He seemed to appear from nowhere. Covered in badges of every description from "I love longleat" to "Pole-axe the Poll Tax". A man from another time. Another space.
Wearing day-glow holographic "Love and Peace" glasses, one of the lenses missing. The sun beat down on him as he shambled along the thoroughfare that ran between the rows of tents, wide enough for a 4x4 or a people carrier to pass through, in the red zone of the camping area at the Isle of Wight Festival.
I couldn't quite believe my eyes. I'd been there for two days already with my friend Grim and we hadn't seen one really interesting person so far. We'd seen people dressed up and in the festival mood but those costumes were hired and put on for the weekend. This guy was the real thing. His look had grown on him over many years like a psychedelic moss. He wore his tattered cowboy hat like an Australian jungle fighter, one side pinned up with a dirty string or bootlace for a chinstrap. His hands were filthy and thick with the residue of canned food. I could smell him even though he was standing down wind and at least ten feet away.Like I said before, Grim and I had been at the Isle of Wight Festival for two days already. We'd gotten in on free tickets that Grim had won in a fixed magazine competition and it seemed like a good idea to get away from the summer heat of the town for a weekend.
I was looking forward to the random events of the festival scene. The births the deaths the marriages and the murders.
There was also a feeling of pilgrimage about the journey. After all this had been the festival that was famous for two of the last appearances of both the Doors and Jimi Hendix and the energy and magic of that mythical era still resonated and pulsed for me at the mention of what was in my mind the British Woodstock.
The freaks and troubadours would be everywhere, jumping out of every bush, with wild eyes and wide smiles, their mandolins stuffed with Heroin, Hashish and LSD. But as soon as we arrived we realized that this would not be the case.
The festival had more of the feel of a steam rally or a Hitler youth meeting. Nearly every one we met was immaculately dressed either in designer gear or the ubiquitous England football shirt. The look was straight off the high street. Slip on Addidas trainers, knee length shorts and skin heads for the guys. Cowboy boots, crop tops, big sunglasses and breast implants for the girls. What was going on here? What had we stumbled into exactly?
At first I thought we were in the wrong place and that soon we'd see a Tombola, a home made cake stall or Nick Griffin. But no. This was actually it.
The famous 1970 Isle of Wight Festival was actually the last of three festivals that had been held there since 1968 and had at that time the record for the highest attendance of any outdoor gig in the UK with a crowd of 600,000 people, over twice the number of people who had been at Woodstock a week earlier. The "peace and love" era had quickly passed its high water mark and was coming to an end. The horror of Altamont was yet to come and the influence of big business was being felt more and more in what had once been an underground scene. Despite the subsequent media myths of flower children and the love generation the Isle of Wight Festival was described at the time by members of the audience as a "Psychedelic concentration camp".
I was a little disturbed by the fact that nobody had offered us any drugs so far. This was like finding no jazz in Harlem or no Guinness in Ireland on St. Patricks Day. It just didn't happen.
I couldn't remember any other festival that I'd ever been to being like this.
I remember one year at Glastonbury when I'd climbed in over the wall using a stolen rope ladder, before my feet had even hit the ground, I was surrounded by drug-peddling Rastas crying "Speed-Hash-Es-Trips!" That was a festival. There had been a guy next to me with his own home made rope ladder cobbled together with bits of tow-rope, twigs and thick branches. He was a real bona fide hippy getting all the heads in for free. I was charging £20 per person to get in using my own ladder. You see I was skint and as it turned out everyone that came in over the wall on my rope ladder looked like some kind of corporate executive anyway. The rot was already setting in .
Along the top of the security wall ran rows of sharp spikes to deter any would-be intruders. I was just folding up my rope ladder when I heard a scream. I turned around and saw the hippy hanging by one impaled hand from the top of the twelve foot fence. One of the branches/rungs of his rope ladder had snapped and as he had slipped one of the spikes had gone straight through his hand. I managed to help him down eventually but he had quite a nasty hole in his hand and he was an ugly colour too. The poor guy was obviously in shock as well as being in a lot of pain and high as a kite. He threw up on his sleeve of his druid's robe. I offered to get him to a first aid tent but he just wanted me to help him back to his converted ambulance parked in the Avalon field.
"I've got some plasters there man."
It was obvious to me that he needed more than a plaster, several stitches probably, but he insisted that he'd be fine.
"It's just a scratch" he said as the blood poured out of his hand.
I walked him slowly back through the festival towards the camping area, supporting him all the way. He was on the verge of fainting, getting paler by the second.
"That's my ambulance over there..the one with the...smoke coming...ahhh no!!!"
Now he was running towards the ambulance with me following.
"No no no..noooo maaannn".
I wasn't quite sure what was going on at this point but I soon found out. When my injured friend had set out that day to do his good work with the rope ladder he'd stashed all the money and the drugs he was going to sell and take that weekend in the wood burner that he'd had had fitted in his ambulance. While he was away one of his stoned friends had lit the thing. As we got there my injured friend was close to tears.
He opened the door of the burner and pulled out the red hot smouldering tin that had once contained his drugs and cash and badly burnt both of his hands in the process.
Yes that was one to remember. There seemed to be no danger of anything like that happening here at the Isle of Wight, but then the badge man arrived.
I caught his eye as he came over. He was smoking and enormous joint and offered me some. As he passed it to me I noticed large ragged scars on both sides of one hand and the waxy remains of severe burns on the palms of both of them.
"You got a light?" He asked...
