One year after the Woodstock Arts & Music Festival descended on Max Yasgur’s farm in upstate New York, a similar event kicked off at Afton Down on England’s Isle of Wight on August 26, 1970. Some claim the week-long festival was the British equivalent of the previous year’s decade-defining weekend in New York. Others write off the Isle of Wight Festival as a disaster.
Frankly, it was a little bit of both.
The Isle of Wight Festival 1970 Begins
If the goal of Ron, Ray, and Bill Foulk was to create a British Woodstock, the numbers would show they succeeded. Estimates claim attendance at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival to be around 600,000 to 700,000—-hundreds of thousands more people than Woodstock’s roughly 460,000 attendees. Like Woodstock, the festival kicked off in August and featured a star-studded lineup of performers, including Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, The Who, Joan Baez, Jethro Tull, and Joni Mitchell.
Unlike Woodstock, the festival struggled to balance a free-spirited, “peace, love, and harmony” ideal with a successful business venture. Organizers built walls, installed ticket turnstiles, and implemented security measures to ensure the only people attending the Isle of Wight were actual ticket holders. These strict festival rules angered attendees (both paying and non) who believed the extra security and emphasis on ticket sales flew in the face of these festivals’ anti-capitalist undertones.
Logistical and drug-related issues also ensued. Located on the English Channel, the wind raking across the Isle of Wight made running sound for the event next to impossible. Add bad acid, booze, and general discontentment to an already anxious crowd, and it was only a matter of time before conflict started breaking out across the Afton Down grounds. In hindsight, some historians and organizers have claimed the media exaggerated the trouble. But some performers might not have thought so.
Controversial Performances at the “British Woodstock”
Tempestuous dynamics between the Isle of Wight performers and the massive audience are largely to blame for the festival’s reputation as a “disaster.” In a now-infamous interaction, audience members heckled a visibly nervous Joni Mitchell about smiling so much that she stopped the set to address them directly. “It’s really a drag,” the singer said to the crowd while sitting at the piano.
Sound troubles and a rowdy crowd led to Kris Kristofferson having an equally unpleasant set. After audience members misheard Kristofferson’s “Blame It On the Stones” as an attack on the Rolling Stones (it wasn’t), the crowd quickly turned. “It was a total disaster,” he later recalled (via The Independent). “They booed us, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Sly Stone; they threw s*** at Jimi Hendrix. At the end of the night, they were tearing down the outer walls, setting fire to the concessions, burning their tents, shouting obscenities. Peace and love it was not.”
Gathering a crowd of over half a million people, most of whom were using some kind of mind-altering substances, was bound to have its challenges, and Kristofferson referenced some of them in his recollection. For example, after an MC declared the festival free (again, it wasn’t), ticket-holders on the inside of the event perimeter dismantled the walls piece by piece. The image was so alarming that festival workers began demanding payment immediately in case the chaos boiled over further.
In hindsight, the festival wasn’t all bad. After all, the Foulk brothers seemingly accomplished their goal of throwing a British Woodstock. Ask any naysayers in upstate New York how they felt about the festival held down the road the previous year, and they’d likely have a few grievances to share, too.
Photo by Brian Moody/Shutterstock
Most Popular
Comments / 0