England

Trouble on the island

Trouble on the island

It was its third year and its last. More than half a million people turned up to the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival and witnessed the final act of one great performer and the emergence of another.

For five days, tensions had been rising. It was 1970 and the end of the peace-loving era was looming. Jimi Hendrix, the headline act for the Isle of Wight Festival, had performed one of his most disappointing sets ever. A raft of technical problems wasn’t helped by the fact that, well after midnight, everyone was cold and exhausted and the guitarist himself was self-medicating on an unknown combination of booze and drugs. He left the stage in the wee small hours, but not before fans threw bottles, lit fires and hurled flares on to the roof of the stage, causing it to catch fire.

“Thank you very much. And peace and happiness and all the other good shit,” said Hendrix as he departed. Little did anyone know it would be the last time he would perform in the UK. Three weeks later Hendrix was dead.

In the early hours of 31 August, however, one of the organisers went to wake Leonard Cohen. He was due to play after Hendrix, but decided to take a nap. There is no way anyone thought the unshaven, long-haired singer dressed in a safari jacket would be able to turn around the ill feeling seeping through the crowd. Kris Kristofferson, Joan Baez and Judy Collins, who’d all endured the wrath of the restless audience, gathered backstage to watch what was about to unfold.

This was the third Isle of Wight Festival organised by brothers Ray, Bill and Ron Foulk. In 1968, it went for just a day. Jefferson Airplane headlined and 10,000 people turned up. The following year, organisers lured Bob Dylan. Once he’d signed on, The Who, The Band and Joe Cocker followed suit. Over the course of two days, 150,000 revellers enjoyed the good vibes. But it wasn’t until its third year that the Isle of Wight Festival entered the stratosphere.

There was trouble from the start. For those first two years, the Foulk brothers had rented a field from a farmer. But the Isle of Wight was a haven for well-heeled retirees, and those people didn’t like the idea of it being taken over by hippies. The council, heavily lobbied by residents, introduced an act that meant organisers had to get permission to hold any large event. The Foulk brothers were forced to accept the only venue being offered to them, at East Afton Farm. 
It was overlooked by a large hill, making it hard for them to stop people watching from outside.

The times were changing too. Three years earlier, the Summer of Love saw people who rejected the establishment gathering in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood and the first rock festivals being organised. Some were free; others, like the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival in California, donated gate proceeds to charities. On the other hand, promoters were starting to realise there was a lot of cash to be made and bands’ agents were demanding higher fees for their acts to appear.

The year before, Woodstock organisers decided to pull down the fence and let people in for free due to fears security wouldn’t be able to control the crowd. Four months later, the Altamont Free Concert turned into a debacle when 300,000 people turned up and the Hells Angels were hired – if you can call being paid with $500 worth of beer being hired – to do security. They got drunk, the crowd became increasingly agitated, Santana refused to play due to the deteriorating situation, 
and Meredith Hunter, a member of the crowd, was stabbed and killed by an Angel after pulling a revolver from his jacket while the Rolling Stones were on stage.

Early on at Isle of Wight things started to get out of hand. The organisers had expected a decent crowd, but an estimated 600,000 to 700,000 eager punters hit the island. Among them were a band of radicals and anarchists who, unwilling to pay the ticket price, set up a camp outside the festival fences. Paint was handed out by the organisers in the hope the protestors of Desolation Row would decorate the barricade and get into the spirit of the festival. Instead they covered the walls with Nazi symbols and anti-establishment slogans that then had to be painted over. Others tore down sections of the fence and entered without a ticket. In the midst of the growing problems, health officials turned up to inspect the inadequate toilet facilities.

Who knows how much of this, apart from the ill feeling in the audience, Leonard Cohen was aware of. At the time, the 35-year-old was a relative newcomer to performing. He’d spent his twenties as a poet and novelist in Montreal, had released two albums, Songs of Leonard Cohen and Songs from a Room, and had only ever played one festival, at Aix-en-Provence earlier in the month. On the night, he’d taken Mandrax. Who could blame him?

Jeff Dexter, a DJ who introduced the band, could see they’d all taken the sedative. “They were in such a state I could have fucked them all and they wouldn’t have known it,” he told Sylvie Simmons, Cohen’s biographer. He and others were worried for their safety, but Cohen was calm. He walked on to the stage and, in the darkness, began to tell a story about his father taking him to the circus. “I don’t want to impose upon you,” Cohen continued, “but there was one moment when a man would stand up and say, ‘Would someone light a match so we can locate one another?’ And could I ask you, each person, to light a match so I can see you all?”

At first, there was just a flicker and he softly, slowly began singing ‘Bird on a Wire’. The crowd was mesmerised. During the 16-song set, the number of matches grew and lit up the misty sky.

“They hated everybody at that festival,” Kris Kristofferson recalled in an interview in 2010. “The only guy they didn’t hate was Leonard Cohen. It was strange. I thought they were going to kill him because they had been so shitty to Jimi [Hendrix] and by the time they got Leonard it was like four in the morning and they were burning down the concession stands and tearing the walls down … And he charmed the beast. For whatever reason they listened to him. They loved him.”

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The fourth Isle of Wight Festival was held in 2002 and is now an annual event. 
isleofwightfestival.com

Tags: england, festival, music

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