Isle of Wight 1970: the festival that brought an era to its final note

Imagine arriving on a small island and suddenly finding yourself surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people.
That was the Isle of Wight in the summer of 1970.

The third edition of the festival, held from August 26 to 30, was on a completely different scale from the two previous editions.
Estimates vary, but around 600,000 people — with some sources suggesting even more — travelled to the island for what had become one of the biggest musical gatherings the world had ever seen.
For a place with a population of only around 100,000, it was an almost surreal invasion.
Roads became congested, ferries were overwhelmed and the festival site developed into a temporary city of its own. But the real attraction was on the stage, where the organisers had assembled a lineup that now looks almost impossible to recreate.

Jimi Hendrix was there.
So were The Doors with Jim Morrison, The Who, Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Jethro Tull, Leonard Cohen, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Free, Sly & the Family Stone, Ten Years After and many others.
It was not simply a collection of famous names, but a snapshot of music at a turning point.
And some of those performances would acquire a completely different meaning with hindsight.

When Jimi Hendrix walked onto the stage on August 30, nobody knew that they were watching one of the final performances of his life. He would die in London just 18 days later, making the Isle of Wight appearance one of the last major filmed records of the guitarist on stage.
The Doors’ appearance carried its own sense of finality.
Their early-morning performance on August 30 was their last European concert with Jim Morrison. Within months, the band would effectively disappear from the live circuit, and Jim Morrison himself would die in Paris less than a year later.
Miles Davis, meanwhile, brought something completely different to the festival: jazz. His electric performance demonstrated just how dramatically the boundaries between rock, jazz and experimental music were beginning to dissolve.

But outside the stage, another show was taking place.
The organisers had expected a huge audience. What they got was something far beyond their expectations. Thousands of people arrived without tickets, while others watched from the surrounding areas.
The situation became increasingly difficult to control, and eventually the organisers opened the gates.
The decision solved the immediate problem but created another one: an enormous financial loss.
The Isle of Wight Festival became one of the great paradoxes of music history.
It was an extraordinary cultural success and a business disaster. The promoters lost a huge amount of money, and the company behind the event, Fiery Creations, was left in serious financial trouble.
And then came the political reaction.
The enormous crowds caused such concern among local authorities and residents that the British Parliament passed the Isle of Wight Act 1971, introducing restrictions on large gatherings on the island. The legislation effectively made it extremely difficult to organise another festival on the same scale.
The music had been enormous.
The backlash was almost as big.
And so, after the summer of 1970, the Isle of Wight Festival disappeared for more than three decades.

What makes the story even more fascinating is that the festival was not forgotten.
American filmmaker Murray Lerner had filmed the 1970 edition extensively, capturing not only the performances but also the extraordinary atmosphere surrounding them. His footage eventually became the documentary Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival 1970, released in the 1990s.
Watching it today is like opening a time capsule.
The clothes, the crowds, the arguments, the mud, the stages and the music all belong unmistakably to another world. Yet the artists are still immediately recognisable, and the performances preserve the feeling of a generation gathering together for what many believed was simply another celebration of freedom and music.
It was actually something else.
The original Isle of Wight Festival had begun in 1968, when only a relatively small crowd gathered to see Jefferson Airplane and other artists. In 1969, Bob Dylan made his first major appearance after his motorcycle accident, attracting around 150,000 people.
Then came 1970 — and the explosion.

When the festival returned in 2002, it had become a major modern music event once again, attracting some of the biggest names in contemporary music.
But the atmosphere could never quite be the same.
Perhaps that is inevitable.
The 1970 festival belonged to a very particular moment: the final summer of the 1960s spirit, even though the calendar had already moved into a new decade.
Jimi Hendrix would be dead within weeks. Jim Morrison would be gone less than a year later. The counterculture that had gathered at Woodstock and then descended upon the Isle of Wight was beginning to change, fragment and disappear.
That is why the final night of the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival feels so much bigger than a concert.
It was the end of a musical era — played at enormous volume, in front of an audience of hundreds of thousands, on a small island that would spend the next 32 years waiting for the music to return.