“It happened in this field!” » Shirley Thornton smiles at the memory of the first edition of the Isle of Wight Festival, in 1968. Her farm planted in the middle of wheat, in Whitwell, then belonged to farmer Jimmy Flux, who rented a piece of land, nicknamed “ Hellfield », the “field of hell”, by the press of the time. Thirty pounds sterling was enough for the Foulk brothers, the three organizers, to make one of the most important rock festivals after Woodstock a legend. Its fame will go far beyond the contours of the diamond-shaped island, located south of the coast of England. “Some people come here to remember this moment”adds Shirley Thornton, who transformed the old building into a guest house.
A few dozen kilometers away, near Freshwater, Brian Hinton attended the 1970 third edition of the festival, which then only resumed in 2002 in the small town of Newport. It was the first time he set foot on this Channel island, among an audience of more than 500,000 people, while Wight only had around a hundred thousand inhabitants. Can you imagine a greater contrast than that between conservative old England and the Flower Power hippies disembarking en masse from the ferries at Ryde pier? “Never seen before in the country! I remember the magnetic voice of Jim Morrison, the electric jazz of Miles Davis and Joni Mitchell in her yellow dress explaining to us that we were behaving like tourists! »recalls the man who is today curator of the Dimbola Museum, in Freshwater.
This unique museum, which is held in the eponymous home of Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), presents the work of the photographer as well as images of Charles Everest retracing the hippie epic of the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 . “ Jimi Hendrix and Julia Margaret Cameron were both geniuses, they knew how to capture people’s souls”ignites Brian Hinton. Behind us, in the institution’s café, Patsy Carter, a neighbor listening to our conversation, shares her memories with tremors in her voice: “I saw Bob Dylan in 1969. It was magical! »
Could the island, with its unreal light and the whiteness of its cliffs, have inspired this musical magic? Our way of going to discover it by bike makes us believe it, and in any case brings us back to this lightness, to this scent of evidence evoked by Michel Delpech’s title, Wight is Wightor by that of the Beatles, When I’m Sixty-Four.
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