The Isle of Wight Festival, created in 1968, reached its peak in 1970, when nearly 600,000 spectators gathered on this piece of land in the south of the United Kingdom. Fifty years later, Europe 1 looks back on the various concerts given for what was, one year after Woodstock, one of the last great hippie meetings. This Wednesday, the Who, the group that did not want to die old.
Tommy: cult album and concert
The Who are the English headliners of this Isle of Wight festival. Last year at Woodstock, they electrified a flabbergasted audience and enjoyed an unexpected success from the American public. This time, they are playing at home, amidst their rivals from across the Atlantic. They are sure of their strength. However, two years earlier, this group had many questions about its future. After a resounding debut, in every sense of the word, routine threatened them and success was unraveling.
So, at the end of 1968, its leader as brilliant as tormented, Pete Townshend, tries everything for everything. He writes what will soon be called a "rock opera", the ambitious and improbable story of a deaf, dumb and blind child who becomes a pinball god. Bingo! The group gets an extra ball and the game is restarted, because Tommy's double disc is a planetary cardboard box. Among the most famous extracts, we find the last songs of the disc We're Not Gonna Take It and See Me, Feel Me / Listening to you which conclude the story of Tommy. Performed on the night of Sunday August 30, 1970, they offer the public an unforgettable new performance. This rock-opera would later become a film, also crowned with success despite a puzzling staging to say the least.
Keith Moon, the incandescent
The Who's story begins ten years earlier, in the early 1960s, in Acton, West London. Roger Daltrey, the singer, was at the time only a teenager fired from his college and who was already working as a metal worker. On weekends, he spits his rage into the microphone of a group called the Detours. He meets a bassist, John Entwistle, then a guitarist, Pete Townshend. The new formation begins to make itself known with a repertoire of covers of all kinds.
And then one evening, a kid accosted them, full of nerve: "Give me a test, anyway I'm better than the guy you're going to hire, whoever he is." We give him a chance. The other three are stunned by the power and madness of the game of this kind of cartoon character who says his name is Keith Moon. Deal concluded, he is engaged. The group will be called The High Numbers for a moment to stick to the wave of Mods, these young rebels obsessed with style. They finally adopt The Who, it's short, it's funny, it holds back and it's easy to decline graphically.
Cult group of Mods
Mods love it. The group quickly becomes their standard bearer: scooters, parkas, two-piece suits, short hair and above all wild music are waiting for you. And for good reason since all these little people are addicted to amphetamines, these little pills that we take so as not to sleep.
Thus in 1965, for their first album, recorded according to the legend in a single afternoon, The Who draws a legendary title. Some claim that Daltrey, made too aroused by the pills, could no longer control his stuttering. Others that he wanted to make fun of, precisely, those who were victims of this unfortunate side effect. The result is astounding. The Who explodes with this title which will give its name to the album: My Generation .
Wild music and enmities
"I hope to die before I get old." This is THE sentence we retain from this title, however immortal. It sums up the state of mind of these post-war English baby boomers , determined, whatever the consequences and obstacles, to breaking the barrier of social classes and living at full speed. Because as surprising as it may seem, the Who do not love each other and have never loved each other. Their alliance is more a matter of circumstances than of friendship.
Between Daltrey the little guy, Townshend the skittish nerd, Entwistle the silent and Moon the grenade happily unhinged, there is little or no common ground, except violence, whether verbal, physical or musical. These four are arguably the loudest, wildest of all. They do not hesitate to smash their own equipment on stage and then to subject their audience to concerts at more than 120 decibels, the volume of an airliner on takeoff. A challenge at the time. Townshend pays him today, since he's half deaf.
Who's Next, the pinnacle of success
Much of the work of Pete Townshend, the group's mastermind and main songwriter, is directly inspired by his childhood. He has been mistreated, abused and raped. "Tommy" is, in a way, autobiographical. Throughout his immense career, Townshend will try to find a spiritual way out of his traumas, but never departing from his squeaky irony.
The most perfect example comes right after the Isle of Wight in 1971 in what is considered the band's best album: Who's Next , "Next". The song is called Baba O'Riley . A fierce critique of hippie culture, "It's only teenage wasteland," laments the song: it's just a huge teenage mess. The song is recognizable by its famous intro which delighted fans and a famous American detective series. It is above all a piece of bravery, triumphant moment of an almost perfect album, and often cited in the list of the best rock records in history. “I wanted us to sound like a bomb ready to explode,” Daltrey said. It's done, but the Who will never reach these heights again.
Lives of excess
Keith Moon leads a life of sometimes mind-blowing excess, like when he drives his car into a swimming pool. His almost inevitable death in 1977, at just 31, from a drug overdose, somehow killed the spirit of the group. The Who continues, despite everything. John Entwistle, the bassist, also disappeared in 2002 from a cocaine overdose.
They are only two of the original formation, the backbone of the group: Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey, the best enemies today reconciled. The proof is that they released a studio album in 2019, the first in 13 years. An album rather well received by the critics. Not bad for grandpas in their seventies who wanted to die before they were old!
Find all the other episodes of our series "The Isle of Wight Festival, 50 years later":
> Episode 1: the last notes of Morrison's Doors
> Episode 2: Mighty Baby, talent without glory
> Episode 3: the unexpected concert of Brazilian exiles
> Episode 4: the Rory Gallagher revelation
> Episode 5: Tony Joe White's springboard
> Episode 6: Joni Mitchell's legendary concert
> Episode 7: the second Woodstock of Ten Years After