Isle of Wight Festival 1970 – The Last Great Event

No, not the kind of performance anxiety for which every second spam email has an instant cure, I mean the kind that is better known as ’stage fright’.  Even among seasoned professional performers of all kinds, stage fright is surprisingly common.  For many, the act of walking out onto a stage can produce anything from [...]

Clive Jones, the sax player you can just see behind Black Widow front man Kip Trevor, tells us that the band is back, and that a new album will be released soon, featuring Tony Martin, formerly of Black Sabbath.

Good luck with the album, Clive.  This picture is not the one I told you about, it’s [...]

‘Dance to the Music’, and ‘I Want to Take You Higher’, are probably the only Sly and the Family Stone tracks that most younger music lovers today have ever heard, if any, but Sly Stone has been acknowledged as a major influence by some very important musicians, like Michael Jackson, and Miles Davis, Prince, and [...]

As I’ve said before, IOW1970 wasn’t just a rock festival it was a music festival, and we had a wonderful diversity of performers, many of whom would rarely, if ever, play in the UK again.

Rosalie Sorrels wasn’t well-known at the time in England, and she probably still isn’t, but in terms of American cultural history [...]

“We had a tent, a Primus stove and a few pots and pans. We may even have had a change of underwear.  As I remember it, we always left everything in our tent during the day and before the Festival started would walk into the local village/town to use the toilets and buy food and [...]

I don’t have to remember that “Holy ****” (insert expletive of your choice) feeling I got after climbing to the top of the ridge and seeing this scene, because looking at this picture now gives me the same sense of awe and amazement as the real thing did the first time.  (right click the pic [...]

There are a lot of significant costs involved in building a structure like the IOW1970 stage – even if it’s only a temporary structure – but I’m sure the budget didn’t cover this sort of fancy finishing.  Fortunately, not even sub-minimum wages needed to be found to pay for this work.  From the organisers’ point [...]

Take a bow, construction team.  When it was completed this was a stage worthy of the world’s biggest ever rock festival.

The floor was flat and solid, clad in thick plywood, covered in coir matting for grip.  There was theatrical lighting above, and separate areas either side of the stage for the main banks of speakers. [...]

If you Google images of Woodstock 1969, you will see pictures of what was really a very poor and inadequate stage area for an event that was always going to be of some significant size.  The Woodstock stage was little more than a platform with a couple of loose tarpaulins strung over the top of [...]