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 [...]]]>

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 clammy palms to a debilitating panic attack.  Beta blocker drugs help to reduce the effects of the anxiety, but then so does alcohol, which could explain why so many professional entertainers end up with a drinking problem.

If ever an audience was likely to induce an attack of stage fright just from its sheer size alone, it would be this one.  This was the biggest live audience any performer has ever stood in front of.  It was the equivalent of more than six Wembley Stadiums on FA Cup Final Day, all at once.  From here, the crowd was incomprehensibly vast, and it seemed to stretch out beyond the visible horizon, beyond the curvature of the earth.  Even for those lucky performers who had never experienced stage fright, entertaining a crowd this big must still have seemed like a daunting task.

If I had been booked to play at this Festival, I think I would have insisted on performing at night.  After dark, from the stage, you couldn’t see past the lights on the speaker towers.

This is only the first day of performance, yet, as you can see, the floor of the stage is already littered with dogends, cigarette stubs dropped and trodden into the matting to put them out (well, we assumed they were put out).  By today’s standards, how disgustingly dirty, and how potentially dangerous was that?  Yet [...]]]>

This is only the first day of performance, yet, as you can see, the floor of the stage is already littered with dogends, cigarette stubs dropped and trodden into the matting to put them out (well, we assumed they were put out).  By today’s standards, how disgustingly dirty, and how potentially dangerous was that?  Yet we were accustomed to a world that was so strewn with dogends everywhere that we hardly even noticed them.

How that world has changed.

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 [...]]]>

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 a slightly better one (although it doesn’t show much of you, I admit).

Courageous of you to perform in bare feet on that stage, after three days of sweat, spit, and dogends.

‘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 [...]]]>

‘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 Herbie Hancock.

By 1970, Sly’s life was fuelled by cocaine, and his happy, positive music of the late 60s became darker in the next few years as he descended into heavy drug dependency, eventually becoming so unreliable as a performer that promoters were no longer willing to book his band.  By 1975, it was all over.

Considering that he was so erratic that he missed nearly a third of the band’s other performances in 1970, it was a privilege for all of us to have been there at IOW1970 and to have seen him at close to his best at one of the performances he managed to complete.

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 [...]]]>

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 she is a legend, a celebrated conservationist.  Rosalie began as a folklorist in the 50s, putting together a monumental collection of songs and stories and trying to preserve that oral tradition by documenting and performing them. She has recorded 25 albums of her own and played on many others, written numerous books, been awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts, and twice been nominated for a Grammy.  Now in her late 70s, she is still travelling and singing and telling stories.  Great lady.

At IOW1970 she performed, as she often did in those days, accompanied by the excellent Dave Bromberg.

“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 [...]]]>

“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 go to the pub… Everything was always as we left it when we got back to our tent.”

(This is an extract from a comment to an earlier post – thanks Robert S)

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 [...]]]>

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 and choose ‘view image’ or ‘open image in new window’ to see a larger version)

Woodstock 1969 was marketed afterwards as ‘Three Days of Peace and Love’, but in reality, that event was a poorly organised disaster zone during which they had to call out the National Guard.  Watch the movie, it was a total shambles.

IOW1970 is remembered more as the time when those naive dreams of the sixties died, yet look again at this picture.  It’s hard to imagine ever being in a more crowded environment than this packed arena, yet what is this teeming mass of unrelated humanity doing? They are sitting peacefully together on the grass in the sunshine, just chilling out, for the fourth or fifth consecutive day.  And when it was over, they all peacefully dispersed and went home.

The love part isn’t quite as visible, but I’m pretty sure there was some of that going on, too.

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 [...]]]>

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 of view it was even better than that, the labour for this was virtually free.  Most of the painting – and other odd jobs – was done by fans, early arrivals who were willing to work in exchange for festival tickets, which they probably wouldn’t have paid for anyway, and in the end, didn’t need to.

They might not have been so keen to work if they had known the Festival was going to be free anyway, but that’s life.

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. [...]]]>

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.  There was a staircase entrance for artists that came up through a hole in the middle back of the stage, and there was that massive ramp out the back.

And the team found time to add a big sign and a coat or two of coloured paint, so it looked pretty good from out front, too.

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 [...]]]>

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 it.  Here’s one example.

At IOW1970, no rainstorm was going to stop the music by driving performers from the stage, nor was it going to destroy any equipment, nor even temporarily short the electrics.  Every square inch of stage was enclosed, sheltered under a completely waterproof roof, with walls at the back and sides.

Yes, I know, at one point during the Festival, this roof supposedly caught fire, but look at it, and what it’s made of.  To this day, apart from the nameboard, which was later attached to where this rigger is sitting, I don’t know what was up there that could have been flammable enough to produce the flames and smoke that were in some of the press shots.

Perhaps it was just a pyrotechnic effect that went wrong.