The problem with the 1970 Isle of Wight festival was how to get out of it. On the morning of Monday, August 31, exactly 55 years ago, something like 600,000 fans were going to be trying to leave the island.
In all probability, the queue for the ferry from Ryde to Portsmouth was likely to resemble a less frostbitten version of Napoleon’s army retreating from Moscow.
I’d attended the festival with my friend Geoffrey Cannon, then the Guardian‘s rock critic. I was one of three Melody Maker writers on the case; the others were Chris Welch and Michael Watts.
Poor Watts, a recent recruit, had been sent to a camping supplies shop on Holborn, around the corner from the office, and given enough money to equip himself with a small tent and a bedroll.
His job would be to tell the story from the perspective of the kids up on the hill.
Welch and I would be taking notes in the relatively salubrious area reserved for VIPs and the press in front of the stage, revelling in the experience of seeing Miles Davis play to a crowd of more than half a million with an average age of probably 20. And there was Joni Mitchell, and the Who, and Richie Havens, and John Sebastian, and the rest of an extraordinary bill.
Geoffrey and I both had to be at our respective offices by the Monday lunchtime, and it was he who came up with a brilliant solution.
He called the flying school at Portsmouth airport and asked if they had a plane that could pick us up and take us across the Solent.
The flying school could indeed meet his request, and we were invited to report at something like six o’clock in the morning, maybe a bit earlier.
After leaving the festival and making it to the nearby Bembridge airfield, we sat in a hut by the grass runway, waiting for our plane to arrive.
We’d been there for a few minutes when a limousine drew up. Out of it stepped Jimi Hendrix, still wearing the flowing multicoloured silks he’d worn on stage only three or four hours earlier, giving a performance that had begun badly but eventually coalesced into something those who heard it would never forget (luckily, the whole set was filmed).
For Jimi, a helicopter was waiting. He climbed in and disappeared into the misty dawn sky. Eighteen days later, after returning to London from gigs in Denmark and West Germany, he was dead.
Shortly after his departure from Bembridge, our single-engined Cessna turned up and off we went. I expect we shared a taxi from Portsmouth to London and put it on expenses, as we did with the cost of the plane, which came to nine pounds and six shillings, including landing fees.
The bill was made out to Geoffrey. Somehow, I’ve managed to hang on to it for the past five and a half decades.
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There used to be a civilised convention that normal reviewing practice should be suspended for certain kinds of musical events: those put on for charity, or memorials.
Of the celebration of the life of Louis Tebogo Moholo-Moholo at a packed 100 Club last night, it need really only be said that the whole evening was suffused with the indomitable spirit of the great South African drummer, who died in June, aged 85.
The trumpeter Claude Deppa, his friend and frequent bandmate in Viva La Black, started the proceedings at the head of his warm-hearted quartet.
Then the pianist Steve Beresford and the drummer Mark Sanders took over for an intricate and absorbing free conversation. Evan Parker brought out his soprano saxophone, removed its mouthpiece, and tapped the keys to produce a quite extraordinary 10-minute percussion solo which managed to be both a shadow commentary on what he might have played with the mouthpiece in place and a unique tribute to his former colleague in the band Foxes Fox.
The trio of Larry Stabbins on alto saxophone, Paul Rogers on bass and Sanders again on drums played a set notable for Rogers manoeuvring his bespoke seven-string instrument into the expressive space between a Celtic harp and a cello.
The heart of the celebration of Bra Tebs (as his friends knew him), which was organised by Hazel Miller and Mike Gavin of Ogun Records, came in the set by Four Blokes + 1, his last London-based band.
Pictured above, this featured Jason Yarde and Shabaka on saxophones, Alex Hawkins on piano and John Edwards on bass, with the superb Sanders once more on the drum stool, embodying rather than imitating the characteristics of Louis’s playing.
They came out roaring, and that’s how they were still sounding as I had to make my departure, with the darkly ecstatic closing cadences of “Dikeledi Tsa Phelo” accompanying me up the stairs and into the night.
by Richard Williams
