Wednesday 26th August - Sunday 30th August 1970

Jimi Hendrix 1970
The highlight of the biggest ever live music event seen in the UK, at East Afton Farm, Jimi comes on round midnight to give everything he has left to give. It is his last major performance – within three weeks he is dead. Opening with a distorted version of ‘God Save The Queen’, he looks troubled, but sings and plays with a savage grace. Someone sets the stage on fire after his set, like a wake for the 1960s.

Wednesday 26th: Judas Jump, Kathy Smith, Rosalie Sorrels, David Bromberg, Redbone, Kris Kristofferson, Mighty Baby.

Thursday 27th: Gary Farr, Supertramp, Andy Roberts Everyone, Howl, Black Widow, Groundhogs, Terry Reid, Gilberto Gil.

Friday 28th: Fairfield Parlour, Arrival, Lighthouse, Taste, Tony Joe White, Chicago, Family, Procol Harum, The Voices of East Harlem, Cactus.

Saturday 29th: John Sebastian, Shawn Phillips, Lighthouse, Joni Mitchell, Tiny Tim, Miles Davis, Ten Years After, Emerson Lake and Palmer, The Doors, The Who, Melanie, Sly and the Family Stone. Mungo Jerry were there but decided not to play.Tiny Tim with Islanders Cas Caswell bass & Jack Richards drums.

Sunday 30th: Good News, Kris Kristofferson, Ralph McTell, Heaven, Free, Donovan, Pentangle, Moody Blues, Jethro Tull, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Richie Havens, Hawkwind

A new site
"The new site will cover three hundred acres and is set up in such a way as to provide people with an entire self-contained community, without infringing on the rights of local inhabitants." Rikki Farr

East Afton Farm - Freshwater

The original plan was to hold the Festival at Churchill's Farm, Calbourne, a landlocked site west of Newport, the Island's capital. However, a Select Committee of the County Council found this unsuitable - 'the land is high and is known to be both windy and damp' - but agreed instead to East Afton Farm, Freshwater.

The new site was situated on a flat plain just off the main Newport-Freshwater road in the heart of the quiet and mysterious West Wight. It was overshadowed by the massive chalk bulk of Afton Down and - further to the west - the granite monument to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Tennyson Down itself as it curved away to the Needles, and the sea.

Ron 'Turner' Smith:
"Ray Foulk and I spent most of the winter, one or two nights a week, talking about it, designing it, drawing it out - until the plan finally evolved. We went across and saw Mark Woodnutt about a site, to see if the County Council would join with us. I got the impression that Woodnutt wanted a slice of the action; he thought there was good money to be made.

"Ronnie and Ray joined me over at Woodnutt's house; we had agreed that we were not going to pass any money over to Woodnutt, so he stiffened his opposition. We got a convoy of vehicles to move out to Churchill's Farm where we hoped to pitch our site, when Ray - who had been in County Hall that morning - came steaming down the road to say, "They've blocked us here; we can use a field at Afton Farm." When we saw it, it was obvious they wanted to smash us, because the land was overlooked by Afton Down, and we knew immediately there would be as many people outside as in."

An all-star line-up
By early June, the only acts definitely booked were the Who, Richie Havens, Chicago, Pentangle and Mungo Jerry. The DJs were to be Rikki Farr and 'blond, bespectacled authority on progressive music', Jeff Dexter.

In early June, another piece of the jigsaw fell into place when Fiery Creations announced that the top attraction at the Festival would be Joan Baez, 'in the same spot that Dylan occupied on the Sunday night last year', and as an exclusive performance - her first for three years in Britain. As her husband was currently in prison in the States for draft evasion, she had refused to appear in her own country since Woodstock. The Doors would headline on Friday, Hendrix would top the bill on Saturday, and two further names had been added to Sunday's bill - John Sebastian and James Taylor.

Preparing for the masses

1970 Stage & Crowd

Tickets for the weekend would cost £3. Press Officer Peter Harrigan talked about possible problems, and how they planned to overcome them.

"This is our third festival. For the first one we brought Jefferson Airplane over. We got 10,000 people and the stage was just the back of two lorries. Last year we had Bob Dylan and something like 150,000 came to see him. We were only expecting 50,000 and to be quite honest the facilities - toilets, catering etc - were strained. We have learned a lot from the past and this year we are planning everything with a figure of 200,000 in mind. If we do get more - and we have carried out surveys; there is a lot of exaggeration with the numbers at pop festivals - there will be relief toilets and things like that ready for use.

"The fact that we are on an Island will help ease the situation; people won't be able to bring their cars over, so we won't have long jams. Ferries will be running all night and local companies are organising the transport to the actual site. There will be large camping areas all around the arena -

"We have spent over £100,000 on getting the artists to appear, and about the same on preparing the site. We could have spent less on facilities and made a huge profit, but people would have been disappointed and they wouldn't come again next year. That's not what we want. We want this to become an annual event. We want it to last."

Meanwhile, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, the Moody Blues, Family and taste had all now been confirmed, as had been the debut performances of Emerson, Lake And Palmer.

On July 23 the formal agreement - between the IOW County Council and Fiery Creations - that the Festival could take place was duly signed.

Ron Smith:

Joni Mitchell

"It took three or four weeks to build the basic site; we set up a workshop in an old button factory in Middleton, where we constructed fibre-glass loo seats. We had nine diggers on the site, and piped several miles of ditches, as well as a hundred taps and stand-pipes, and over a thousand loos, built over deep trenches. At that time, the water supply for all of Freshwater was restricted to one eight-inch main at the foot of the Down so they tapped some supplies that had been used in the Crimean War on top of Headon Warren and added this to the system, as well as some brackish water which came from Freshwater pumping station.

"Much to my regret now, we also removed a couple of miles of fences - we fetched in scaffolding from all over the country - and of course we had French, Italian and Spanish anarchists camping there. One night, they decided to break the fence down. I was called to the scene, met their leaders and talked them into a quiet mood, and sent Ronnie for some Mars bars, which I distributed free - and it shut 'em up.

"The Festival went on. The editor of a leading architects' magazine was overwhelmed by it all. "You're building a small city here!" He devoted that month's main article to the pop festival."

Jimi Hendrix

The thirty-eight acre grass arena was to be completely surrounded by nine inch double walling, between which a ring road would run, allowing shops and other amenity areas to be serviced. There would be complete catering facilities and every type of food and refreshment would be available from over eighty serving areas, including restaurants. Licensed bars would open, on site, from 11am to 11pm.

Elaborate sanitation arrangements were to include over 1,200 closets, half a mile of urinals and a hundred water points. Litter would be dealt with by using over 2,500 waste-paper sacks daily and a continuous sanitation and disposal service.

There was to be a special welfare enclosure, a full equipped field hospital, a church tent, a Release ten - for those suffering bad trips - and a police-controlled lost property office.

Over 300 acres were to be available for camping space, free of charge for people, and marquees for people with no tent of their own. On sale at the site were to be disposable sleeping bags, made of paper and foam rubber. With unconscious humour, it was stated that these had been tested under arctic conditions and should last in the Island climate for at least a week -

The world's largest festival in the eyes of the parish clerk - the simple world of the Freshwater parish clerk. Here is the sort of man who could report the sinking of the Titanic as displacing a lot of water, and causing needless damage to a perfectly formed iceberg, while worrying about possible improprieties in the mixed lifeboats.

25 AUGUST
Every seat and piece of grass 'taken over' by hippies - litter everywhere in the village, a couldn't-care-less attitude by all fans, baskets and bins being completely ignored. Bread in short supply. Buses filled by hippies with no chance for public. Considerable excrement over side of Downs (Mrs A., who reported this, felt and looked quite ill). I had to phone Health Department and ask for it to be disinfected because of the stench. Mrs T. of The Artist reported eighteen brooches missing after two or three hippies had been in her shop. Now a considerable crop of all sorts of inferior trading vans in many parts, leaving considerable litter nearby. Mr F., High Street, reported an indecency outside his shop at 8am. He told those involved that the village was not used to such behaviour and he would send for police if they did not move on.

26 AUGUST
Noise - all night Discotecque (sic).

27 AUGUST
Took a walk over Afton Down; very few pop fans in the actual arena, but plenty on the hillside. Footpath 28 (Desolation Row) a dreadful looking sight.

28 AUGUST
Mr C. reported that in mid-afternoon he saw sexual indecency at a culvert, near side of Afton Manor gate.

29 AUGUST
Mrs H. reported that at 10.30pm a stark naked man jumped out and danced in front of her car.

30 AUGUST
Reports of extensive nude bathing at Compton Beach: Did Police ignore this sort of thing? Mrs A. witnessed one nude couple who passed her by saying, "There's nothing else left for kicks."

The arena looked squalid, with large piles of rubbish, tins and so on at various points among the fans; the lower site was oozing and squelching near the water taps and it was a relief to step onto the highway. We had left our son there, and he later went into the Arena for several hours … it was interesting that he too wanted everything washed after he returned home. - Parish Clerk

Jimi Hendrix

My own abiding memory as I set off for home and a warm bath was of watching one poor unfortunate fall into the slit trench which served as a mass open-air commode. That and a great feeling of excitement, exhaustion and fellow feeling. Society was more of a garden, less of a jungle, in those far-off days. May they return.

The END
In one of the most honest accounts of the Afton event, T.P. Kelsey stated the view from the arena, a personal summation of what those five days of music meant to those who experienced them, a blueprint for a more hopeful future.

"And when it was all over and the long files of fans were waiting for their transport back home, I felt most of them must have been proud to have been part of the third Isle of Wight Festival of Music. For the festival provided an alternative society. A society where people forgot their own particular class, creed, race or religion and were able to live together and do the simple things of life on a friendly basis. There's something in that, I'm sure. Think about it."

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

Copyright: Brian Hinton, 1995. - See Brian's Books on Amazon