THE WIGHT STUFF
“It began as a beautiful dream, but it has got out of control and it is a monster.” So said 1970 Isle of Wight festival promoter Ron Foulk, after it was over.
The 1970 Isle of Wight Festival remains – by some distance – the biggest rock’n’roll gathering ever held in Britain – and Europe, for that matter. Over the course of the August Bank Holiday weekend it attracted (by police estimates) around 600,000 people, more than four times the island’s resident population and more than double the number anticipated by the promoters.
It was the third rock festival to be staged on the island. The first, in 1968, was a relatively modest affair headlined by Jefferson Airplane that drew around 10,000 people. But the following year local promoters the Foulk brothers, with their company Fiery Creations, scored a major coup when they managed to lure Bob Dylan away from the Woodstock Festival to make his first live appearance in
