‘It’s a myth that Jimi Hendrix played while the stage was on fire. It was a firework’
In 1968, when I was 22, my older brother Ronnie got a job as a fundraiser for a swimming pool on the island. I’d done a concert for CND [the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament], so we started talking about doing some sort of festival to raise the money. My younger brother Bill suggested it had to be pop. An agency in London gave Ronnie a list of acts including the Pretty Things, the Move, Fairport Convention, Tyrannosaurus Rex and an American act, Jefferson Airplane. We only had a £750 investment from the Isle of Wight Indoor Swimming Pool Association, but after a friend lent us his £1,000 army pay-off, we managed to book all those bands, sell 10,000 tickets and break even. In the interim, the pool association pulled out because it didn’t like the publicity about hippies, drugs and sex, but they allowed us to use their investment and we were able to pay them back.
That first event in 1968 was pretty shabby – the stage was a couple of flatbed trucks and the caterer ripped us off. We decided to do it again the following year, but properly. Ronnie had got Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding album for Christmas and argued that someone like Dylan would draw people to the island. He got Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman’s number from an underground magazine and called him. Dylan hadn’t performed since his motorbike crash in 1966 so we didn’t get far, but we kept calling. Grossman wanted Dylan to make a big comeback at the Woodstock festival, but the two had fallen out and weren’t speaking. Meanwhile, I’d been getting on well with Grossman’s partner, Bert Block, and one Wednesday night he sent a telegram saying Dylan had agreed to play the Isle of Wight. It felt like winning the lottery. But he wanted me to fly to New York to sign contracts, and said: “Don’t forget the dollars.”
