt of £125,000 and the opponents ensured the Parliamentary Act the following year which banned any further Isle of Wight Pop Festivals. The Island's brief modem fame and prosperity came to an abrupt end. The hedonistic optimism of the 'Sixties Revolution' evaporated in the gritty seventies.

The idea and format of this kind of festival was not completely lost, the torch passed to the embryonic festival already started at Pilton Farm, Glastonbury.
The Isle of Wight Pop Festival of 1970 was one of the greatest human manifestations of the revolutionary late 1960s. The political revolution did not happen, but artistic and musical change accelerated. Cultural values have since been transformed by the humanism, liberalism and tolerance felt by the hundreds of thousands who gathered on and around the East Afton site in those heady days of 26th - 30th August 1970.

For a generation around the world, the Isle of Wight Festival became a symbol, of the times "a changin'". The French pop single "Wight is White" remains one of the anthems of the 60's for our Gallic cousins. The Isle of Wight achieved a global fame for a generation who in their own way helped to mark the dividing line between the solid conservative values of the postwar world with the society of individual freedom and social equality of modem times.

There is a permanent exhibition of ephemera and posters from the three early Island festivals, 1968-1970, at the Julia Margaret Cameron Trust’s Dimbola Lodge in Freshwater Bay. The exhibition is sponsored by Solo, the company which is organising the new Isle of Wight Festivals at Seaclose Park. “We hope to eventually add an audio visual component, tying together festivals past and present” said Trust chairman and festival historian Brian Hinton.

“During this year's Nokia Isle of Wight Festival, Southern Vectis are running a 'magic bus' service from the new site to Afton, and then on to Dimbola to see the exhibition. We hope to place a statue of Jimi Hendrix as he played Afton in 1970 in the grounds of Dimbola in the future, as a permanent memorial to that great event.