Festivals Britannia Page #3

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that went on seemingly forever.

Everything seemed to be bright and in the process of awakening.

If they're free, if they're put on by amateurs, then you don't have security.

You know, you don't have fences round, you don't know how many people are there.

No barriers, no security.

There were about three policemen.

Most of the free festivals were policed by Hell's Angels at the time.

Nobody needed the police force or anything like that.

And everybody looked after it well.

People were there for the afternoon.

They didn't have to be fed, they didn't have to be managed.

Money didn't have to be collected.

The press were climbing up the back of the stage to take pictures,

and the only security you had were Hell's Angels, who chained the press photographers to get them down.

In some of the later festivals,

particularly as it got to the Rolling Stones festival,

there were hundreds of thousands of people,

and you stood on the stage there, at those festivals, and you thought,

"This is unreal."

# Oh, yeah, yeah... #

When I went to the Stones, I went backstage,

and there was almost like a kind of royal garden party going on!

I don't know if there actually were tea and scones, but it felt as though there should be.

And it was incredibly nice, you know?

MUSIC:
"I'M YOURS AND I'M HERS" by The Rolling Stones

# She's gotten bigger

# Somebody else's too... #

You know, the Stones show was just amazing.

I mean, there was amazing little kind of visual things,

like an entire oak tree just filled with people all the way up.

It was gorgeous. Nothing really mattered very much.

It was like a gathering of the clans, in a sense.

It was like, in a way, that's an idea of festival being about community

rather than about just going to a big concert in the open air.

This growing sense of a new society was perhaps most apparent

in the States at Woodstock festival in 1969.

The sheer volume of people wanting to attend forced the organisers to declare it a free event.

The government declared it a national disaster.

This template of a free festival would become hugely significant for the British hippies.

# By the time we got to Woodstock

# We were half a million strong

# And everywhere there was song... #

Definitely, Woodstock changed a lot of things.

There was a school of thought, which was

give the music to the people free

and sell the records afterwards in the shops.

Why charge young people who can't really afford it to hear something

that is of their own generation being generated by themselves?

Why charge them money to do it?

#..We are stardust... #

The thing I think that we Brits learned from

first Monterey and later Woodstock is that all things were possible.

That gave the business big ideas, but it also brought,

it brought the very best of the rock'n'roll of the period

to an awful lot of people.

# Once upon a time You dressed so fine

# Threw the bums a dime in your prime

# Didn't you? #

Whilst free music was a lovely idea, the commercial potential

of festival culture was becoming increasingly apparent.

#..You used to

# Laugh about... #

As Woodstock was unfolding, a group of young entrepreneurs from

the Isle of Wight were attempting to produce a commercial festival

that would be its British rival.

# Now you don't seem so proud... #

Our aim was to be business-like and put on a first-class event that

people would enjoy and that we could make money out of,

you know, we could make a living. We weren't looking to exploit it,

we were just trying to do a decent thing,

and we believed that if we could do a decent thing, then next year

people would want to come back and we could do it again and again.

The gigantic, three-day pop festival at Woodside Bay.

It marked the momentary re-appearance of Bob Zimmerman,

alias Dylan, after three years in seclusion.

# How does it feel? #

First, to get Dylan was just amazing.

I mean, it was absolutely staggering that we had that good fortune.

We made an offer that was appealing,

involving a holiday for Dylan and his family and a trip

over on the QE2 and all this sort of thing, and it chimed in with him

feeling that he wanted to get back to work.

And Dylan set sail on the QE2 on 15th August,

which is the Friday of the Woodstock festival.

Dylan should have been at Woodstock. He should have been the number one star at Woodstock.

I've heard it said here today by some of your fans that the new Bob Dylan is a bit of a square.

Is this true?

LAUGHTER:

You'll have to ask the fans.

#..Come on without

# Come on within

# You'll not see nothing like the Mighty Quinn

# Come on without

# Come on within

# You'll not see nothing like the Mighty Quinn

# Whoa, you know, I can do just like the rest

# You know I like my sugar sweet... #

We'd made a name for the Isle of Wight festival

as an international event of absolute supreme stature

by having the biggest name in the counterculture appear.

It was a bit like winning the lottery, almost.

It was that much of a long shot, and it happened.

The Isle of Wight Festival had been a financial success,

and as the Sixties gave way to a new decade,

in 1970 the Foulk brothers aimed for the stars

and managed to book half of them in the process.

An estimated 600,000 people took the ferry to the event of a lifetime.

Arriving for the Isle of Wight,

it was just like everywhere you looked there was

thousands and thousands of young people with backpacks,

sleeping bags, hundreds and hundreds of them just...

moving in waves towards this place. It was amazing.

I remember walking for miles to arrive there and then walking over this hill

and seeing 600,000 people in front of me

and realising all these other people loved the same music as me.

The island cannot cope with the quantity of people.

I mean, whether it's 150 or 50,000 bishops,

it still cannot cope with the quantity.

I want to keep the Isle of Wight the same as it was

when I was born here 75 years ago.

If you have a festival with all the stops pulled out,

kids running about naked, f***ing in the bushes and doing every damn thing

that they feel inclined to do,

I don't know if that's particularly good for the body politic.

'Lord Baden-Powell must have been turning in his grave, but the camp fires helped

'many of them to lose their cool, together with the Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation

'throbbing its highly amplified message to the world.'

The Isle of Wight residents must have been terrified.

That's an invading army of 500,000 people.

Somebody might have had the odd flower nicked out of a garden,

a runner bean stolen or something,

but I don't think there was any trouble for the residents at all.

# Take a little dope

# And walk out in the air

# Stars are all connected to the brain... #

Inside the arena, a rippling mass of humanity got its rocks off

to the likes of Miles Davis, The Doors, Joni Mitchell and The Who.

I really wanted to see Jimi Hendrix, you know.

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