Back to the field of dreams

ROCK HOLIDAYS Twenty-five years ago today, Simon Calder and Jonathan Glancey were at the Isle of Wight rock festival. Now Simon Calder (below) finds serenity - and golf - have taken over Devastation Hill, while Jonathan Glancey (bottom) recalls enjoying hte of real freedom in that grubby version of utopia

"You're acting like tourists, man - give us some respect." Joni Mitchell is pleading with the largest rock audience of all time - 600,000 people gathered in a field on the Isle of Wight. Hang on, Joni, this is a first serious attempt to misspend my youth. Clad in a tie-dye shirt and green loon pants, I cannot possibly be a tourist.

Last Sunday I was, though. A quarter-century on from the third, last and greatest Isle of Wight pop festival, the field stretches emptily into the distance. Afton Farm basks serenely in the August sun, devoid of any creature more offensive than a couple of dozen heifers wandering around and looking as if they might be auditioning for the cover shot of the Atom Heart Mother album. For the tourist, this corner of the island is a quiet treasure, a Greatest Hits of the landscapes of Wessex.

You can see for miles and miles from the highest ridge of East Afton Down, across the rolling pastures of West Wight to the sunlight dancing on the silvery Solent, pierced by trim sails and edged by a dusting of chalk-white cliffs frozen like waves against the horizon. Few signs of human habitation impinge upon this vision. The occasional neat village conforms to either or both of the island's twin traditions: red-brick homes with sharply raked roofs, or older, greyer and comfortably thatched stone cottages.

You can also see that the only possible venue for the pop festival was this huge field, a mile long and a quarter-mile broad. In the summer of 1969, Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon and half a million people congregated at Woodstock for the first mega-festival. One summer later, Jonathan Glancey (see below) and I landed on the Isle of Wight. A ticket to Ryde (calling at Ford, Barnham and Bognor Regis) took you to a close approximation of Abroad, and placed you a few hundred feet from your rock idols.

Anyone who was there can, these days, clamber across a stile to heaven. You instantly recall how the ragged plain - its coarse, cropped grass spattered with cowpats - gained an extra dimension and came to life with the best rock billing ever. (Anyone who was not there will argue that Live Aid had a much better line-up in 1985 and wonder what all the fuss was about.)

Those who missed the gig should just enjoy the surroundings. Poetically, the Tennyson Trail stretches along the spine of East Afton Down, extending eastwards from the monument to the poet in Freshwater Bay. Prosaically, this hill was known as Desolation Row (or Devastation Hill) during the festival, an escarpment inhabited by those unable or unwilling to pay the pounds 3 demanded for five days of rock. They comprised a loose coalition of French anarchists, White Panthers and, bizarrely, Young Liberals. From their base on the slope, these rebels without a ticket launched a series of guerrilla raids, culminating in the fences being torn down and the festival being declared free.

"This festival cannot ever break even, so we're going to make it free as from this minute." Rikki Farr was the de facto compere, and spent much of the time sermonising on stage. "Open the gates, and for God's sake let's have some music."

It could not happen now: Desolation Row is occupied by the Freshwater Bay Golf Club.

Those of us who were still only just coming to terms with adolescence had obediently bought our tickets in advance, and hung on tightly to the precious multicoloured entitlement to 120 hours of latrine-to-Release- tent entertainment. One in every 100 of the people of Britain, plus tens of thousands of foreign visitors, found a way to the island of rock dreams.

The old steamers that used to splutter across from Portsmouth to Ryde have since been replaced by Australian-built catamarans. These carve across the Solent in 15 minutes flat, but moor at the same doddery old pier. Here is a rusting iron and timber pier being used precisely for its original purpose - a terminal for transportation by sea. The only amusements are the quaint old railway station, with a few peeling traces of the old yellow-and-green Southern Region paint job, and the trains - quainter yet - that rattle across the ironwork to meet the day-trippers. When old London Underground trains have finished shuttling between Morden and Edgware, they get floated over to the Isle of Wight, where they are repainted and pressed into service on the modest railway to Shanklin. The present stock dates from the Thirties.

August 1970 must have made the local bus company's fortune. Carrying pop fans at 10 shillings (50p) a time, Southern Vectis double-deckers growled across the island along the rock superhighway, aka the B3399. Pleasingly, the same vehicles are still plying the route. Southern Vectis is one of the country's more enlightened bus companies, and has a policy of using fine old vehicles with miles of life left in them. So you sway across the island aboard an AEC built in the Sixties, the ashtrays perhaps still concealing traces of exotic roll-ups.

The collective memory among the islanders about the festival has faded much more slowly than the haze of marijuana smoke, so the driver knows exactly where to deposit you to visit the festival site. He sets the controls for the heart of the sun, or at least steers in the direction of Freshwater Bay - now recovered from the multitudinous onslaught and idly getting on with being a peaceful beach resort. If the Isle of Wight can be said to have a wild coast, then Freshwater faces out to it, but the Channel is placid this calm August, a millpond gently washing against soft sand.

While Jonathan Glancey did acid, I did Spam. Canned meat should have been on the list of controlled substances: the contents degenerated into a pink plasma that glubbed out menacingly as I opened each can. But with a lifetime's worth of rock stars playing, you could forgive the limited catering as readily as the toilet facilities - which constituted a much greater threat to health than any of the narcotics consumed. One look at the scaffolding slung over some noxious pits induced instant constipation.

Wandering around the field last weekend, with unlimited access to all areas, gave the sense of being a survivor. Jimi Hendrix gave his last big performance at the Isle of Wight, Jim Morrison rode the storm one last time, Chicago's Terry Kath later lost at Russian roulette (poetic justice for a man who wrote "If You Leave Me Now", say some), while Keith Moon crashed through Tommy, then went and died before he got old.

The last day of August 1970 may not, after all, be the day the music died; there are plans afoot to stage another Isle of Wight pop festival. In this week's edition of the County Press, one Peter Turner writes: "The audience who attend these events are not drop-outs, hippies or the dregs of society, they are responsible human beings who have jobs, bank accounts and mortgages." Oh, no, Jonathan. We sound just like tourists.

Michael Watts is an experienced Fleet Street journalist who works on the Independent's Saturday magazine. In 1970 he was Mick Watts of Melody Maker, forced by his editor to spend his Isle of Wight Festival in a tent on Devastation Hill, while his fellow hacks lorded it up in a three-star hotel in Freshwater.

Twenty-five years later we sit, several days of the week, within 25 feet of one another up in the sky in Canary Wharf Tower; we get high by Otis lift, not by lysergic acid, and the only music we hear is the white noise of the building - an insistent tinnitus of air-conditioning, desk-top computers cooling and telephones cheeping like hungry chick sparrows.

I got to hear about the Isle of Wight Festival through Melody Maker which, at the time when Bridge over Troubled Water (aagh) was the No 1 album, was a part of every flared-trousered schoolboy's kit, leafed tenderly, in my case, between prep, poetry, Railway Magazine, sketchbook and pool of Penguins (both the paperbacks and the biscuits).

Under our blazered arms, those of us who dreamt of the Isle of Wight that summer tucked LPs bought with money hard-earned during school holidays. Debates raged over who was the better guitarist, Hendrix or Clapton, which was only a slightly more grown-up version of the old arguments concerning Spitfire-versus-Messerschmidt, Stanier "Coronation"-v-Gresley "A4", Norton Commando-v-Triumph Bonneville.

The festival took me and two pals into a crowd 600,000 strong, an instant canvas city on Afton Down, to a scene that Mick Watts described as "more the younger generation's equivalent of a mass outing to Butlins" than revolutionary.

Ah, but Michael, as Mick of MM you were so much older then (younger than now, of course), while we were spilled into what seemed like a Huxley- Leary-Oz magazine utopia. A grubby utopia, but a first taste of real freedom. Of course, it all seems quaint now and it is easy to look back to the festival through tangerine (or purple) lenses but, come on now, did we have a good time? I certainly did.

JG