Isle of Wight Festival 1970 — Hendrix's last major concert

The Isle of Wight Festival of August 1970 drew an estimated 600,000 people to a temporary site at Afton Down on the western end of the island — one of the largest gatherings in British history, bigger than Woodstock the previous year, and for a brief period the largest city in England. The bill included the Doors, the Who, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, Joan Baez, Emerson Lake & Palmer, and a dozen other major acts spread across five days. Jimi Hendrix closed the festival's main stage on the night of August 31.

He was not in good shape. Those close to him in the final weeks of his life have described someone who was exhausted, unwell, and troubled by the legal and personal complications that had accumulated around him. The Isle of Wight set was erratic by his own standards — he restarted songs, the band lost its footing on several numbers — though photographs and the subsequent concert film show him still capable of moments of extraordinary playing. The crowd, most of whom had been on the island for days in deteriorating conditions, received him as the legend he was.

Hendrix left the Isle of Wight after his set and flew to Sweden for a concert in Gothenburg on September 2, then continued to Germany. He returned to London in early September and died there on September 18, 1970 — eighteen days after his last performance on the island. The Isle of Wight Festival has since resumed and now runs annually at a different site on the island, but the Afton Down location of the 1970 festival has a memorial stone acknowledging what took place there. Reaching the site requires a walk across farmland; the field itself is unremarkable, which is what makes it strange to stand in.