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‘I watched Bob Dylan play tennis with three of the Beatles’: how we made the Isle of Wight festival

‘It’s a myth that Jimi Hendrix played while the stage was on fire. It was a firework’

We only had a £750 investment from the Isle of Wight Indoor Swimming Pool Association, but after a friend lent us his £1,000 army pay-off, we managed to book all those bands, sell 10,000 tickets and break even. I would arrive on stage wearing a helmet with a pie dish on top filled with petrol and our lighting man would throw lit things at it until – whoosh – it went up in flames. At the Isle of Wight, I’d planned to fly in by hot air balloon from Portsmouth, but on the day strong winds in the opposite direction scuppered that.

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