Isle of Wight Festival 1970 – The Last Great Event

One design innovation – which I’m pretty sure was Bud’s idea – was a huge shallow ramp at the back of the stage.  This was wide enough and solid enough to back up two big trucks onto, side by side.   That was so the roadies for the outgoing band could be derigging and loading [...]

Luckily, the weather was mostly fairly kind during construction, and not much work was lost because of rain, but Bud and his riggers often worked on into the evening, until it was too dark to keep going.  I’m sure the crew were reasonably careful, and I don’t remember anyone being seriously hurt, but no structure [...]

The stage that we got was not just a raised platform, it was a very solid structure with walls and a substantial weather-proof roof.  The heavily cross-braced steel scaffolding skeleton slowly took shape over the first two weeks of construction. Steel scaffolding is a very versatile temporary building material but it has to be dismantled the [...]

This is Bud.  Bud was an American, and he built our stage.  Not single-handedly, and I’m not sure if he was officially in charge of the whole construction project, but he always seemed to be in charge in every practical way, and it was his broad range of construction skills and hard work that made [...]

Dawn on the last full day.  The 3rd Annual Isle of Wight Festival of Music 1970 had stopped being fun.  It was now an endurance event for almost everyone there.  It was a matter of pride now not to quit, to be able to say that you stayed there to the end, and that you [...]

Around Day 4, the excitement of sharing this amazing experience was wearing off.  The initial euphoria had faded.  Many had not slept at all, others were uncomfortable but still asleep, despite the general decibel level which had not stopped all night.  The day had not yet warmed up, it was still the hazy morning hours [...]

This is what it looked like from the stage, on the afternoon of the second day.  The crowd is happily enjoying the entertainment, many of them on their feet and waving their arms.  It wasn’t hard to be happy that day.  It was warm, dry, and you and half a million or so other people [...]

Forget the fashionable 1960s politics of anti-materialism, the tired socialist rhetoric about the nobility of the downtrodden oppressed classes, these unwashed individuals were not socialist revolutionaries.  Most of the young people who gravitated towards Desolation Row had chosen a lifestyle that was as close to poverty as their limited funds and lowered standards of hygiene [...]

This redhead in a blue caftan and beads with the distinctly non-hippy haircut is Dyan Birch, the lead female singer with the pseudo-hippy group Arrival.  Arrival didn’t last very long, and when it broke up, four of the members – including Dyan – joined with the remnants of other bands and formed another group, called [...]

The original Jethro Tull died in 1741. He was a technological pioneer who helped to revolutionise British agriculture.  The other Jethro Tull was born in 1967 and is still going strong.

Perhaps harking back to the old rural roots of the band’s namesake, Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson presented himself as a sort of crazy pied [...]