After my last blog, I thought I would go onto YouTube.

Check it out and you will see that I have not been telling a yarn.

( For the unenlightened a yarn is a fabricated or exaggerated story)

Now go to YouTube

Put in Hendrix IOW, there is not a lot, but you will see the fences being pulled down, etc.

As I sit here 53 years later, listening to that night the memories come flooding back, it is like yesterday, and to be honest with you, before a friend suggested that I write a Blog, I had forgotten it all.

The smells, the atmosphere, and the hundreds of thousands of people watching him in silence totally stunned by him.

The Who were brilliant, outstanding, and you can see it on YouTube, do it, Kieth Moon at his manic best, but I think if you asked anyone who was there and there were so many great bands playing there what was the ultimate memory.

I recon most would say that night, with Hendrix, it is hard to explain it but at times it was nearly spiritual.

Still, enough of that night, other things happened over the weekend.

As I said it was hot, the best August for years, so when the bands were not playing lots of people went to the beach which was only half a mile away.

Now naturally not many people took swimming costumes with them so, hey music, peace, and love, let's go nude.

Nowadays, especially abroad who cares, but in 1970, it was a big thing, hundreds of nude hippies swimming on the local beach.

One of the pictures in the book that gave me a giggle is of some people washing them selfs off under a small waterfall, totally nude.

What they did not know, is that the stream that makes the waterfall over the cliff also took away all the overflow from local septic tanks.

Oh, well no one was ill, or noticed, and none of the locals told them!

Now to basics and another memory that will live with me forever.

You have half a million people in a huge field.

Nature doesn't care, so sooner or later half a million people will need the toilet.

Nowadays there are portaloos that are changed daily, but back then, they were not invented.

So the answer was, get a digger to dig great big long trenches, and with a long bit of wood to squat on, off you went.

Having not used the toilet facility there, I cannot vouch if paper was supplied. I think not.

But I did have a pee there.

By the last day, regrettably, the facilities had been overfilled, broken down and, stinking.

By this time, it was the last afternoon, security had given up and it was free to get in.

Anyhow we are going into the site past the broken toilets, and some poor stoned hippy has fallen in. He was trying to get out, covered in it all, and I remember him saying, 'Help me, man' .

A Good Samaritan went towards him and we being not good Samaritans, and not wanting to get covered in shit, passed by on the other side, as it were.

I did wonder if he got out or sank slowly to his doom.

However, no one was reported missing so I guess he made it.

For years later when it was all over, when the crops were grown again there were long strips where the corn grew far better than the rest of the field, strangely where the loos were.

Organic fertilizer at its best.

Before things fell apart, there was the main entrance, where hopeful police had put big dustbins with a sign that any drugs should be put there no questions asked.

Well I can tell you the bins were full up, coke cans, beer bottles general crap, but not even a roach.

However, we did see four young coppers on the Saturday afternoon disposing of presumably confiscated dope.

They were burning it.

The thing was they were doing it rolled up like a big cigarette and passing it between them.

Like I said, they were young coppers, waiting for Hendrix, so what if they wanted a spliff, no one cared if they were left alone.

NB, many years later in a much later Blog if anyone is interested I will tell you about camping, two guys my chum knew turned up with the biggest block of hash I had ever seen, and I have seen a few.

I asked my chum who they were, he told me they were the London Drug Squad, but good guys on holiday. They were great fun but some say they shouldn't take your homework with you.

Where was I?

Oh yeah down memory lane in 1970 watching The Who at the IOW, on YouTube.

One thing I have missed out on is that time Tied Dyed grandad shirts were the thing, and if you again don't know what they were, it is your fault for being young, but not to be worn at a festival as everyone else would be wearing one so you wouldn't be cool. Consequently, no one at the festival wore tied dyed.

Shame really.

Anyhow, finally, the festival ended, and the following day the weather broke back to the usual crap, rain, etc.

It didn't take long before it was just fields again, like it never happened, but it did and I was there!

So if you read this, light up an incense stick, turn down the lights go to YouTube, and put the Who 1970 IOW on, music flat out!

Then, like man, you could nearly be there,

Getting old sucks, but I was chatting to a chum of mine the other day about old friends and people we knew from the 1970s we counted 72 who have passed away. The oldest was 73.

We were lucky enough to live through the best music, Beatles, Stone, Hendrix,

Live life to the full every day, you know not what tomorrow will bring.

Next blog ..... Long hair, motorbikes, girlfriends, and possibly 1976