“It was a total disaster”: why early music festivals were completely insane
For the past 25 years, music festivals have been as corporately controlled and sterile as any team-building kayaking trip by HR. The moment the fence went up at Glastonbury, the age of festivals having anything in common with the hippie dream they were built from died. No matter how many pissed-up teenagers, high on decent A-level results, a Fred Again headline set, and enough Strongbow Dark Fruits beer to kill a rhino set their tents on fire on the final night of the Reading and Leeds festival—it’s really not the same.
After all, the reason the festival craze of the early 2000s happened was because of how much money investors stood to make off them. The only way festivals have anything in common with their predecessors is if everyone loses money, the festival site is a complete mess, and the people involved fear for their very lives until they’re back home.
This means that, yes, the Fyre Festival is actually the only modern festival to have anything really in common with the early iterations of Glastonbury, Woodstock and, our subject today, the Isle of Wight festival. The Isle of Wight festival gets swept under the rug in comparison with its more glamorous sisters, but it actually predates every other long-running festival of its ilk.
It was the very first music festival of its kind in the UK, and pretty much every active festival in the world follows a slipstream carved first in the Isle of Wight to this day. Does this mean that the first festivals held there were functioning events where everyone had a great time? Lord no!
In fact, the most famous iteration of the festival, held in 1970, has also been regularly called a disaster in the decades following it. For one thing, there was the still mind-boggling number of people descending on the Isle for that weekend. Estimates have put the number of attendees between 600,000 and 700,000, which is around three times the number of people who attend the modern incarnation of Glastonbury every year.
Hilariously, with that many people descending on a music festival in 1970, the organisers decided now was the time to start security measures. They built walls and installed ticket turnstiles to try and ensure that the only people getting into the festival were paid attendees. Yeah, good luck with that.
I also don’t want to blow your mind too much, but when you get that many hippies together, you may encounter a sizeable portion of that crowd using drugs. Shocking, I know. A particularly bad strain of acid found its way into the crowd, and those bad trips, combined with an already unsettled crowd and inferior sound from the stages, made for a legendarily awful festival that basically no one who played had a good time at.
In an interview with The Independent, Kris Kristofferson described the event thus: “It was a total disaster, they booed us, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Sly Stone; they threw s*** at Jimi Hendrix. At the end of the night, they were tearing down the outer walls, setting fire to the concessions, burning their tents, shouting obscenities. Peace and love it was not.”
Then, the worst part happened. An MC declared into their mic that this was a “free festival”. Suddenly, you had around 700,000 people tripping on bad acid and drunk on even worse booze, wondering why they’d paid a ticket price for a “free festival”. Naturally, those already in the festival site began dismantling the walls and destroying the turnstiles to let everybody in.
Somehow, the festival managed to last the weekend and didn’t descend into Woodstock 1999-style chaos. What’s more, somehow, the organisers decided to do it all again the following year, and the Isle of Wight festival is still alive to this day. It’s got very little in common with the acid-fuelled nightmare that was the 1970 version, but then again, perhaps that’s for the best.
