Miles Davis at the 1970 Isle of Wight Music Festival: What really happened
Miles Davis played the biggest gig of his career when he brought his groundbreaking new Bitches Brew band to the 1970 Isle of Wight Music Festival, still the largest ever music event to take place in the UK. Jon Newey was there to witness this historic weekend
By midday on Saturday 29 August, the writhing sea of flesh flowing into the already over-crowded and primitive infrastructure of the vast makeshift arena was on an unprecedented scale, and more were arriving every minute. From the stage the size of the audience must have seemed beyond imagination. The numbers for the 1970 Isle of Wight Music Festival estimated by the Guinness Book of World Records were between 600,000 – 700,000, which still remains the biggest audience for a music festival in the UK. Often referred to as Britain’s Woodstock, and somewhat overshadowed in the media by that 1969 landmark American event, they both shared the dubious distinction of being declared a free festival after the attendance grew unmanageable and was overrun by tens of thousands of ticketless hippies. In the IOW’s case, a contingent of French anarchists and revolutionaries, protest-hardened from Paris 1968, also showed up and toppled fences, insisting all music should be free. Interestingly there was nary a Bobby in sight.
For Miles Davis, used to playing smoky jazz clubs with audiences up to 300 or so plus the odd summer jazz festival such as Newport, where the audience numbered around 5,000, the sheer mass of humanity stretching as far as the eye could see that weekend of Friday 28 - Sunday 30 August must have shaken even his suave demeanor. In the event, it would turn out to be the biggest audience that he, or any other jazz musician, would ever play for.
