POP
Something to remember
DUNCAN FALLOWELL
If you rely largely on the newspapers for your impressions, you will in the first place be appallingly naive. Secondly and more to the point, you will consider the Isle of Wight festival to have been very ugly, at best a flop. And in the third place, anything I write may hopefully modify your opinions. Glancing at the headlines, the complacent accusations are plain enough. Rioting, dog attacks, theft, breakdown of services, venereal disease, bad trips, indecency, filth, mess and disap- pointment. Yet los aficionados and myself beg to differ.
There were bad trips, there was litter, there were I imagine some scuffles, and there were problems in floating the whole psychedelic caboodle off the island again. But to describe the festival in those terms is to describe a long warm bath by the indiscreet ring it leaves behind. I'm willing to bet that just as many of you weaken uncontrollably at memories of Jessie Matthews in Evergreen. so in time something approaching half a million young people will get very sen- timental about the Isle of Wight 1970.
OK, so the backers did lose money, but that won't make me cry. (Although, I admit, it's rotten the way many of those turned-on, tuned-in musicians don't drop out far enough to prevent their demanding such fees. Joan Baez. literally top of the bill and arch-opponent of materialism, strutted off coolly with £12,000. And into the—I was going to say 'bargain'—I think she's a hell of a bore.) What about the indecency? Nothing anybody says is going to change your feel- ings on that but it may be worth a mention that in the Garden of Eden the state of nakedness was the state of grace. And as for Devastation Hill, where 50,000 bright 'uns saw it all for nothing—well, every large gathering has its lebensraum.
So, I won't hear it. The Isle of Wight festival, this huge tottering Mardi gras sans culotte, the last and most swaggering of the bucolic shindigs which with varying success (usually depending on the weather) have packed the summer, was for the vast ma- jority a marvellous bank holiday event—notwithstanding the low-frequency buzzing of fringe trouble-makers.
Music was, of course, the raison d'être of it all, and once again I'm confirmed in the belief that, immensely professional though the American groups are, English bands are much better at setting crowds alight. It comes, I presume, from not only producing the right noises but also giving due attention to the visual show. The Doors are among the few American bands to have this side of things buttoned up but even their particular brand of little-boy-blue-jeans-'n-leather rock seemed more restrained than usual : perhaps because their leader, Jim Morrison, is facing charges of indecent exposure back home and didn't want a repetition of events.
It was Free, the Who and Ten Years After who really provided the hard rock pulse. The Who, especially, are virtuosi at live performance. They did for the Isle of Wight what Led Zeppellin had done for Bath, and at four in the morning woke everybody up, even in the sleepy suburb of Devastation Hill, to do the dirty on the Older Generation through a screaming wall of amplifiers. At once the area was a field of cataleptic twitching while these plutocrats of pop swooned on-stage like baleful madonnas, glinting with a macabre phosphorescence in the electric dawn. Only little Melanie, a remarkably sad singer/song writer from the States, could have followed them.
If you want some idea of the Who's ex- citement, listen to side two of The Who Live at Leeds. To be played loudly. Actually, cps are planning a series of records from the festival which they taped in total. Judging by the sales of the three-set Woodstock album (what a bogey Woodstock is!) it should recoup some of the organisers' losses, and with a film in the offing I don't think they stand to lose quite as much as they let on. Certainly not enough to discourage future speculators in this field.
Lastly, thanks to Tiny Tim who cut through all the 'message' and 'significance' with some pure fun. 'Land of Hope and Glory' still.
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