Shortly before the infamous 1970 Isle of Wight festival, Stanley Dunmore, a local public health inspector, worried about “a possible breakdown of public order … if the festival is a failure, or falls short of expectations, or the weather is bad, or facilities which the fans expect to find in the town are not available”.
His observations, made when music festivals were in their infancy, confirm some things that we know about them today – if only Billy McFarland and Ja Rule had read Dunmore’s report before the spectacular failure of Fyre festival. These events are complex and expensive to coordinate, especially in remote settings with inebriated and underprepared crowds cowed by the weather. If things go wrong, disaster can ensue.
Isle of Wight 1970 became the British festival that we associate with disaster. The myth goes that a group of young men, out to make a few quid from youthful music fans, put on the largest-ever pop festival in Britain at the time. To protect their investment and rake in gate receipts, they erected fencing around the site to contain the crowd of 600,000 and exclude troublemakers. Building on a few references in the press, the popular image is of radicals and French anarchists flooding down from Desolation Hill, which overlooked the festival site, and ripping down the fencing. In a recent article on Joni Mitchell’s performance, the Guardian reported that “fights broke out, objects were thrown, and a lot of bad acid was taken”.
But it is easy to get the wrong impression about the 1970 festival. It has been mythologised and attacked for personal and political reasons, but against most criteria other than finances (a £40,000-£60,000 loss), the evidence that I unearthed for my first book reveals a beguiling and misunderstood story. It suggests the festival was not as bad as it seems – in fact, at the time some saw it as the British Woodstock.
The first Isle of Wight festival, in 1968, attracted about 8,000 festivalgoers to Hell Field near Godshill. Three Labour-supporting brothers in their early 20s brought to the island from Derbyshire during childhood, Ray, Bill and Ronald Foulk, instigated the festival to raise funds to build a municipal indoor swimming pool.
The 1969 festival exceeded their wildest expectations. Bob Dylan, who had hardly played live since his motorbike accident in 1966, attracted the world’s media and 80,000 to 100,000 festivalgoers. Ray Foulk says the 1969 festival was not without hiccups – he told me that “the catering was not adequate; we were ripped off and the public were”, and a lack of toilets led to long queues. But the promoters learned on their feet and overcame these problems; good weather did not test the amenities at the site, now in Wootton. There was a headline performance from the Who, and Dylan’s appearance was a culturally significant moment – a pilgrimage – for the postwar generation.
It teed up the 1970 festival, one of the largest outdoor gatherings in Britain since the war, even if the figure of 600,000 is probably an overestimate. The event might not have taken place if local councillors, well-connected islanders and their Conservative MP, Mark Woodnutt, had had their way. In letters to the environment department, Woodnutt argued that the festival could cause a polio epidemic (the island had suffered one in 1949) and that the 1969 festival had “left a scene of indescribable filth”. However, he would need a high court injunction to stop the festival, and proof that the festival was a threat to public and environmental health rather than simply a nuisance.
Mindful of a a possible injunction, the Foulks’ company Fiery Creations reminded the council of the lack of trouble during the 1969 festival and the good publicity the island received because of the event. Dunmore, the health inspector, and Douglas Quantrill, the island’s chief medical officer, alleviated sanitation and safety fears, and helped coordinate organisations from macrobiotic caterers to National Rail.
Without legal recourse, local pressure groups and councillors disingenuously claimed the island lacked suitable sites for a large festival and pressured landowners into refusing to rent land. The East Afton site was only agreed in early August, weeks before the festival opened at the start of the bank holiday. The valley, flanked by a hill on National Trust property and near idyllic beaches below white cliffs, would soon host a stage, 20 turnstiles, 66 food and drink stalls, 500 toilets and 600 feet of urinals.
Reports from the time, and footage, suggest that the crowd witnessed some stunning performances. The lineup included the Who, Miles Davis, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, the Moody Blues, Jethro Tull, Sly and the Family Stone and Gilberto Gil; Jimi Hendrix played one of his last performances before his death. Recently rediscovered photographs taken by Peter Bull show calm and content festivalgoers, who resemble their contemporary counterparts aside from their attire, lack of mobile phones and the fact that they’re nearly all sitting down.
There were disturbances, though. A group, no more than 200 of those camping on Desolation Hill, attempted to break down the perimeter wall the day before the festival began. Later, on Sunday morning, organisers and audience argued when security cleared the inner arena for Jethro Tull’s soundcheck and to check tickets. At 4pm on Sunday afternoon, MC Rikki Farr declared the festival free (to the horror of Ray Foulk who was standing in the crowd) and, after the announcement, the inner arena wall was dismantled from the inside by ticket holders, prompting a queue of concerned workers and creditors seeking immediate payment backstage. There were 117 arrests for possession of drugs.
Conflicts do not feature prominently in the official record, however. Douglas Osmond, the chief constable of Hampshire police, dressed up like a hippy and went incognito on Desolation Hill for a day. He claimed to see less violence than at a typical football match and concluded that “people become unduly anxious about these gatherings”.
Every national newspaper reported on the festival, with some of them, glad for news in August, printing extensive coverage. These generally positive reports were punctuated by scurrilous stories about sex and drugs, outraged locals and photographs of nude (mostly female) bodies. The Sunday Mirror’s account explained: “This isn’t quite paradise. But if you are young and can look after yourself and the sun stays out and the music stays loud, it doesn’t matter.”
It is interesting, then, that a view of the festival as a disaster has come to dominate. Organisers blame the late documentary film-maker Murray Lerner. Fiery Creations and Lerner wanted to emulate the success of the 1970 Woodstock documentary, which took just under $50m at the US box office, but their Isle of Wight film did not find a distributor until 1997 and the delay caused acrimony. Ray Foulk, particularly in the second volume of his book When the World Came to the Isle of Wight, and Peter Harrigan, Fiery Creations’ publicist, allege that Lerner removed footage of isolated incidents of trouble from their context and spliced them between performances for drama. For instance, Lerner’s documentary edited the footage of arguments in the main arena on Sunday morning to include shots of some drunken jeering and stray beers thrown at a lighting tower. The film exaggerates the intensity, significance and extent of either disturbance. It was, Foulk said, “complete fakery” and “besmirched not just the festival but a whole generation of people”. Indeed, he argues that the festival was only declared free to benefit Lerner’s documentary in the first place.
The organisers also made the mistake of inviting International Times (IT), a London-based countercultural paper, to view the site under construction. As head of the British White Panthers, its editor, Mick Farren, published communiques in pamphlets and IT that encouraged resistance. He saw the increased price (to £3, about the price of a double album) and security as an affront to his left-libertarian view that music festivals should be free, and claimed that the fences, security dogs and turnstiles evoked prison camps.
After losing £6,000 on their own free festival a month before, Phun City near Worthing, the 1970 Isle of Wight festival provided Farren and his peers a chance for some agitprop myth-making to champion the radical underground. Take Jean-Jacques Lebel, the only one of the “French anarchists” that can be identified from the festival despite that phrase recurring in several accounts – thanks to his involvement in the counterculture, Lebel could amplify his role in the festival’s mythology and its political significance through the underground press.
Farren’s fear about repression and exploitation were not misplaced, but misdirected. The idea that festivals had radical potential, alongside stigma concerning festivalgoers’ propriety, took hold, and exacerbated the anxieties and prejudices of conservative Isle of Wight residents. The county council had received calls to stop pop festivals since 1969 – one letter described festivalgoers as “social parasites” – and following the 1970 event Woodnutt introduced legislation to prevent another festival on the island. The council now had complete discretion over licenses for overnight events with a crowd over 5,000, and organisers would have to give four months’ notice. Subsequently, there were no further festivals there there until 2002.
Other rural areas wanted similar control and Conservative MP Jerry Wiggin’s Night Assemblies Bill offered it. The bill proposed criminalising any outdoor gathering of 1,000 people or more between midnight and 6am unless the organisers applied to a local authority at least four months before and provided financial guarantees.
The bill did not, however, define the “pop festival” clearly and therefore threatened the right to free assembly. The National Council for Civil Liberties argued it would “stifle political opinion and prevent activity at a time when too much emphasis is being put upon law and order at the expense of justice and liberty”, and the bill failed.
It exposed, though, tension between young people, the counterculture and rural British conservatism. The vitriol aimed at pop festivals, and the types of social change that they were seen to represent, is startling. Great Western festivals ran into to trouble, for instance, in Tollesbury, Essex, in 1972 when trying to find a festival site (it ultimately settled on Bardney, Lincolnshire). The local villagers burned effigies of the organisers, Lord Harlech and the actor Stanley Baker – the type of hip capitalists that countercultural radicals also feared. A local explained that this was because the festival would cause the “sheer rape of our way of life”. The panic over festivals became a trope for bored reporters in the summertime and justification for heavy-handed policing, as those brutally attacked by Thames Valley police at the Windsor free festival in 1974 will attest.
Quantrill, meanwhile, became a public health celebrity, if there is such a thing. Councils sought him out for advice on festivals and at the Royal Society of Health Symposium in 1971 he argued, in what became a widely circulated paper, that there was little risk in a reasonably well-planned festival such as the Isle of Wight 1970. The government select committee issued an official code of practice to guide local authorities and festival organisers, undermining “anarchic” or free festivals by giving local authorities clearer grounds for injunctions if a festival did not meet the code’s expensive recommendations. Without significant capital and a willing council, it made it harder for enthusiastic amateurs such as Fiery Creations to run a festival, leaving rural landowners and posh hipsters increasingly in charge.
When you attend the modern-day music festival, however, you are, in a sense, stepping into a world made by three brothers, their friends and a handful of kindly civil servants. Think of them when you find an empty, mercifully unstained Portaloo.
• Peter Bull’s photographs are taken from a forthcoming book, Isle of Wight 1970: 50th Anniversary Celebration of the Greatest Festival – Ever
