EXPERIENCE 1970 REMAKING HISTORY
Vintage audio/gear expert and Isle of Wight festival enthusiast Chris Hewitt on the task of recapturing a classic festival, 50 years on.
Extreme hardcore’ for Chris Hewitt is the back cover of Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma album, which shows the band’s touring gear arranged in meticulous detail. He can tell you which of those pieces of equipment he now owns, stashed in a couple of warehouses around Cheshire, and the whereabouts of the rest. It probably won’t surprise you to know that in his short-trousered days he was an avid trainspotter.
Hewitt collects rock’n’roll equipment. Specifically, the pre-digital kind used by artists in the 60s and 70s. His encyclopaedic knowledge came into its own recently when he was hired by the makers of the films Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocket Man to recreate the old stage set-ups used by Queen and Elton John.
But it’s the WEM PA equipment favoured by many of the biggest bands and artists of the 60s and 70s and some of the legendary open-air festivals that gets Chris hottest. “The first thing I did was buy Pink Floyd’s five WEM mixers, and then I got Fleetwood Mac’s and David Bowie’s…”
To cut a long story short, by 2016 Chris had amassed more than 30 mixers and enough WEM amplifiers and speaker cabinets to be able to recreate the stage audio set-up used at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival.
And so, after an exploratory trip to the island and a couple of low-key events involving Arthur Brown and The Pretty Things, Experience 70 was born. Before Covid-19 threw a whole bag of spanners in the works, it was all set to be a three-day event held this September at the original 1970 site. It has now been moved to September 2021, with the same bands and artists currently rebooked.
When it came to recreating the original festival line-up there were some obvious problems – notably the deaths and/or retirements of several of the biggest acts who played. For Hewitt and his fellow co-ordinator Andy Sharrocks, tribute acts were the obvious way to go. “We were always going to have to get the best Hendrix tribute act and the best Doors tribute act,” says Chris. “We’ve tried to balance that by getting John Lodge of the Moody Blues, Ten Years After, Pentangle and others who played at the original festival.” They decided to expand the use of tribute acts, partly due to economics and partly because they realised that these acts could recreate the show almost as well as the original artists could. Sharrocks, who spent many years working at Flying Music, who specialise in staging ‘heritage tours’, adds: “One of the things that surprised me is that a lot of younger people don’t actually care who plays the music as long as they hear what they came to hear. It surprised me because I’m a huge Rolling Stones fan, but I would never go and see a Stones tribute band because it’s not the real deal for me. But this doesn’t seem to apply to younger generations. As long as they get the music they want and it’s played well, they don’t mind.”
Chris adds: “This is not about another annual commercial festival, sponsored to the hilt, with the same stage everywhere you go – that curved roof with a couple of PA towers either side and a screen. We will be going back to how it was in 1970.”