The Truth Behind the “Disastrous” 1970 Isle of Wight Festival (and the Organizers Who Were Blamed for Its Bad Reputation)

The 1970 Isle of Wight festival had no small shortage of attention-grabbing but generally fleeting moments that made it seem like it was a disaster. The audience booed Kris Kristofferson off the stage. Angry attendees tripping on bad LSD heckled Joni Mitchell and threw things at Jimi Hendrix. Non-ticket holders bypassed attendance fees by tearing down the festival fencing and breaking in.

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But according to the organizers who were there to watch all of these historical events unfold, the festival wasn’t nearly the “disaster” many made it out to be. Largely speaking, the event was an impressive feat for three aspirational twenty-somethings who got their start putting together a fundraiser for a local pool. Yet, despite its size surpassing the Woodstock Music and Art Fair by tens of thousands, the Isle of Wight is portrayed as a failure more than a phenomenon.

The fact that the Isle of Wight Festival didn’t occur past 1970 until the early 2000s reinforced the narrative that the musical event was a destructive flop. However, according to festival co-founder Ray Foulk, this was a “false narrative” for which one man was particularly responsible: Murray Lerner.

The British Response to Woodstock Was Hamstrung in Parliament

To a certain extent, there were always going to be pearl-clutchers about the Isle of Wight festival. Even in the 2020s, outcry from the more conservative corners of the public will arise any time there’s an abundance of music, art, sex, and drugs. The year 1970 was no different, and organizer Ray Foulk said they prepared for it when planning the third iteration of the music festival. The event had only grown with each passing year, and the pushback did the same. Once that criticism entered the Parliament, it became too big for Foulk to overcome.

Before the Isle of Wight could continue into its fourth year, Parliament added a section to the Isle of Wight County Council Act of 1971 that forbade overnight, open-air gatherings of over 5,000 people. Considering the previous year’s festival saw a staggering 500,000 attendees arrive at the festival grounds—surpassing Woodstock by roughly 50,000 to 100,000—this was effectively the death knell for the event. This legislative roadblock played a large part in the narrative that the Isle of Wight Festival was unsuccessful. A documentary by Murray Lerner did the rest.

Organizers Say This Filmmaker Made the Isle of Wight Festival Look Worse Than It Was

By splicing footage of rare, fleeting instances of crowd outbursts and zeroing in on the more unsuccessful sets of the festival, Murray Lerner’s documentary about the event “created a false narrative that it was a disaster,” Foulk later told The Guardian. “We’d created a blueprint for the modern festival with camping. It was a pilgrimage to see countercultural artists who were singing about making the world a better place.”

Aside from a few hiccups, the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival was a star-studded musical showcase featuring Jimi Hendrix, Jethro Tull, The Doors, The Who, Miles Davis, and more. The festival returned to the same location in 2002 with The Charlatans and Robert Plant headlining. The following year, it returned under the same name with Bryan Adams and Counting Crows as the top billings.

Photo by David Redfern/Redferns