‘They booed Joni Mitchell and threw s**t at Jimi Hendrix’: The amazing story of the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival

Sign up to Roisin O’Connor’s free weekly newsletter Now Hear This for the inside track on all things music Get our Now Hear This email for free Get our Now Hear This email for free SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “We realised that to get people to go to the Isle of Wight for a festival, you’ve got to put somebody on that’s pretty special,” says Ray Foulk, author of two volumes of When the World Came to the Isle of Wight, telling the story of the festival’s genesis. But Hendrix increased in stature between booking him and the actual event… the Woodstock film made Hendrix into a big star.” open image in gallery Encore: The Who, performing at the Isle of Wight in 1969, were back for more 12 months later The film, released in March 1970, had also stoked Europe’s appetite for its own lawless hippie utopia and further terrified the Isle of Wight residents who had had a year to mobilise against another major festival on the island, and all the nudity, drugs, vandalism, disease and degradation it would doubtless bring to their doorsteps. Joni Mitchell had her Saturday afternoon set interrupted by a bongo-toting hippie named Yogi Joe, ranting about the encampment of hay bales that people had built and named after Dylan’s “Desolation Row”. “Look at that,” Jim Morrison said to a reporter backstage, watching Hendrix head to the stage in his full psychedelic guru regalia, “it’s like a priest going to the altar.” There he played a powerful, exhilarating set that opened with fervent NYC blues deconstructions of “God Save the Queen” and “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, in honour of Britain’s experimental influence on the era, and ended, two hours later at 4am, with firebrand takes on “Purple Haze”, “Voodoo Child ” and “In From the Storm”.