The Isle of Wight - on the hippy trail to the original festivals

Find where Hendrix collapsed, Dylan went to the seaside and the Beatles played tennis.

Today’s youngsters may think the Isle of Wight conjures up images of beach huts, candy floss and grown men walking around in plastic Captain’s hats. Anyone older than their mid-thirties, however, has a different image.

That’s because the Isle of Wight once hosted Britain’s biggest-ever pop festival. The Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 attracted an extraordinary live audience of half a million - more than Live Aid, Glastonbury and Knebworth. All those flower-power youngsters hitch-hiked south and sat in a field to watch acts like Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, The Who, T Rex, Supertramp, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, and The Doors.

The Isle of Wight has held a much smaller, much more organised music festival every summer since 2002. Admittedly the current Isle of Wight Festival won’t persuade 500,000 hippies to jump on ferries… but it is starting to revive the image of the island as a ‘cool’ destination.

Council chiefs hope the tourism benefits will outweigh any problems caused by visiting music fans. This wasn’t the case 30 years ago when anarchists fought a pitched battle with hired security heavies, flower-bedecked hippies wandered country lanes frightening old ladies and a local Tory MP watched horrified from a clifftop as nude bathers frolicked at Compton Bay. It resulted in the government passing the ‘Isle of Wight Act’ virtually prohibiting large events without council approval.

And today’s headliners, acts like The Police and Robert Plant, are most likely to arrive by private helicopter and head off to their luxury yacht afterwards. It was different in 1970, at the end of the Festival Jimi Hendrix had to be carried semi-conscious from the stage after what turned out to be his last live performance in the UK. He died 18 days later.

The bad feeling caused by the three Isle of Wight Festivals in 1968, 69 and 70 means there is sadly very few relics of that era to see now.

For example, there’s nothing to mark the site of Afton Down where the massive 1970 Festival was held. It’s just a huge cornfield on the south side of the B3399 at East Afton.

The farm near Bembridge with a swimming pool and rehearsal barn that Bob Dylan rented for a week during the 1969 festival has since been demolished. Beatles George Harrison, Ringo Starr and John Lennon had stayed there with Dylan and there was even an impromptu celebrity tennis match in the garden. Dylan was hopelessly beaten by Harrison.

To his credit Dylan spent some time seeing the sights of the Island, taking his partner Sara to Osborne House, Queen Victoria’s home near East Cowes, and taking Band guitarist Robbie Robertson to the resort of Seaview. He also visited Tennyson’s House at Freshwater where Queen Victoria’s Poet Laureate wrote many of his greatest works, including the Charge of the Light Brigade. This grand Georgian house is now the privately-owned Farringford Hotel, although Tennyson’s original library is preserved as it was in his day and non-residents can sneak a look.

Nearby is Dimbola Lodge, a charming museum in the former home of Victorian pioneer photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Inside is a small permanent exhibition of photos, posters and memorabilia about the Festivals.

One part of Festival folklore still standing is the pub on Yarmouth waterfront where Hendrix was taken to sleep off whatever he’d taken during his headlining appearance in 1970. In the next room were a hippy couple who’d just got married barefoot at the Festival. This ramshackle 17th-century inn was once the island governor’s residence and had ancient sloping floors and wonky window frames. One of the roadies joked that if Hendrix woke up to find the floor sloping, for once it would be real not a drug-induced hallucination.

That pub is now a luxury hotel which has been bought and renovated by bassist John Ilsley of the rock group Dire Straits. George Hotel at Yarmouth has a Michelin star for its restaurant and guests have use of the hotel’s own ‘gentleman’s motor yacht’. Thankfully the crooked floors and windows are still there.

The hotel overlooks the harbour where American superstar Neil Young arrived for the 1970 Festival by ferry in his white Rolls Royce. He met such a barrage of harassment by the waiting police that he simply turned round and drove back onto the ferry, never to return. Needless to say, Island tourism chiefs are hoping visitors to the current festivals stay a little longer.

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