The Isle of Wight Festival 2007 was the sixth revived Isle of Wight Festival on the Seaclose Park site in Newport on the Isle of Wight. It took place between 8 June – 10 June 2007. Tickets went on sale at 9am on Thursday 22 February and were sold out by Monday 26 February. It was the first festival since 2003 with no official sponsor.
The festival capacity was around 60,000. Local artist, Helen Davenport, created a 15 ft luminated wicker and tissue paper statue to commemorate the performance of Jimi Hendrix in 1970. The campsite was located next to the site on an extensive farmland site. The Seaclose Park site was within ten minutes' walking distance of the town of Newport.
The 2007 Festival sold out in a record time of less than five days. The festival was the Rolling Stones' first British festival performance for over thirty years since their performance at the 1976 Knebworth fair. The festival once again featured the popular Carling warm beer amnesty, in which people could trade warm beer for cold cans of Carling.
The Red Arrows performed a full-smoke aerial display during the festival weekend.
The festival won the "Best Major Festival" award at the 2007 UK Festival Awards in London in November 2007. This beat off stiff competition from Glastonbury Festival, T in the Park and Reading and Leeds Festivals. This success was followed by promoter, John Giddings, winning the "Outstanding Contribution to UK Festivals" award. In reaction to this, Glastonbury organiser, Michael Eavis, offered to present Giddings with the award personally.
Read more about Isle Of Wight Festival 2007: Highlights, Features
Famous quotes containing the words isle, wight and/or festival:
“It is so rare to meet with a man outdoors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is independent of the labor of his hands. Behind every man’s busy-ness there should be a level of undisturbed serenity and industry, as within the reef encircling a coral isle there is always an expanse of still water, where the depositions are going on which will finally raise it above the surface.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Then think I thus: sith such repair,
So long time war of valiant men,
Was all to win a lady fair,
Shall I not learn to suffer then,
And think my life well spent to be,
Serving a worthier wight than she?”
—Henry Howard, Earl Of Surrey (1517?–1547)
“Marry, I cannot show it in rhyme, I have tried; I can find no rhyme to “lady” but “baby”Man innocent rhyme; for “scorn,” “horn”Ma hard rhyme; for “school,” “fool”Ma babbling rhyme; very ominous endings. No, I was not born under a rhyming planet, nor I cannot woo in festival terms.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)