Turn on, tune in, clothes off — but mind the adders! RAY CONNOLLY
CULTURAL HISTORY THE LAST GREAT EVENT by Ray Foulk with Caroline Foulk (Medina Publishing £22.95)
SHORTLy after dawn on the last Sunday in August 1970, I slipped through a ripped- out gap in the 8 ft-high corrugated iron fence that surrounded the Isle of Wight pop festival and climbed up onto the adjacent Afton Down — which that week had been renamed Devastation Hill.
Standing there amid tepees, unharvested litter, sleeping bags and smouldering fires, I watched the night mist melt away to reveal half a million fans below as, on stage, Sly And The Family Stone finished the previous night’s entertainment . . . seven hours late.
The following day, I wrote in the London Evening Standard about how peaceful the moment was as, behind me, young couples rolled out of their tents to climb down the other side of the hill and go skinny dipping in the waters of the English Channel.
Not everyone, however, was finding the weekend so romantic. Since then, the festival has achieved in rock folklore a kind of notoriety for confrontation and financial difficulty.
No one disputes that the list of entertainers assembled was of the highest order.
There was Jimi Hendrix, weeks before his death, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, The Moody Blues, Miles Davis, The Who and Joan Baez. There were up-and-coming acts, such as Kris Kristofferson and Supertramp, and even Tiny Tim was there to sing There’ll Always Be An England.
But off stage, all was not well, as the extraordinary local brothers Ray, Ronnie and Bill Foulk attempted to top the festival they had run a year earlier when Bob Dylan had headlined.
From the start, there were problems. Roared on by a local newspaper, a group of Isle of Wight rate-payers did everything in their legal powers to stop there being a festival at all, forecasting risks of typhoid, cholera, plague, drug overdoses and an outbreak of sexually transmitted diseases if it went ahead.
In the end, the resourceful Foulks were able to defeat the local Jeremiahs. But what they couldn’t properly handle were a couple of hundred militant activists, many of whom were French. Demanding a free anti-capitalist festival and refusing to pay the £3 admission fee (less than the cost of an LP at the time), the agitators, aided by a few Hells Angels and general troublemakers, set about tearing down the fences and making a general nuisance of themselves. Even Joan Baez, whose reputation for saintliness was only a prayer short of canonisation, was moved to comment in irritation: ‘If they want a free festival, they should organise one themselves.’ Of course, with so much expensive musical talent contracted to appear, a free festival was impossible — Baez alone was being paid £8,000, though she is said to have given most of it away. But as the days of the festival passed, it became increasingly obvious to the organisers that they had bitten off more than they could chew. They were running out of money to pay the acts the second half of their fees. In a huge error of judgment, the main stage had been placed in such a way that the free festival activists who had taken up residence on the hill had a grandstand view. And even though the organisers warned about poison adders, many non-militant, but also non-paying, fans took their chances with the snakes and the unruly other folks who had camped there. As Ray Foulk outlines in this second volume of his Isle of Wight pop festival saga, the battle to avoid assorted imminent disasters went on day by day. It can’t have been much fun for him at the time, but the way he relates it, in extraordinary detail, reads almost like an outline for a situation comedy. While he and his brothers were simply trying to get the acts on stage, their managers were falling out among themselves over the size of their clients’ names in the billing and the order of play. Then there was the sudden terror when a rumour swept the site that a bomb had been found, though it turned out to have been ‘only’ a hand grenade. Obviously, security had been of paramount importance in the Foulks’ planning — hence the high fence — but Germaine Greer’s point to me that day wasn’t far from the truth, when she described the place as a ‘psychedelic concentration camp’. Quite how many of the half a million kids enjoying the festival were high on drugs, as the ratepayers had feared, no one can say. But, overall, the attitude of the police in leaving the fans alone and going after the rich pushers, stopping and searching the better dressed as they disembarked from the ferry, seems to have been the line of least provocation. It explained, too, why I— chaperoning the best-dressed girl at the festival with not a thread of denim in her outfit — was met by friends with jokes about us looking smart enough to get arrested.
THE girl was my boss’s 20- year- old daughter. Her name was Anna Wintour, at the very start of her career in fashion. For the Foulks brothers, it was a real pity that the festival failed financially. They didn’t deserve it.
To compound it, the film of the event that they’d hoped would solve their money woes foundered in Hollywood, thanks to their naivete about movie-making.
That being said, they had shown that a big, almost totally peaceful and friendly British music festival could be done. Glastonbury would be its beneficiary and its legacy.
If you were one of the half a million music fans who made their way like raggle-taggle gypsies to the Isle of Wight in 1970, you will absolutely love this backstage look at a great moment in rock history.