The Last Great Event

When the World Came to the Isle of Wight

Ray Foulk, Caroline Foulk

• Publisher: Medina Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781909339750
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Pop Music

The Isle of Wight Festival in 1969 famously 'stole Bob Dylan from Woodstock' and was the starting point and benchmark for all rock and pop festivals in the UK. What followed in 1970 was one of the world's greatest music gatherings of all time, attracting musicians and fans from across the whole musical spectrum.

1: The Carnival is Over

Jim Morrison watched Hendrix proceed to the stage, magnificent in the repaired butterfly costume, and exclaimed: “Hey, look. An actual movie. Hey, that’s beautiful. Looks like a priest going to the altar.”

“THE POP SINGER and guitarist, Jimi Hendrix is dead…The 27 year-old American musician was found unconscious this morning, after a suspected drug overdose. He was taken by ambulance to St Mary Abbot’s Hospital in West London…Jimi Hendrix recently performed at the giant pop festival on the Isle of Wight…”

Molten lead in my ears…I struggled to catch my own breath – the news from the wireless was too goddamn heavy. What on earth?…

It was a dizzying moment. I froze with shock. I was in my cream suit, in front of my oversized desk. It was the afternoon of 18 September – just 17 days since I had stood sentinel, yards from the Palladian stage, beholding Jimi’s ‘Blue Wild Angel’ music.

Today I’d been treading old ground, searching for something…an urgently needed document in the filing cabinets; on the floor; in the bin even. Now what? How to face the rest of this weird day. More hours of punishment by wailing creditors? Paper attack. Telephone attack. Envelopes had settled like snow, obscuring the huge plate-glass surface. Clustering, objectionable, like an avalanche never to be shifted. I had to puzzle it out. He had been sylphlike, but… dead?

The devastating news cast the prosaic features of any normal existence into sharp relief. The office, so carefully designed with modernist furnishings within a traditional Wedgewood-blue setting, was grandiose for a youth of 24, but we had not taken any chances. I needed the prestige to offset my juvenile appearance. However, the outcome of the festival, looming over us like the end of an era, was now reinforced by an altogether graver accomplice.

The media circus began winding up again. The switchboard was fielding incessant calls. But whatever we were going through was as nothing compared to what would be happening in the Hendrix camp. In an upstairs office, a desperate call was put through to my older brother, Ronnie. It was Dick Katz, Jimi’s London agent – the former jazz pianist and a real nice old boy, according to Ronnie (in fact he was only in his early forties). My brother had lunched with him several times while organising the festival contracts. Katz was in a desperate state and trying to get hold of Mike Jeffrey. Hendrix’ manager was missing at this awful moment and his agent concluded he could be with us. Of course, he was not.

My usually charming brother was taking the news badly. Ronnie burst into the office yet again – blonde, haystack hair flying, blue eyes flashing – raving as he thrust a flyer under my nose. My eye fell upon the strap line: Isle of Wight des Kontinents.

“Bloody rude! They call themselves the Isle of Wight Festival of Europe.” The pitch of his voice was oscillating strangely.

“Talk about ripping off our name…” I said, snatching up the leaflet.

Ronnie persisted. He had been on the Hendrix topic for some hours now. It was providing a sorry diversion from our considerable financial woes.

“Mike Jeffrey’s gone missing. There’s a world of frenzied hacks asking probing questions. I really blame these Fehmarn people you know…If they hadn’t put together such a shit show Billy Cox wouldn’t have been spiked with bad acid… the tour would have carried on.”

In fact, the Fehmarn Festival, held on the weekend following ours, had collapsed half-way through in utter mayhem, with backstage cash looted at gun point, machine gun fire, filthy weather, an electrocution on stage, and Hendrix quitting his set – followed by his bass player Billy Cox being hospitalised after he was spiked with acid.

“Well I suppose they weren’t to know they were going to get all that trouble.”

I had this knack of provoking debate, even though I agreed with him. But Ronnie was having none of it. His tone began ramping up to a shriek.

“It’s like Woodstock all over again! They call themselves the peace and love festival, and like them they get a load of aggro, only this time it’s terminal…Now look what’s happened!”

I tried to calm him down for his own sake, if not for mine.

“We don’t really know what went on. I don’t see how the weather was their fault and it’s not as if the Hells Angels attacked Jimi directly. But all the other stuff…” I was having the opposite effect.

“What’re you on about! Jimi wouldn’t have been kicking around in London having overdoses!”

I knew I wouldn’t console my tunnel-visioned and determined brother by arguing. He was probably blaming himself somehow, though God knows it had nothing to do with our event. It was too raw. Jimi had passed through our hands and it seemed like somehow we had sent him to his death. Ronnie had booked Jimi to play the Isle of Wight, and, even here, Hendrix, majestic as he was, had been shaky. There but for the grace…

Eighteen days earlier. By late afternoon, Jimi Hendrix’s road crew had told Ralph McTell that Jimi was still in some debutante’s back garden on the other side of the Island. They said we would have to drag him out and tie him to the microphone if he was going to play at all.

By 6 pm even that whisper of doubt was murderous to our nerves. For Ronnie and me, the arrival of our main man was everything. The minutes were dragging out. Then, out of the blackness, Hendrix strode purposefully forward, an apparition preparing to enter the citadel. From his vehicle to his dressing room trailer he was in reasonable time, but tension mounted.

The heroic natural landscape of the Island’s chalk downs, colourfully populated by hippies, flags and tents, formed the southern flank of the already vast arena. With 250,000 souls, the panorama knew no historical precedent. Not even the spectacle of Circus Maximus could have compared. The patchwork of humanity had knitted together over five days. I could not comprehend the measure of it backstage but when I crept up to the wings it gripped me by my senses: the enveloping sound, the epic sight, the multifarious odours. The distant beacons, delineating the arena, were fluorescent strip-lights in the gloom. They stretched back – miniscule glimmering dashes among a multitude of flecks peppering the night. Those camped illegally on the altitudinous downs provided splashes of fire and torchlight, creating the sense of a tremendous crater, almost interplanetary in scale; alien, like an extra-terrestrial army.

Preparations around the stage were beset w ith difficulties. A nother interminable delay was due this time in part to sound and power problems. It felt excruciatingly similar to the wait for Bob Dylan’s appearance at Woodside Bay the year before. The show was the first British concert by Hendrix in 18 months so the hacks were out in full force, largely thanks to Ronnie and his PR sidekick, Peter Harrigan, and their feverish manipulations. Hendrix had already given around a dozen press interviews in the few days he had been back. Rather curiously, he had revealed that he was less than satisfied with the current sound of his music, which hadn’t changed significantly in years. “I can’t think of anything new to add,” he had lamented in an interview with Roy Hollingworth.¹

Hendrix was focused, attentive and apparently sober for the performance to the largest audience of his career, though his attitude was a shade downbeat. He was scarecrow-thin, a vision with a full afro and High Noon moustache, his handsome, dreamy, tawny complexion and moody full lips cast in a mostly serious expression. As the moment for his appearance loomed, Jimi became troubled by the sleeves of his exotic ‘butterfly’ velvet suit, described by Germaine Greer as ‘a psychedelic minstrel clown’s gear.’² The extravagant sleeves kept catching on the guitar strings, making it difficult to play. The colouring of flame orange with dark lozenges reading as black seemed to allude somehow to our own Fiery Creations banner. We searched for somebody with a needle and thread and the ability to use it – somebody who would be sensitive to the needs of a nervous star in the ascendancy. It happened that DJ Jeff Dexter had a previous incarnation as a tailor. Once a needle and thread had been sourced, and with help from Margaret Redding (mother of Noel, Hendrix’s former bass player), he attended to costume repairs before Jimi could go on.

Moments like these were always difficult. Although we worked so closely together, it was rare to see my two brothers both backstage and within view at the same moment. Ronnie, clad in his heavy sheepskin, was busy charming a prominent gentleman of the press. My younger brother, Bill, a film student, the coolest of the three of us – the first bloke we had known with long hair – was stonewalling some photographer trying to gain admission. I reflected on how incredible it was that he had suggested Hendrix two years earlier for Godshill when Ronnie and I had scarcely heard of him. Bill had the advantage of being ensconced in the laboratory of the avant-garde at the Royal College of Art, where everything was happening. His two older brothers were, in comparison, country bumpkins. Here I was now, sharing the helm of this international enterprise, ready to assist with whatever problem was going to hit next, and feeling like an over-anxious parent at a school concert, barely able to watch and ultimately powerless.

Yards from me, I could see that there was plenty of goodwill for Jimi to make a success of his performance. Joan Baez was to follow him. She was well wrapped up in her stylish hippie fur and she put her arms around him for a hug. Richie Havens took him to one side for a pep talk and learned of some of his troubles. Jimi was murmuring: “I’m having a real bad time with my managers and lawyers. They’re killing me. Everything is wired against me and it’s getting so bad I can’t eat or sleep.” Shocked at how ill he looked, “Like he had been up for days.” Havens offered to put him in touch with a good lawyer, Johanan Vigoda, whom he described as a legend in the music world.

Pink Floyd’s road crew helped with Jimi’s stage rig and, extraordinarily, David Gilmour, who happened to be hanging out backstage, was persuaded to take th...