Arts & Culture
June 2014Isle of Wight Festival
The winner of the 'Best Major Festival' at the UK Festival Awards 2007, this mid-June weekender hosts headliners as big as The Police, The Rolling Stones and David Bowie for an audience of more than 60,000. The Isle of Wight Festival celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2008: although it began in 1968 and is now annual, there was a long hiatus from 1970 to 2002 after unexpected overcrowding - the audience was over half a million - inundated the island in 1970.
The first years of the Festival - which featured many legendary players including The Who, The Doors, Leonard Cohen, Marc Bolan, Jefferson Airplane and Bob Dylan, secured the Isle of Wight's reputation as a quintessential 1960s music festival. In 1970 Jimi Hendrix gave his last major performance at the Festival - he died three weeks later - bringing the 1960s phase of the music festival to a dramatic close.
Today the Festival, held at the Seaclose Park recreation ground on the outskirts of Newport, is a family-friendly affair, with extensive on-site camping facilities.
Headline acts in 2013 include: The Stone Roses, Bon Jovi, The Script, Ellie Goulding and Paloma Faith.
