Isle of Wight Festival 1968

Line-up

Apple Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation Fairport Convention Halcyon Order Harsh Reality Hunter Muskett Jefferson Airplane John Peel Orange Bicycle Plastic Penny Pretty Things Smile The Crazy World of Arthur Brown The Move Tyrannosaurus Rex

Marc Bolan 1968

Sitting cross-legged on a flat bed truck, Marc warbles Tolkein-like fairy tales of elves, magicians and romany soup as half of Tyrannosaurus Rex. The setting is a cold stubble field, near Godshill (where the ley lines meet) to a hippie throng gathered for a now legendary one day event. The first great UK rock festival.

Site Manager, Ron Smith, remembers setting up the event:

"The IOW pop festivals came about as a result of the Isle of Wight Swimming Pool Association, of which I was a member, wanting to raise funds. It was suggested we employ a fund-raiser. I said I knew someone; that person was Ronnie Foulk. We then proposed, after some discussion with Ray, that we have a pop festival. The committee allocated £750 and we set about putting a festival together."

It was Hells Field, a one hundred acre field of stubble corn, and we paced out with some broken bars that had been left on the site what we thought the arena should be, and then Ronnie and Rikki Farr (the compere) suddenly said, "We're off to London now, see you. Don't forget it goes on in three weeks time, Ron."

"I wondered what I should do, when three brothers aged about thirty came on the scene in a van and said they'd heard we were talking about a pop festival on the Island and could they help. They had called at my house and the missus had sent them out. They wanted desperately to be involved, and had experience in scaffolding, laying bricks, anything."

"So I went off in my van to get some scaffolding poles and we set to build the stadium. We covered it in black plastic. The stage was several low loaders which I had through the good offices of British Road Services, and we got a generator down from Winchester. Water for the site was obtained in new dustbins by my wife, who went round garages in the area, filling them up."

The big day dawns

Publicised as one of the biggest pop festivals ever staged in this country, events got under way early on Saturday evening. An audience of 10,000 congregated on forty acres of barley stubble known as Hayles Field - translated by the press into 'Hell Field' - on Ford Farm, near Godshill but nearer Niton, just off the main road from Newport to Ventnor. The event began at 8pm on Saturday, 31 August and ended at 8.30 the following morning - it was supposed to run from 6pm to 10am, so it started late and finished early!

Tickets were the grand sum of 25 shillings each, £1.25 in post-decimal times.

After weeks of planning the supposedly highly organised, precision-planned gig turned out to be 'sixteen hours of make-do, make-shift and hasty improvisation'.

Technical difficulties meant as often as much as a half-hour break between each group. Organisers and sponsors associated with it had already disclaimed responsibility for anything that happened 'on the night', and the Island's magistrates hit out at them for advertising bar facilities before they had applied for a licence. Pre-publicity promised 'licensed bars, marquee, refreshments and snack bar'.

Geoff Wall recalls the sheer excitement of the times: "The boundary fence consisted of black plastic sheeting - a far cry from the high wooden fences and security guards that accompanied futures IOW events. The loos were a simple trench, again surrounded by some plastic bags. The stage itself was just two flatbed trailers placed together, with plastic sheeting covering a make-shift scaffolding structure. To the right of the stage was a huge screen."

The whole affair was a miniature precursor of Afton, beauty and danger coalescing in a rural setting, with the pop fans like the 'poor bloody infantry' of the Great War, setting out for the trenches. As the Islander reported:

'Hells' Field was a beautiful setting for the Festival, surrounded by rolling green hills and bright, bright sunshine. There was, however, something ominous about the enclosure; it looked very much like a prison camp, a detention compound. An area all round the billowing black PVC walls was marked off with wire, and patrolled by a Security man holding an alsation on a tight lead. The queue at the entrance was very orderly and seemed unnaturally quiet, almost apprehensive.'

Quite who did appear and in exactly in what order, is still a subject of lounge-bar arguments. As someone once said, if you can remember the sixties, you weren't really there!

The poster promised Jimmy Saville - who no-one can remember being there - and a 'lite-show' by a student of the RCA. The only thing that compere and Radio 1 DJ 'Laughing' John Peel, who made a brief appearance to start the proceedings, could remember twenty six years later, was ..

"...one fragile bobitette who was crying because her bare feet were so cold and, overcome with lust, I gave her my socks. She skippety skipped away and that was that. I want my socks back. And I want them washed first, too."

The above extracts are taken from Brian Hinton's "Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival 1968 - 1969 - 1970".